Bill Gates is giving his last keynote address to the Consumer Electronics Show tomorrow. Here’s where you can watch it live.

Gates is due to start his departing speech at 6.30pm US Pacific Standard Time, so start streaming early to avoid missing out. Here are your streaming options.

750k high quality webcast stream
300k good quality webcast stream
100k blob quality webcast stream

Gates is no Steve Jobs when it comes to presenting showmanship, but Gates has evovled into a comfortable and competent speaker over the years.

Google is trying to compete with Microsoft in every arena, including presentation software. Google recently launched a competitor to PowerPoint. Many pundits gave Google’s version low markets in a point by point comparison to PowerPoint. Now, Google is making updates and revisions to its presentation software. Here is an analysis of the recent Google changes. I think the so-called inadequacies of Google’s presentation software are overstated, primarily because I think that most of the gizmos in presentation software hurt rather than help audiences. But most speakers can help themselves by knowing how to work with any of the major presentation software applications.

Let’s face it; you are an enabler—and so am I. When you and I sit through someone’s awful, boring, bullet-point filled PowerPoint Presentation and pretend to pay attention and listen, we are enabling another lousy speaker—and we are encouraging him or her to do the same thing again and again.

This has got to stop!

It’s time to take the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Pledge. Here it is:

If in the first 120 second (2 minutes) of a speech
A presenter shows slides that are 90% text based or more
And looks at his/her slides 60% of the time or more,
Then I walk out the door.

By my own accounting, this would put more than half of the business speakers in the world in front of an empty room—every time. The message would start to sink in.

For the record, I am pro-PowerPoint. I use PowerPoint 3-5 times a week in my presentations and trainings. But the way to use PowerPoint effectively is for the speaker to focus exclusively on audience members, use the slides to show visuals and not text, and to focus on one idea at a time in each slide.

Of course it’s not practical to walk out on your boss’s presentation, your weekly staff meeting, or a presentation from an important partner or client. But let’s face it; we all have opportunities to walk out on certain presentations. For example:

1. Large conferences where there are numerous presenters speaking in different rooms at the same time. Walk out on the ones who break the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Rule.
2. Vendors who are taking up your valuable time. If a vendor breaks the 120-90-60 PowerPoint rule in front of me, I simply stand up and say “thanks, I have an emergency. I would be happy to read any written materials you can leave behind.” And in fact there is an emergency; I want to stop my impulse to strangle the vendor for wasting my time with a boring PowerPoint presentation.

All of us, as frequent audience members, have the power to shape the greater business culture’s ways of speaking. If you don’t take a stand (and walk out the door) you will have nobody to blame but yourself when you become bored out of your mind when listening to future PowerPoint speeches.

If you are ready to sign the 120-90-60 PowerPoint Pledge, then please leave just your name in the comment button below.