Microsoft digital head Qi Lu took to the stage at the Web 2.0 Summit conference this morning, where he confirmed a “strategic” deal with Facebook and Twitter to integrate real-time information into Microsoft’s Bing search service.

BoomTown broke the news of those deals earlier today.

Top Microsoft exec Yusuf Mehdi did a demo of the new tweet-powered search for Twitter; the Facebook integration is to come later.

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For many years now, one of our regular attendees at the D: All Things Digital conference has been award-winning movie and television director, producer and writer Barry Sonnenfeld, who is–as it turns out–a not-so-closeted geek in his spare time with a gadget column for Esquire magazine called “The Digital Man.”

Now he is branching out to a vlog about his geek passions on Crackle, which will appear every two weeks from wherever he is–either from his homes in East Hampton, N.Y. or Telluride, Colo., or from Hollywood sets.

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Siri is a virtual personal assistant for your Apple iPhone or computer, originated at the Stanford Research Institute and spun out as an artificial intelligence project financed by DARPA.

In its demo for Walt Mossberg and me at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Siri tried to show how it was an alternative to search.

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What hath the Flip digital video camera wrought?

Well, for one, getting to see a major Silicon Valley tech exec do duck calls online, that’s what.

Cisco PR guy John Earnhardt, who is obviously studying technique from BoomTown’s shaky-cam video style, caught company CEO and Chairman John Chambers quacking away in his office.

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The search for the perfect remote control continues, this time from Canesta, a San Jose-based company specializing in 3-D “natural interfaces.”

That means controlling your television via a series of gestures–including a wave and more.

Canesta demoed the new technology to control TV functions, from changing channels to navigating more complex menus, at the seventh D: All Things Digital.

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Immersion is the company behind haptic, or touch feedback, technology for some videogame consoles and cellphones.

At the seventh D: All Things Digital conference, Immersion demoed its TouchSense for touchscreen keyboards and Immersive Messaging.

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Reading books and newspapers on a handheld device has gotten to be a hot arena in the consumer electronics business, especially after the introduction of the Kindle from Amazon.

Plastic Logic will come on the market next year with its e-reader offering, so the Silicon Valley-based company gave a sneak preview of the device, including a first look at the gadget’s innovative touchscreen user interface.

Look ma, no keyboard!

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Greg Harper, president of Harpervision and co-founder of Gadgetoff, is–let’s be honest–a gadget freak of the freakiest level.

Check out this demo at the seventh D: All Things Digital, where Harper pulls out one odd but innovative product after another from his cornucopia of gadgetry–from a bad-breath checker to a tricked-out diving mask.

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Continuing our posting of the full sessions, in order of their presentation at the D: All Things Digital conference in late May, here is a video of the demo of new personal channels from Pure Digital, maker of the Flip digital camera.

Which is, as many readers of this column know, a key BoomTown accessory–with which I make my wobbly videos annoying various tech mandarins.

Pure Digital debuted its first Flip at a previous D conference and was recently sold to Cisco.

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Did we have demos of new products at the seventh D: All Things Digital conference?

Oh, yes we did!

First up, legendary entrepreneur Philippe Kahn’s new company, Fullpower, which has developed the MotionX Recognition Engine.

The company is developing accelerometer-based hardware and software intended to do for motion and gesture what speech recognition did for speech.

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Incredibly, this is the seventh year of the D: All Things Digital conference.

We feel very lucky to get here, especially in the midst of what our own site’s Digital Daily scribe, John Paczkowski, has so perfectly dubbed the “econalypse.”

Ironically, Walt Mossberg and I planned to launch the very first conference in the middle of the last major downturn for tech, in 2001. But, in the carnage of the Web 1.0 meltdown, we actually held off for two years, with our first D gathering taking place in 2003.

Well, we’re still going–making the same long-term bet that the digital revolution will keep rolling as we did at D1. Here’s our lineup for D7.

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There was no doubt, given the continuing economic collapse and all the joy that brings, that Demo09 was going to be a much tamped-down and sober affair this year.

But there were still a lot of interesting start-ups being featured in the main ballroom and demo “pit,” such as a cool “touch book” offering, a strange hooking-up-in-a-bar smartphone app and a plethora of ideas that obviously got their inspiration from the iPhone from Apple.

As in: touch, swipe, interact! (Which is the official BoomTown motto, in point of fact.)

Here’s a video I did of Demo09, which ends today.

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This past weekend, BoomTown revved up the Mini and headed out in the pouring rain to a Peets Coffee in Fremont, Calif., to the exact spot where Demo Executive Producer Chris Shipley proposed that VentureBeat founder and Editor-in-Chief Matt Marshall take over the longtime bi-annual conference where several dozen start-ups strut their stuff in front of an industry crowd.

Shipley will still be running the show at Demo09, starting Sunday in Palm Desert, as well as the next Demo this fall, with Marshall working alongside until he takes over fully in 2010.

Here’s a video of the pair talking about the changeover.

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An unusual Israeli-Palestinian joint venture start-up, which makes a cloud-based Web operating system letting users access their desktops from any computer with an Internet connection, is alleging a trademark violation by Microsoft in its new $300 million advertising campaign.

G.ho.st, which stands for “Global Hosted Operating System,” claims it has a pending trademark registration for the tagline “no walls.”

Microsoft disputes G.ho.st’s contention.

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We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

In the less contentious spirit of DEMOfall and TechCrunch50, two demo conferences taking place simultaneously this week, we’re happy to bring you all the demos we had onstage at the D6 conference.

Last, but not least: the G.ho.st Web operating system, which lets users access their desktop from any computer with an Internet connection. It’s also the name of a one-of-a-kind joint technology venture between Israelis and Palestinians.

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