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 [...]
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 [...]
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” [...]
Like the Bay Area’s Silicon Valley, the “Emerald Triangle” of Seattle, Redmond and Kirkland has become a many faceted jewel of a marketplace for elite technical and management talent, and strong software design and programming professionals throughout the ranks. As the NW tech world turns, management turnover churns with it. Watching the direction of “HR talent [...]
If you use Facebook, the world’s top social networking site, you may have “liked” an Internet scheme without even knowing it – and unwittingly helped spread the scam to your Facebook friends. Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna and Facebook have announced the latest step in an ongoing fight against spammers and scammers: a lawsuit against [...]
Will the last Seattle Internet company to add a structured social media program to its online offering or outreach, please turn off the lights? Wait, reverse that. Social engagement can be a very luminescent idea to build traffic, heigthen awareness, elevate search ranking and propel your marketing message and sales momentum! Zillow has just announced the launch [...]
Heck, no, we don’t love snow! Seattle is “Rain City,” remember! We have more than a dozen words for rain including rainfall, cloudburst, sprinkle, drizzle, showers, downpour, precip, drencher, and cats n’ dogs, but, unlike the Eskimo’s, only one word for snow — dismal! Catch our drift of emergency online resources in the story below [...]
Does ”Everybody in Seattle really want to work for Amazon?” Business Insider’s Matt Rosoff says the attraction is irresistible for these reasons: 1. Goodbye Beacon Hill, Hello South Lake Union! Amazon is no longer quarantined in a renovated VA Hospital on Beacon Hill. It has traded Count Dracula’s castle on the cliff for much trendier digs [...]
Windows 8, The iPhone 5, 4G phones, Smartphones and smarter cars, the birth of “Business TV,” further meteorology in the Cloud, and new avionics in the clouds from Boeing’s 787 and 747-8 aircraft. All are in our future forecast for the Pacific Northwest and the Seattle metaverse in 2012. Friday Harbor’s Mark Anderson of the Strategic News [...]
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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]