After 20 years at Goodyear Tire and Rubber, Debra Walker decided to take a walk on the wild side: she and Ken Brookings, another auto-industry veteran, started iCARumba. The site now has 2,000 car-repair shops as members (in Seattle and San Francisco). And it’s just starting to advertise to consumers. Its goal: comprehensive car-repair info, [...]
Wall Street has fallen hard and fast for this pitch: a single website that caters to virtually all small-business needs. Witness the meteoric rise of AllBusiness.com, BizBuyer.com, Onvia.com and Works.com. Meanwhile, Workz.com has quietly carved out a niche telling businesses how to sell online. And in May 2000 it will introduce its own Marketplace. Here’s [...]
Seattle’s Internet startups are pretty skeptical about the benefits of online advertising. That’s one of the main things we learned at the Online Advertising forum, hosted by the Seattle Online Network in mid-February. For one, there wasn’t a single Seattle-area Internet company among the forum sponsors. And the four panelists, all in the online advertising [...]
The Demo Club investment forum (Feb. 7 at the Speakeasy Café) was well orchestrated, despite the informal, clubby atmosphere. The earnest entrepreneurs got red name tags (none is making money, after all), and they gulped water or soft drinks when they could. The decidedly skeptical would-be investors wore gold tags and were partial to beer [...]
The press likes Martin Tobias, the founder and top executive of Loudeye Technologies (formerly encoding.com), probably because he’s quirky and full of vim and vigor. So we weren’t all surprised to see Tobias interviewed on dbusiness.com re the AOL-Time Warner merger. After all, both these media giants are Loudeye customers and/or investors. What did surprise [...]
It’s always a hoot when privately held companies register to sell shares to the public. For one, they’re required to file papers (S-1 forms) that are the equivalent of standing stark naked on an auction block and having potential investors poke at your privates. Here are the more interesting things we found when we zoomed [...]
Not another e-commerce venture! There are so many, and so very few are actually making money. Still, we thought you ought to know about LightingUniverse.com, a Kirkland-based company that came online Feb. 1, 2000. LU bills itself as the “largest Internet lighting store,” never mind that that wording doesn’t make sense (try “the largest lighting [...]
On the Internet, “process” is product. Consider DocuSign. The Seattle-based company is well on its way to digitally replacing the time sensitive process of obtaining a signature — superseding, in sequential order, the fax, Fedex, the carrier envelope, the “sign here” sticky note, the signature, and the return receipt — in sum, the entire process [...]
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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]