LAS VEGAS -- Microsoft's two coolest new products weren't shown during its Consumer Electronics Show keynote address. Not sure how that happened, exactly, but that's the conclusion I've reached after spending part of the day at the company's booth here.

The first is Songsmith, the song creation program that we detailed in this post earlier today. The second is the Microsoft Tag bar-code reader. We posted about the iPhone application earlier today, but the product is much broader, with applications for Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Symbian and other mobile platforms.

The basic idea is for companies and individuals to create custom bar codes that people can scan with the mobile app, to automatically take them to mobile sites designated by the creator of the tag. For example, a bar code on a DVD package could send people to a site related to the movie. There's also a back-end service for tracking the number of people who access a site via a tag.

It's free to use during the beta, but the company is exploring potential business models. Here's a video of Aaron Getz, Microsoft Tag product unit manager, giving me a demo today.