First things first, for those emailing me frantically about getting into our D@CES onstage interview event later today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas: We’re sold out and have a very long wait list.

That said, people in Sin City tend to flake out, so if you show up at the Marcello Ballroom at the Venetian Hotel at 3 pm, you might snag a seat, as people did last year at the same event.

No guarantees, but it’s a betting town, so you might want to do so.

And, if you throw craps, our crack All Things Digital staff will be posting photos, reports and video quickly.

I am hoping there will be some juicy news for them to chew on, as we interview three fascinating subjects:

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer browser team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Our latest event comes after our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference, part of the D: All Things Digital juggernaut.

(Actually, it is more like a tiny red wagon, but it is really cool.)

This is our second D event at the CES, which is taking place this week.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

As usual, our event will be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

The D@CES program is only this afternoon, with the new trio.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real, live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

As noted before, I will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

So get ready for some fun–after all, it’s Vegas, baby.

After our successful D: Dive Into Mobile conference last week, the D: All Things Digital train keeps chugging away and is now headed to Las Vegas just after the new year.

There, we will do a second D event at the Consumer Electronics Show, which will take place from January 6 to 9, 2011.

It will, natch, be focused on the consumer electronics arena, and the big trends impacting it.

Unlike our other conferences, the D@CES program is only one afternoon, on Friday, January 7, at the Venetian’s Marcello ballroom, followed by a party at the hotel’s V Bar.

Last year’s tech execs onstage were Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, Netflix founder and CEO Reed Hastings and Google’s Android chief Andy Rubin.

This year, the trio will be: Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Nvidia co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and Dean Hachamovitch, who heads the Internet Explorer team within the Windows unit at Microsoft.

Costolo (pictured here), a longtime entrepreneur, took over from co-founder Evan Williams earlier this year and is charged with turning the microblogging service into a real-live boy, um, company.

Twitter is making a big push into the mainstream and also wants to be present for all the many devices shown at CES.

BoomTown will be grilling Costolo. Well done, I hope!

Nvidia’s Huang (pictured here) is leading a big change for the company. Although known for its PC graphics chips, Nvidia is shifting an increasing amount of focus to other areas, such as mobile chips with its Tegra line.

Huang will be interviewed by Mobilized’s Ina Fried.

Walt Mossberg will take on Hachamovitch (pictured below), who heads the IE team at Microsoft.

Well known for sporting a different black shirt featuring a different saying made up of the IE logo and letters at every keynote speech, he has been at the software giant since 1990.

We thought bringing his voice was important, since Hachamovitch has been focusing on privacy using the browser, an increasingly key topic in tech.

D@CES is invitation only, but if you want to go, email me at Kara@AllThingsD.com and I will send an invite, as long as supplies last.

In a Webcast, Microsoft Vice President Dean Hachamovitch said that today’s consumers have very little knowledge of what personal information is being tracked by various third parties.

“Tracking Protection in IE9 puts people in control,” Hachamovitch said. It allows, for example, one to view part of a Web site without viewing content coming from specified third-party sites.

The new feature, Hachamovitch said, is coming in the release candidate version of IE9, which is due early next year. By default the new feature will be off, but a user’s choice will persist from one browser session to another.

The move is about more than just cookies, Microsoft said, allowing users to create both a list of sites they do want to allow third-party access to, as well as a list of sites that should be blocked. Those lists could be created by the users themselves, or by businesses or other entities. Microsoft said it expects tech enthusiasts to be the first creators of such lists, but over time it expects privacy lists to come from a wide range of places, including from privacy groups.

Microsoft also said that the new feature is complementary to, and not a replacement for, its InPrivate filtering, which hides browsing history on the machine itself.

Hachamovitch said the company is opting to keep InPrivate off by default in IE9 because of the value consumers get by having a browser know which sites one has visited.

The timing is interesting, coming just a half-hour before Google’s Chrome announcement.

The near-final version of IE 9 that we’ll see later this morning is said to be orders of magnitude faster than IE 8. It’s more compliant with emerging HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 standards. It’s also, in the words of Microsoft, the only browser to use “full hardware acceleration,” the first to really tap into a computer’s graphics chip to fully accelerate content display rendering. In other words, it’s the only browser to really use the whole PC to see the Web and make Web pages behave like native applications. That claim’s already been disputed by Firefox developer Mozilla (“we are faster and we were first”), but that’s beside the point. Because what really matters is that true hardware acceleration is finally here, and that can only help push the Web forward and make it more interactive and more immersive.

“We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don’t think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way,” Jerry Bryant, Microsoft’s Security Program Manager said in a statement.

I see. Perhaps, IE’s security record inspired budget concerns given the number of potential payouts.

In any event, here’s Bryant’s statement in full.

“We value the researcher ecosystem, and show that in a variety of ways, but we don’t think paying a per-vuln bounty is the best way. Especially when across the researcher community the motivations aren’t always financial. It is well-known that we acknowledge researcher’s contributions in our bulletins when a researcher has coordinated the release of vulnerability details with the release of a security update. We also work to make sure we can support and strengthen the community’s development, by sponsoring nearly 50 security conferences in over 20 countries each year. We even host our own researcher conference at Redmond each year, called ‘BlueHat Security Briefings’ to promote the sharing of ideas, social networking and provide direct access between researchers and the specific owners of the technology they’re researching. While we do not provide a monetary reward on a per-bug basis, like any other industry, we do recognize and honor talent. We’ve had several influential folks from the researcher community join our security teams as Microsoft employees. We’ve also entered into contracts directly with many vendors and sometimes individual researchers to test our products for vulnerabilities before they’re released. Many of these vendors and individuals first came to our attention based on the high-quality and unique approaches demonstrated by the vulnerabilities they reported to the MSRC.”

IBM (IBM) has chosen a default browser for its nearly 400,000 employees and it’s not IE.

“We’re officially adding a new piece of software to the list of default common applications we expect employees to use, and that’s the Mozilla Firefox browser,” Bob Sutor, IBM’s vice president of open source and Linux, said in a blog post Thursday. “Firefox has been around for years, of course. Today we already have thousands of employees using it on Linux, Mac, and Windows laptops and desktops, but we’re going to be adding thousands more users to the rolls.”

So what does standardization on Firefox mean for IBM workers?

Says Sutor, “Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser. All new computers will be provisioned with it. We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.”

A nice endorsement for Firefox, though not entirely unexpected, given IBM’s code contributions.

BoomTown started off at what has become a magically bottomless trough of posts. Kara reported on yet another exec, this time Angela Courtin, SVP of Marketing, Entertainment and Content, scurrying down the gangway of the SS MySpace. Kara mused that while posts on executive departures from My Space and Yahoo have been plentiful lately, they can’t keep coming forever. Midweek, she got on a plane to Beantown and caught up with Walt Mossberg at MIT’s new Media Lab facility. The video she came back with features foldable cars, cities of the future, awesome electro-opera gloves and the weirdest glowing-eyed owl-thing Weekend Update has ever laid eyes on. Seriously: Worth a watch. Toward the end of the week, Kara got deep in a piece she wrote for the Washington Post, where she worked back when newspapers were king. She wrote about what she thought the world would benefit from being rid of, namely physical keyboards and computer mice. Full disclosure: She wrote the post on her Apple (AAPL) iPad.

Digital Daily was a posting machine this week, starting early with some bad news for Steve Ballmer and the Internet Explorer fanboys out there (theoretically there should be some right?). It looks like IE’s dominating market share dropped seven percent, down to 59 percent since this time last year, under pressure from other browsers, according to a Net Applications study. Midweek, John moved on to a post about recent speculation that low AT&T (T) data plan prices for the iPad 3G may indicate an extension of the exclusive deal between AT&T and Apple. John finished things off with a nice post that brings some perspective to all the Apple ogling by the press. The comScore (SCOR) report names Samsung as the top mobile device maker in the U.S. market, even if an analysis of media coverage volume might suggest otherwise.

Over at MediaMemo, Peter brought us a post early in the week on Google’s investment in Invidi, a start-up working on “addressable ads” in the TV space. We aren’t sure if Google (GOOG) is looking more Appley or if Apple is looking more Googley these days. From the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel files, Peter posted that Time Inc. saw gains in both ad and subscription dollars last quarter. The question remains: Will it be a V- or a W-shaped recovery? At least it’s not just a backslash. Delivering a much anticipated piece of news, Peter posted that it appears Facebook will finally start rolling out location services sometime in the next several weeks. Advertising Age reported that McDonald’s (MCD), the international corporate face of individualized services, will be a partner for the launch. It makes a lot of sense if you think about it. At Mickey D’s, you can have it any way you want, as long as it’s the McDonalds way.

Personal Technology this week was a little more of a conceptual piece than a gadget review, but Walt always mixes it up at the right time. He devoted his entire column to demystifying some of the concepts around cloud computing and explains what it may mean for Joe and Jane user. Walt seems keen on the change with allows flexibility and interoperation among devices, and his explanation brings it down to ground level. Katie rounded us out with a hands-on review of Microsoft’s new Kin One, a roundish little smartphone designed to be a social platform as much as a phone. She liked the design and execution in most areas, though felt that the polish on this first Microsoft smartphone reincarnation was a little lacking. Best of all? Seems like Kin’s constant wireless upload of all content to the cloud might be the feature to beat.

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and tweeting out with our new Meebo bar. We’re in the final countdown to the D8 conference now, and we’re ready to level up to full-tilt awesome. Stay tuned!

This is the first time IE’s share has ever fallen below 60 percent.

Meanwhile, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari and Google’s (GOOG) Chrome all made small gains, apparently at IE’s expense. Chrome posted the largest of the bunch, rising 0.6 points to 6.73 percent. Firefox’s market share rose 0.07 points to 24.59 percent. And Safari’s increased just 0.06 points to 4.7 percent, a surprisingly underwhelming gain for a browser that ships not just on the Mac, but on the iPhone, iPod touch and now the iPad as well. (Click chart below to enlarge.)

Yes, IE’s month-over-month drop is piddling. But the year-over-year decrease is worth noting because the rate of decline in IE’s market share is clearly accelerating. The browser has lost nearly eight percent market share since April 2009. And it has lost nearly 20 percent since April 2008, when its market share was over 77 percent. Clearly, IE 8, while largely well-received, hasn’t done much to reverse the overall decline of Microsoft’s (MSFT) browser.

Hard to believe that IE held an estimated 95 percent of the browser market in 2003.

“The future of the web is HTML5,” Hachamovitch says. “Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive Web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.”

So Microsoft, like Apple, is casting its lot with HTML5, and largely for the same reasons. That said, it’s not abandoning Flash entirely. Not yet, anyway.

“Today, video on the Web is predominantly Flash-based,” Hachamovitch writes. “While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular Web site without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. … Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s Web.”

In other words, Flash is important today, not because of its strength as a platform or its “ reliability, security, and performance,” but because the average Web user is accustomed to it. Which is a more diplomatic way of saying exactly what Jobs said yesterday:

Flash was created during the PC era – for PCs and mice. Flash is a successful business for Adobe, and we can understand why they want to push it beyond PCs. But the mobile era is about low power devices, touch interfaces and open web standards – all areas where Flash falls short. … New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too)

And so, beginning on Feb. 22, Windows users in the U.K., France and Belgium will be presented with a ballot screen offering them an opportunity to swap out Internet Explorer for one of 11 other browsers from rivals like Mozilla, Apple (AAPL), Opera and Google (GOOG).

“The browser choice screen software update will be offered as an automatic download through Windows Update for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7,” Microsoft (MSFT) Vice President and Deputy General Counsel Dave Heiner explained in a blog post announcing the move. “The software update will be installed automatically, or will prompt you to download or install it, depending on which operating system you are running and your settings for Windows Update.”

Once that’s done, users will be shown a ballot screen offering the option of installing one of the listed browsers, learning more about them or postponing the browser choice to a later time. Simple enough–assuming that automatic updates is enabled and that they actually care about browser choice.

If that’s the case, many probably dumped IE for an alternative long ago, right?

Anyway, as I said, a limited ballot screen rollout begins next week with full-scale deployment across the rest of Europe a week later, potentially reaching some 170 million PCs. It will be interesting to see how many of them end up switching to a new default browser.

PREVIOUSLY:

• Microsoft Announces Windows 7 Neelie Kroes Edition
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• Great Move, EC. Now We Have to Download IE Ourselves…
• If Windows Didn’t Ship With IE, How Would You Download Firefox?
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