3. Wowie Zowie Hardware, Continued

The Zeed+ puts all the components in grass-like spikes that plug in to the top of the urn-like case; it was inspired by Japanese flower arrangements. While not all the designs would be practical to manufacture, Bill Gates called them the kind of design that "advances in miniaturization are going to make possible".

The BulbPC as viewed from above

The most practical was the BulbPC, which looks like a slim flood light and fits in the cable guide in the desk of a typical office cube, but could also sit on a shelf or the floor in a classroom in the developing world. It's a sealed unit; designer Allen Wong told us he was amazed by how dusty Kenya was when he visited and he hoped the BulbPC could go to places where you couldn't take a standard PC.

Craig Mundie delivers his keynote, focusing on technology for the developing world.

Craig Mundie looked at technology for the developing world in his keynote, with a medical diagnostic kiosk that could relay blood pressure and other readings to a doctor. He also showed Phone+, the concept of using a mobile phone as a basic PC by connecting it to a keyboard and TV. Within five years he predicted we'd be using a radically different PC architecture based on multicore processors and rejected the idea of mobile phones or rich Internet applications taking over from the PC. And what will all those cores be doing? In the same way that Vista SuperFetch can predict which application you're going to launch next, depending on the time of day and what you've already run 90% of the time, he suggested PCs will look at what you usually do and start doing some of it for you automatically.