Adam Brotman has been appointed chief digital officer at Starbucks Coffee Company and Curt Garner has been named chief information officer. “Over the past several years, there has been a seismic shift in consumer behavior in large part because of the rapid adoption of social and digital media as a primary means of connection and [...]
With endowments from Washington’s top tech leaders, the University of Washington continues to apply more than a billion dollars per year to sponsored research. The brain trust that shepherds this research is profound. There are no less than 6 Nobel prize winners among the current UW teaching staff and many more are nationally recognized in [...]
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 [...]
Windows 8 has been heralded as the biggest change to the PC OS since the 95 flavor (which celebrates a 17th anniversary this year). There are a vast number of changes ushered in by the Metro-style interface you may yet to fall in love with on a Windows Phone What was once a Start Menu is now [...]
Adam C. Engst has a propensity for being first. When your author had the pleasure of interviewing “ACE” for Seattle magazine and the cover story, “Who’s Building Our Dot.com Empire,” Adam was selected as a “first string” pick as one of the Emerald City’s original Internet pioneers for his groundbreaking book, The Internet Starter Kit and [...]
Danielle Tiedt, a 15 year Microsoft veteran who was General Manager of the marketing effort for Bing, has changed the channel from one search engine to another. Tiedt launched the fledgling Bing premiere just three years ago and recently spearheaded the “Bing is for Doing” campaign. Moving from Microsoft’s Bing to Google’s YouTube, the marketer will become VP Marketing [...]
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 [...]
Amazon.com plans to build three commercial towers in Seattle, potentially increasing the city’s downtown office space by 7 percent, based on the company’s preliminary development plans and figures from CBRE Group, Inc. According to Bloomberg News, the world’s largest Internet retailer has agreed to buy three contiguous blocks in the South Lake Union “Denny district” from Clise Properties Inc. and [...]
WTIA “Oscar” Finalists Called to the Red Carpet The WTIA has named this year’s Finalists for the 2012 Industry Achievement Awards including the ”Best Early Stage Company of the Year,” “Best Seed Stage Company of the Year,” “Consumer Product or Service of the Year,” “Commercial Product or Service of the year,” “Technology Accelerator of the Year” [...]
“No Man Is an Island,” the famous literary tagline penned by 17th century English poet John Donne is a kind of 21st century reminder for the island inhabitants of the Puget Sound. The West Sound hosts a growing number of ferry-linked communities around the Sound, many challenged by a lack of high bandwidth connectivity and [...]
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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]