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CDM Welcomes Bill Gates to Digital Music Creation!

If you missed Bill Gates’s keynote from CES, you didn’t miss much — aside from an uncomfortably-close-to-Terminator image recognition demo, technology Microsoft says they won’t productize. (That’s good, because otherwise a robot from the future might have killed all the presenters on the spot.) But Microsoft did stage an Oscar-style spoof video, complete with celebrities, demonstrating what Gates might do after retirement from his full-time Chairman position later this year. The overwhelming trend: get into music making. Guitar Hero and Rock Band seem to be doing fine jobs of convincing people to make more music.

I had Chairman Bill running in a corner of my screen while I cleaned house, hoping for something interesting like gesture recognition in Windows 7, so I didn’t snag images quickly enough. Gizmodo has a good write-up with images and on-demand video from CES should be available soon. He did choose JayZ over Timbaland as his producer, I’m guessing because even Gates was offended about that whole Finnish chiptune controversy.

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Since Gates is currently a Windows user, I suggest loading up the retirement laptop with platform-exclusives FL Studio and SONAR (alongside plenty of great cross-platform tools). And since presumably Gates still has a house filled with flat-screen projection surfaces, might I suggest a side order of VJing — especially if the music thing doesn’t work out?

Sadly, this leaves the rest of us dreaming for a gestural, multi-touch operating system that isn’t installed in a hotel lounge doing cool-looking but semi-pointless things.

Web: Want to Break Into Games? Nextcat Adds Listings

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Amidst the social networking crap, there are gems offering real resources. Nextcat lies somewhere between LinkedIn and MySpace, offering places to connect with professionals in a range of fields. The site was founded by two Berklee College of Music alums, an alma mater for a number of our readers. I’m guessing "modeling" applies to very few of you, but music is included, and now the games industry, as well, including music and audio for games and related careers. (Our own W. Brent Latta broke into that field while writing for CDM.)

Nextcat seems to do a pretty good job of attracting serious people; there are some useful looking folks already in the gaming section. And as far as I know, this is one of the few places that people in the industry can network. With gaming increasingly alongside industries like film, and music — as always — interfacing with all other art forms, I think this shows some real promise for future resources, as well.

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