Bing Watch . . . Just Bing It!

Swipe and googling: Bing’s rival upgrades its mobile app for tablets include for iPad and Android version 3.1 in 36 languages



After almost four months Bing launched its mobile app for Apple’s iPad, Google is set to release its app for tablets include for iPad and Android.  The decision engine rolled out “Bing for iPad” app during the first week of April this year. 

According to Google blog post, the enhanced mobile app for tablets will be available soon, and it’s designed for Android version 3.1.  It also will be available in 36 languages. 

Some enhancements of Google app for tablets include newer page layout to help users experiencing better search results.    Google design team also modified font size and made it easier to swipe and touch buttons.  Users can easily find, touch, and search on popular categories such as Images, Videos, Places, Shopping, others.

(Images: Google blog and Bing)

Bing to sponsor ESPN Summer X Games in Los Angeles from July 28 to July 31 at STAPLES Center and L.A. LIVE entertainment complex

The decision engine crews are coming to BingWatch's hometown this week as the major sponsor for this year’s ESPN Summer X Games.  This is going to be the 17th year event for ESPN. 

All competitions will take place indoor and outdoor, using LA Lakers stadium (STAPLES Center), the new entertainment complex L.A. LIVE, and brand new building Nokia Theatre.  All venues located close to LA Convention Center, or on the intersection of freeway I-10 and I-110.

The event started this Thursday afternoon at 12:00pm and will end on Sunday night at 8:00pm.  This year’s competitions include skateboarding, BMX, Moto X, rally car and rally cross.  To check out a full schedule, please click here to go to ESPN X17 homepage.

The decision engine extends Sweepstakes for Bing Rewards members with 3 super prizes until September 30, 2011

Bing team urges the decision engine users to join Bing Rewards membership where each new signee will receive 250 free points.  In order to collect more points, member must install Bing Bar on their PCs.  Bing Bar could be installed on any PCs that run on Windows 7, Windows Vista, and Windows XP SP3 operating system.  To get more points, they also must install Internet Explorer with version 7 or newer.

The extended Sweepstakes for Bing Rewards members was announced today by Bing team.  The new deadline is now set until September 30, 2011, 12:00 pm EST. 

3 lucky Bing Rewards members will be picked by the team to take home one of the three super prizes include a vacation trip worth $5,000, a high-tech entertainment room worth thousand dollars, and a gift certificate from ecommerce king Amazon.com worth $1,000.

The decision engine to continue sponsoring its home-town football team Seattle Seahawks as training camp practices will start on Friday, July 29, 2011

Since the decision engine launched two years ago, it has sponsored its home-town football team Seattle Seahawks.  This year will be the third year of Bing as the top sponsor of the team.  The team is now coached by former USC Trojans Pete Carroll.

Seattle Seahawks training camp organizer urges its fans to start registering for this year summer camp which will start on Friday, July 29, 2011 and will finish on August 15. This year practices will take place at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center (VMAC).  There will be a cost of $5 per head for transportation fee.  Kids that are 15 years or younger must go with an adult.

(Image: seahawks.com)

Back-to-school trends: Bing shopping team publishes some results based on the decision engine’s recent survey

Bing team recently conducted a survey to find out more about back-to-school shoppers purchasing behavior.  There are several interesting results from the survey.  According to Bing blog post, the decision engine’s back-to-school shoppers are more interested in price of products than value or style.  This group of shoppers accounted for 52% of samples.  Majority or 87% of shoppers visited comparison websites to find deals that fit to their tight budgets of $100 total.  44% of shoppers will go to used uniform stores to find cheaper clothing for their kids.

In term of purchasing expensive items such as computer PCs or laptops, according to Bing survey results, 60% of shoppers will ask opinions from friends or family before making the shopping decision.  As Bing is integrated with Facebook social networking, the partnership between the two companies would help those shoppers to make better decisions easily.

The salad bowl decision engine: Bing mixes pay-per-click search ads within its organic free listings

The new technique for placing pay-per-click ads within its organic search results was spotted in the wild by one of analysts at rimmkaufman.com, and then later confirmed by Barry Schwartz of searchengineland.com.  The new method of placing ads is almost like a salad bowl mixing "paid" ads into the organic search results. 

Users could be tricked to click on the pay-per-click ads, especially the "paid" ads appear at the first page listings.  In order to be fair with other organic free listings, Bing is trying to be a little bit precaution by placing a tiny label read “ad” on the right hand side of the “paid” listings.

Citing Microsoft spokesperson who had confirmed the test, Barry Schwartz wrote “We’re constantly testing and experimenting on Bing, and with that, we carefully measure user engagement and reaction to these changes. We have nothing further to share at this time.”

 
(Screenshot: searchengineland.com)

Bing’s parent reports fiscal year fourth-quarter revenue of $17.4 billion and net income of $5.9 billion, while the decision engine division revenue increased 15% for the full fiscal year

The world’s largest software company continues to make a lot of money thru Windows 7 operating system, Office suites, Xbox gaming consoles and controllers, Server and Tools, etc.  After the Wall Street market closed on Thursday afternoon, Bing’s parent reported fiscal year fourth-quarter revenue of $17.4 billion and net income of $5.9 billion.  The latest fiscal year calendar for the fourth-quarter ended June 30, 2011.

In term of revenue, Bing’s parent hit a new record revenue during this past quarter with an increase of 8% from one year ago.  The company also has a new record net income with an increase of 30% from one year ago.

From July 2010 to June 2011 fiscal full year, the giant software company made total revenue of $69.94 billion.  This was an increase of 12% from 2009 to 2010 fiscal year.  Full year net income was $23.15 billion or an increase of 23%.

According to the press release, Bing’s division (Online Services Division) revenue increased 17% for the fiscal fourth quarter.  With the help from its two top partners include Facebook social networking and Yahoo Search, there were more companies placing pay-per-clicks ads on the decision engine as the full year of 2010-2011 revenue increased 15% from full year of 2009-2010.

Rest in Peace: Bing’s rival to say goodbye to Google Labs, as Googlers will spend their 20 percent “free” time on higher ROI projects such as Google+ project

The decision engine’s rival announced that it will be discontinuing Google Labs starting this morning.  One of the top executives for Research Department, Bill Coughran, posted a blog telling Googlers to put more efforts on Google+ project which was launched three weeks ago. 

Google Labs was instituted to let Googlers expand their innovative ideas while spending their 20 percent “free” time.  However, since Larry Page the founder returned to its CEO position in early April this year, the new boss tried to make all Wall Street analysts and investors happy.  Mr. Page tries to make sure all Googlers will spend time and more focus on higher ROI projects such as the new Google+ project.  This project is now competing closely with powerhouse Facebook to gain users base in term of social networking.

(Logo: Google Labs)

Bing Maps employs over 50,000 Gigwalkers and iPhone users to take photos in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Seattle to enhance the decision engine images search results

Bing Maps images search results is now powered by 50,000 Gigwalkers.  Bing Maps partners with Gigwalk, a Silicon Valley startup company that was officially launched in May this year. 

Gigwalk members are also known as Gigwalkers.  They will get paid by taking photos with their iPhones.  A small task of taking a photo of street signs or restaurant menus will cost about $4 to $7 per action, as reported by The Seattle Times. 

The cheap labor of over 50,000 Gigwalkers will bring 3-D and popular Photosynth panoramas of local stores, restaurants, and landmarks to enhance the decision engine mapping system.  Bing’s Photosynth app for Apple iOS version 1.1 was released three weeks ago.

The business of taking photos is now open in selected large cities in America include New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Miami and Seattle.

In order to participate, new members must download Gigwalk app to an iPhone.  The company is also building a similar app for Android and Windows Phone.

(Screenshot: Gigwalk.com)

With the help of Fareology, Bing Travel lets users to find more deals and discounts for this year’s summer travel plans

Bing Travel team just published some interesting trends regarding this year’s summer vacations and plans.  Bing Travel believes that airfare has dropped about 3.3% to 4% from last year.  However, airfare for top destinations with sunny weather has increased about 6.5% to 6.6% from last year (i.e., Los Angeles). For accommodations, the price for rooms has increased about 1% to 30%.

In order to help the decision engine users to find more deals and discounts, Bing Travel also released some tips and trends which were based on dataset provided by Impulse Research.  According to the findings, Bing Travel showed the following behaviors for this year's vacationers:

• Two-third of Americans who had decided to pick a vacation destination was due to a reason that they’ve found the best deals and discounts.
• Majority vacationers (91%) conducted online search to compare the best deals by visiting several websites.
• Every one of five vacationers spend at least 10 hours to conduct search online before making decision on their vacation destination
• For hotels, staying in Paris and Rome is getting more expensive while Toronto and Orlando are less expensive than last year.  Travelling to New York and Paris are considered the most expensive places while Orlando and Las Vegas are the cheapest destination.

(Screenshot: Bing Places showing Los Angeles)

Let’s say hello to socl.com: a new Bing’s social search service a.k.a. Tulalip, or just a Microsoft Research project

Bing’s family could be extended soon with a newborn sister who has a short name socl.com, or also known as Tulalip.  The finding was first reported by a domainer at fusible.com who has been tracking the sale of a resemblance domain name social.com for $2.6 million in June.  Socl.com domain name was owned by a regular domainer and later sold to Microsoft in early July 2011. 

A text message on the new socl.com homepage reads “With Tulalip you can Find what you need and Share what you know easier than ever.” 

Tech bloggers have been writing comments about the new social search service who many believe will soon compete with Facebook and Google+.   At the same time tech watchers have also chasing the newest Bing’s family member into Microsoft headquarter in Redmond.   However, a Microsoft spokesperson has denied the rumor.  Citing the giant software company’s spokesperson, Matt McGee of Search Engine Land wrote about socl.com as “an internal design project from one of Microsoft’s research teams which was mistakenly published to the web.”

(Screenshot: fusible.com)

America’s user intent search market share for June 2011: Bing captured 14.4% shares, an increase of 0.3% shares from May, while Google's share stalled at 65.5%

The decision engine continued to grab more search market shares from rivals in term of user intent search or explicit core search.  As per data from comScore, Bing gained 0.3% shares from May 2011 to 14.4% shares in June 2011.

Bing’s partner Yahoo Search remained stable at 15.9% shares in June.  The Search Alliance Bing and Yahoo now have a total of 30.3% shares, compared to May which was at 30.0% shares exactly.

Bing’s top rival Google stalled at 65.5% shares in June.  The giant search engine also has the same total in May at 65.5% shares.

(Table: comScore)

Bing Finance integrates resources from partners to support the decision engine users to make better financial and investment decisions include Seeking Alpha, StockTwits.com, TheFlyOnTheWall and Trefis.com

Bing continued to partner with top notch experts in their fields to provide better search results. This week the decision engine announced a new partnership with financial and investment resources to help its users to make better decisions.  The latest partnerships will integrate several financial and investment website features from Seeking Alpha, StockTwits.com, TheFlyOnTheWall and Trefis.com.

Seeking Alpha provides financial news and activities on stock market.  StockTwits.com helps users to skim on experts’ chit-chat on specific stocks.  TheFlyOnTheWall provides real-time updates and news on a specific company.

(Screenshot: Bing team)

Yell to work with Bing to provide local search and mobile advertising targeting small and medium businesses in America and Britain with over 50 million unique web visitors per month

One of the largest print and digital marketing services in Britain, Yell announced a partnership with Bing to provide local search and mobile advertising targeting small and medium businesses.  With an armada of 1.3 million clients and over 50 million unique web visitors per month, Yell serves mostly local businesses in America, Britain, Spain and South America.  The high volume of web traffic will help Bing to conquer European nations as the decision engine is trying every niche to grab search market share worldwide.

In return, Bing’s parent Microsoft will offer sweeter deals to Yell to provide its popular business software and cloud services, including the newly launch cloud-based Office 365 and the recently approved Skype and in-house communications solutions.

The decision engine releases new enhancements to Bing Maps user interface, including some changes to task and navigation controls

In order to help users to find controls for Bing Maps easily, this popular mapping website has modified its user interface by moving around controls for Road, Aerial, Traffic, Birds Eye, and the StreetSide.  These old buttons now moved to top level menu items on the left.  Most of the major buttons now have text labels on them.

The team also replaced with a bolder Bing Maps controls for graphics zoom-in-out and direction changes at the top right. 

Bing Maps new user interface: OLD design (left) versus NEW design (right)

 
(Screenshot: Bing team)

400 students from around the world greeted Bing’s boss Steve Ballmer as Microsoft CEO opened the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals in New York City

Bing’s boss CEO Steve Ballmer has officially opened the final round for the Imagine Cup 2011 Worldwide Finals in New York City on Friday evening.   There were 400 elite students who representing their countries in this year’s challenge. 

During the opening remarks, CEO Ballmer also mentioned about the decision engine’s works in progress "Bing is a service that is probably amongst the things I'm most excited about at Microsoft, most excited."   Later Bing’s boss added that today’s search engine should be helping users to do stuff as Ballmer said “The truth of the matter is, computers, search engines, nothing really understands verbs today.”  Ballmer believed that the decision engine is being built to helping users to do stuffs as they wanted “And the core technology we're developing to understand and try to simulate the world of users and what they're interested in, and how they want to get it done is all being done in Bing.”  Ballmer also praised the decision engine relationship with social networking powerhouse Facebook during his speech and later added “We're pretty excited about the work we're doing there with Facebook…” (click here for a full transcript of CEO Ballmer opening remarks).

To promote the hottest gaming product in the planet, Bing's boss Mr. Ballmer promised to giveaway all finalists with a Kinect for Xbox 360 ($150 market value).

Each competitor will demo their new ideas for helping to solve world's problems in the new few days.  Top finalists will be announced during the event and judges and online community will pick the winners (click here to vote).  The event will close on Wednesday evening with Awards Ceremony.

This year’s Imagine Cup has several categories include:

• Software Design
• Embedded Development
• Game Design
• Digital Media
• Windows Phone 7
• IT Challenge
• Interoperability Challenge
• Orchard Challenge (winners have already been announced)
• Windows 7 Touch Challenge (winners have already been announced)

 

(Photo of Steve Ballmer by Danijel Blagajac, dblagajac via flickr.com)

Let’s say hello to BingDude, the official representative for the decision engine at WebmasterWorld

The decision engine has assigned a representative to answer webmaster’s questions especially for those who have issues related to Bing search.  First reported online by seroundtable.com, the new rep is also known as BingDude.

BingDude was registered as a member at WebmasterWorld on March 3, 2011.  This rep has over 10 years of experience in SEO.  So far, BingDude has posted and replied to at least 16 Bing threads at WebmasterWorld forums.   As Americans celebrated the 4th of July holiday early this week, BingDude has been really active in the past few days answering questions such as "Controlling Bingbot crawling" and others. 

 
(Screenshot: WebmasterWorld)

Facebook announced a partnership with Skype to offer video calling to 750 million social networking users

Bing’s social search partner Facebook made an awesome announcement this morning at the social network powerhouse’s headquarter in Palo Alto.  The partnership with Skype will offer video calling to 750 million social networking users worldwide.

In conjunction to today’s big announcement, the world’s largest social networking also launched multi-person chat.   This new feature allows users to chat together, discuss issues, and making decision together.

Bing’s parent Microsoft is going to pay over $8.5 billion for the p-2-p technology.  Few weeks ago, the deal gained a full approval from FTC and Department of Justice in America.  The deal will be completed around Christmas this year.

(Image: Facebook Live)

The decision engine introduces a new feature dubbed as Lasso for Apple’s iPad users, conducting search by circling a keyword on touch-screen devices

Bing updates its mobile app for Apple’s iPad and introduces a new feature dubbed as Lasso.  iPad users can now conduct search faster and make better decisions without typing into the search box.  Users only need to circling a keyword on touch-screen devices and the decision engine will find the answer.

In coming months, Bing team intends to release more features for iPad users, as Bing team blog wrote “What you’re seeing today is only the beginning. Lasso moves Bing beyond the search box.”

To download the upgraded Bing app for iPad, please go to App Store.  To try using Lasso for Apple iPad please go to bingforipad.com.

(Image: Bing team)

Ni Hao Bing: the decision engine signed a partnership deal with China’s largest search engine Baidu to provide English search results

After several months in the making, while Americans are celebrating Independence Day on July 4th, Baidu released an email statement to announce a partnership with Bing decision engine, reported reuters.com.  The deal will let Bing to extract search results in English-language to Baidu users. 

With China’s growing Internet users closer to one-half-billion users, Bing could gain business attraction in the Great Wall country.

With the help of Bing’s parent, Facebook to launch awesome social networking features include Skype video chat product for desktop users

Bing’s partner Facebook has invited press and tech bloggers to a special event the day after Independence holiday in America, exactly on Wednesday, July 6, 10:00am Pacific Time.  On the invitation, a line of text read “Please join us for an event at Facebook” 1601 S. California Ave, Palo Alto, California 94303.

According to a tech blogger at techcrunch.com, Facebook will launch a new video chat service with the help of Microsoft’s newest property Skype.  Early this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted that the social networking powerhouse will soon be launching an “awesome” new service within days.  As Bing’s parent will pay over $8.5 billion dollar for Skype Company, this p2p voice engine will help stretching Facebook and Bing relationship for a long run. 

On the bright side, Facebook users will spend more time on the social website as they will utilize voice and video chat to communicate with friends and family online.  At the same time, Facebook users will also use Bing decision engine to conduct search online.