Amazon’s new generation of Kindles have sold faster and in greater numbers than any other Kindle launch in the eBook Reader’s history, continuing Kindle’s over two-year run as the bestselling product across all products sold on Amazon.com. The all-new Kindle has an electronic-ink screen with 50 percent better contrast than any other e-reader, a new [...]
There are 16 Washington companies on the newly released Inc 500 list of the fastest-growing companies in the country. Among the Puget Sound’s Internet-related firms are: QuoteWizard #36, ClearAccess #66, Chasing Fireflies #111, Visible Technologies #164, Mpire #166, Countour #183, Avalara # 275, and SEOmoz # 334. Edmonds Moving Ahead with Municipal Broadband Plans Great [...]
After nine years of covering the Seattle Internet landscape like the berry vines of summer and the rain dance of winter, listing hundreds of Seattle area company startups, thousands of job openings and industry events, dozens of interviews with online business leaders and innovators, and scores of advisory, tech and investment columns written by resident [...]
There is a trend afoot to consolidate industry trade shows from disparate points of focus into a cohesive panorama of events that offers a bigger picture than the sum of its individual parts, Seattle Geek Week is one of the prototypes. It features 10 days of events hosted by various individuals, organizations and community groups [...]
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. For Microsoft, exceptionally strong sales of Windows 7 helped the company drive yet another record in quarterly performance. For the third quarter of Microsoft’s fiscal 2010, ending March 31, the company turned in revenues of $14.50 billion, up 6 percent from the same [...]
Reading like a delinquent April Fool’s joke, an amateur spy novel, or a mock headline in The Onion humor magazine, this week’s Brewing column is steaming over news reports from networks as reputable as ZDNet and the TWIT Network’s Security Now with Steve Gibson. According to ZDNet UK’’s Tom Espiner, Microsoft has turned over all [...]
In a partnership that brings together the second-and third-most trafficked websites in their market category online, two of the most popular real estate websites in the country have announced an exclusive partnership. Zillow® will now power all for-sale listings on Yahoo! Real Estate. Once the integration of Zillow’s more than 4 million for-sale listings is [...]
The Main Street Fairness Act that is now pending before Congress and would require all Internet merchants to collect sales tax, has a staunch advocate and a strong tech support department here in the Puget Sound —Seattle-based FedTax.net. The TaxCloud™ sales tax calculation and remittance service calculates the sales tax due on any purchase in [...]
Bing Music lets you discover and sample more than 5 million songs and lyrics for free, including search results tailored for songs, artists, albums, and lyrics. Songs can be played inline and purchased with one click from iTunes, Amazon, or Zune. Bing Movies helps people pick a movie through visual search, customer reviews, inline movie [...]
Seattle Law Enforcement, aka Seattle PD, has publicly unveiled an online service that posts some of the area’s most serious police incident reports within clicking distance. The new Website lists reports for all homicides, robberies, burglaries and aggravated assaults, according to police. The idea, department spokesman Sgt. Sean Whitcomb said, is to make information more [...]
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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]