While Microsoft COO Kevin Turner did a kind of modified cheerleading act at Microsoft’s annual Financial Analyst Meeting, Entertainment and Devices President Robbie Bach played the teenage boy and Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie the voice from the future.

It included Bach playing ball with Microsoft’s new motion-sensing, controllerless Project Natal and Mundie introducing a very creepy digital assistant with more than a passing resemblance to HAL from “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

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With all the attention given to Facebook and MySpace, it’s hard for other social-networking sites to get much attention, unless–like Bebo–they manage to sell themselves off to a big company for an ungodly amount of money.

Still, many smaller sites are chugging along, such as the San Francisco-based hi5 Networks, trying to build strong niche businesses and find other means of making money besides the still unproven advertising space.

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

Here’s an interview I did with Activision Chairman and CEO Bobby Kotick about the state of the gaming business.

It’s a good week to focus on the gaming industry since Electronic Arts abandoned its hostile acquisition bid for Take-Two Interactive over the weekend.

The move was–in part–in answer to Activision’s recent merger with Vivendi Games, which includes Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, one the most popular multi-player games. This has made Activision one of the gaming industry’s largest companies, due to some of its well-known franchises, especially its hugely popular Guitar Hero, which debuted version IV at D6.

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Our very own John Paczkowski channels some of the Holy Spirit–but this time for the glory of Apple’s iPhone, which debuts Friday–in his Digital Daily video.
The fire and brimstone aside, the hype over what AT&T is calling “iDay” is going to get pretty rollicking over the next few days, especially as reviews of what [...]

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