Speaking yesterday morning at the Qualcomm CES keynote, Gary Shapiro blasted SOPA and its backers and supporters for their efforts to stifle both free speech and innovation. Shapiro is president of the Consumer Electronics Association, the organization responsible for CES. …

Recently during his Worldwide Partner Conference keynote Kevin Turner, Microsoft’s COO, informed partners of an interesting development. Apparently Apple has taken notice of Microsoft’s Laptop Hunter ads… and really don’t like them.

Apple doesn’t like them to the tune of having their lawyers contact Microsoft, telling them stop running the ads.

The answer to the question “Where are we going?” has never been so uncertain. That’s probably not true, what I just said—likely every generation walks that line of dread. Our generation, if we were to follow Dave Taylor, would end up where he did eventually—at some future crossroads equally uncertain—but we’d surely arrive there by different roads.

Satya Nadella (Microsoft’s Senior Vice President of the Search, Portal & Advertising Platform Group) spoke at this morning’s keynote at the Search Engine Strategies Conference.

Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, after stirring up some controversy at his last SES keynote address, was invited to speak again at the SES Conference in New York, and his tone regarding SEO was a bit softer.

SES New York is here again, and WebProNews is there to bring you reports and videos from the Big Apple. Enjoy our coverage this week.

Day 2 of SMX West 2008 was kicked off with a keynote by Louis Monier, formerly with Google, eBay and Alta Vista and currently Vice President of Products for Cuill, an up and coming search property.

Monier made it clear that his address would be on search history and future aspects and not on Cuill.

Danny Sullivan giving his keynote address at SMX West 2008 in Santa Clara, CA. He discussed the evolution of search from strictly web page results to the current blended results that he refers to as Search 3.0 and the coming Search 4.o, personalized search.

The latest Keynote Customer Experience study on search engines showed Yahoo edging out Google for top marks in search assistance & suggestions.

Well, it’s not going to cause quite the media-wide paroxysm the Jesus phone (iPhone, for the uninitiated or unacquainted with light-hearted sacrilege) caused last year at Macworld, but there’ll probably be sufficient tremulous giddiness about the world’s thinnest notebook computer, the MacBook Air.

Fake Steve Jobs says that something in the air is the Woz’s SBDs. Ha, ha. Everybody loves a good fart joke. But depending on whether the supposed Macworld keynote leak on Wikipedia was the real deal, a promotional buzzworthy plant, or a fake, the Real Steve Jobs might not find it all that amusing.