Redmond, Wash., June 22, 1998 — Microsoft executives will discuss the company’s vision of the Web lifestyle at this week’s Digital Living Room, an executive conference hosted by Upside magazine and industry analyst and commentator David Coursey. The conference program will include insights from Microsoft executives on the current accomplishments and future potential of WebTV, Windows CE and digital broadcasting. More than 250 executives from the computing, Internet, entertainment, and content industries are expected to attend the conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel, California, June 21-24. (For more on the Digital Living Room, see www.digitallivingroom.com.)
The consumer experience is changing as the world shifts from analog to digital, and Microsoft is providing leading-edge technologies that give consumers the benefits of a Web lifestyle. For example, WebTV provides consumers enhanced television viewing with more choice, greater control and seamless integration of the Internet with TV programming.
Jon Roberts, Windows CE group director for Microsoft, will provide a glimpse of a future family’s life in their digital home. Microsoft technologies are opening the door to a wide variety of possible consumer experiences: a kitchen where all appliances – including the telephone, radio, oven and washer/dryer — are networked and centrally controlled; or a scenario in which a parent doing the family banking on the television downstairs gets email from a child upstairs who needs help with homework.
Steve Guggenheimer, group product manager, digital TV, Microsoft, will give attendees a look at digital television’s current and future potential. Steve’s demonstration will include a look at the future of this emerging technology as Microsoft envisions it.
Bill Keating, Microsoft’s senior vice president of worldwide field operations, will give a demonstration of WebTV Plus as part of a series of discussions and demonstrations about the future of set-top boxes. Other participants include Network Computer CEO David Roux; Ganesh Moorthy, Intel’s general manager for appliances and computing; and Matt York, editor and publisher of Smart TV magazine.
