Digital Burndown, a new catalyst for community, invites you to experience social gaming and meet other talented E-City game developers in live “meat space.” That’s the space where you will “meet” with other “live minds and bodies” in the non-virtual world. The “meating place” is reserved for game industry folks to get social-aka-”network” with colleagues. [...]
Feeling under the weather is not unusual in Seattle. But area residents can wait, on average, for up to two weeks or more to arrange a medical appointment with a specialist.* Where do you turn when you need to see a doctor…right away? Try the Internet. ZocDoc has launched in the Greater Seattle region to [...]
Spending on public and private IT cloud services will generate nearly 14 million jobs worldwide from 2011 to 2015, according to a new study by the analyst firm IDC. The research, commissioned by Microsoft, also found that IT innovation created by cloud computing could produce $1.1 trillion a year in new business revenues. “The cloud is going [...]
It’s not “Dancing with the Stars,” but ”Advancing to the Stars” that is the star-filled challenge for 20 contest finalists vying to make it to the top of the Seattle Space Needle — and far beyond. Your vote on the Space Needle’s Facebook page could put five of them over the top! The contest, announced [...]
WTIA, the Washington Technology Industry Association, has testified in front of the House Higher Education Committee in Olympia about the degree “gap” in Washington, especially with regards to computer science and engineering. The hearing was a work session where the Higher Education Coordinating Board, www.hecb.wa.gov, the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges,www.sbctc.ctc.edu and the Workforce Training Board, [...]
As Internet Websites were being blacked-out on Wednesday, January 19th, in protest of the controversial SOPA legislation more reminiscent of the days of governmental blacklisting, Seattle was being blanketed in a coat of frosty white. Mayor Mike McGinn activated the Seattle city government’s Emergency Operations Center (EOC) after the National Weather Service forecasted several feet of snow and icy road [...]
After a 14 year tenure as the opening act in the tech world’s largest new product extravaganza, it seemed only fitting that American Idol host, Ryan Seacrest, would be on hand to send Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s back home after in his final star turn as a CES keynoter. While the Redmond brigade says its marketing [...]
How would you interact with an Online Voter’s Guide that lets you register your approval by degree (with a slider) and add your opinion to others on an election issue? CityClub of Seattle and the University of Washington’s Center for Communication & Civic Engagement and its Department of Computer Science and Engineering have collaborated to [...]
Group Health Cooperative, Seattle’s consumer-governed, nonprofit healthcare system that coordinates care and coverage, has launched a new customer-care strategy, highlighted by the development of an iPhone application, Group Health Mobile. The mobile application provides Group Health’s 650,000 members with unhindered access to their personal health information, as well as Group Health’s network of information. Group [...]
Lockerz, the Seattle-based social commerce company with more than 45 million monthly unique visitors worldwide, has acquired AddToAny, one of the Web’s largest social sharing platforms. AddToAny enables users to share and bookmark online content with the most popular social networks, news aggregators, email services, and instant messengers. With the acquisition, Lockerz expands its online [...]
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May 14 2012
Google Blinks! Bing Sings, and Slings the Arrows of Social Interface Discontent! Amazon’s Social “Denny Triangle!”
At last week’s Bing Search Summit in San Francisco, Microsoft took the wraps off a brand new Bing featuring a new, right-hand social column (“The Sidebar”) that will eventually include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Quora and LinkedIn integration, as well as people who may know something about your most recent Bing query. The new Bing search even offers a way to ask questions on your favorite social network, directly through Bing. “The search engine has been reinvented!” wrote Mashable’s Lance Ulanoff.
In total, there are three new Bing columns in all:
* Core Search: minus many of the social annotations that Bing has added over the years (that have been relocated).
* Snapshot: providing additional information about a particular search listing, without having to leave Bing
* Sidebar: serving as the new home for social integration with search
“With this update, the competing search philosophies are clearer than ever,” opined Mashable. “Google sees the world as a deep blend of data, people and activities, all of which can be mined simultaneously for a rich and useful experience. Bing sees a more structured world, where social interactions, while extremely helpful, are kept a safe distance from the core results you desire.”
How does Bing build these “Friends Who Might Know” lists? Microsoft execs explained they’re leveraging as much publicly available data as possible from Facebook (for now) and soon Twitter and other networks. Inclusion in the list is not necessarily based on something you posted about the topic.
The sidebar includes people you know through your social networks that have, say, posted a photo about the topic, liked a certain relevant topic or searched for a similar topic in Bing, and people you don’t know, who are, for example, known Topic Experts and Enthusiasts (identified by Bing). All of them could be considered helpful in your quest for knowledge. Conversations revolving around a query topic are viewable through the social pane — you just hover over the activity and a small box will slide out to the left with the original post. You can add comments in any conversation in the activity pane or see the conversation in the slideout.
For example, a search for “Seattle restaurants” might pull up Facebook friends who have “liked” dining establishments in the metro area under a header that reads “Friends Who Might Know.” Bing users can also post comments or queries in the sidebar interface that will automatically be published to their Facebook page (provided they’re signed into Facebook) and could hypothetically flag their Seattle-based friends in posts seeking advice on where to go for dinner.
To see the new pane at work, you have to sign into Facebook and install the Bing App in Facebook. With that done, your social pane will be filled with recent Bing activity that’s also been shared on Facebook. When you enter a search query in the Bing interface on the left, the pane will also display a list of Facebook friends, and topic experts who might be able to assist with your query. Note: The Bing App defaults to sharing your posts with Everyone. If you do a lot of searching, you may want to dial that down a bit.
This deep integration with Facebook isn’t the first time the two have collaborated, and Bing has been adding social recommendations powered by Facebook to its search results for the past year. But it’s a sure sign that Microsoft — which bought a 1.6% stake in Facebook for $240 million in 2007 — will lean on a company it’s heavily invested in to improve on the social-search product Google introduced in January. “Search Plus Your World” pulls up Google+ content deemed relevant to signed-in Google users and has gotten a tepid reception, said Adage. [24x7]
Amazon Advances Its Vision for a Social Campus Compass, Not an “Apple Circle,” but a “Denny Triangle.”
The City of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development has posted the latest renderings of Amazon’s proposed Denny Triangle campus.
At a public design review board meeting, attendees liked proposed amenities that include outdoor artwork, a playing field, a dog park and space for food trucks.
The venue also incorporates a healthy measure of social engineering into the design. To ensure public open spaces between buildings are both lively and safe, buildings are designed so that people who park their cars in the underground garages will have to walk outside to get from the garage elevators to the elevators in the building lobbies. “That will help ensure a steady flow of people moving through the plazas.”
The project will also be a haven for bicyclists. Each of the three blocks will have a dedicated bike entrance and storage for as many as 400 bikes. That could allow as many as 1,200 Amazon employees to bike to work. [24x7]