Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, used his keynote speech at last week’s CES 2011 event to state that “there are already more than 5,500 applications available for Windows Phone customers…to put that in some context, our customers typically get access to more than 100 new applications every 24 hours.” Ballmer also noted that more than 20,000 developers have registered, “and are keeping the application pipeline full with more signing-on each day.” He promised updates to the platform which will deliver “significant performance improvements when loading or switching between applications.”