The Puget Sound Business Journal has named its 2008 40 Under 40 honorees, celebrating its 10th year spotlighting the area’s top business leaders under the age of 40 who excel in their industry and show dynamic leadership. The 2008 40 Under 40: Aaron Adelstein, Built Green Ryan Allison, Cellar 46 & Roadrunner Hospitality Ash Awad, [...]
If you can’t make the Casual Games Conference coming to town next week, perhaps you’d like to tour the venue all the same, form the comfort of your ergonomic desk chair, with 3DExplorer.The first “plug-in-less,” browser-based 3D virtual world creation platform, has just announced a 3D virtual representation of Seattle’s Benaroya Hall, home of the [...]
We interrupt our local tech coverage for an editorial opinion on the technicalities of corporate foul play. Question: Is there anyone in this city who does not truly understand how Seattle lost its NBA franchise last week? Before the arena lease issue went to trial. Before fall-back or win-back plans were ever contemplated. Before the [...]
Microsoft’s legendary chairman and boy wonder, Bill Gates, is retiring from his daily rounds on the Redmond campus at age 52 to spend more time with his philanthropic foundation. On his last day, Bill delivered a tearful valedictory address to staff with righthand man and Microsoft chief executive, Steve Ballmer, by his side. “There won’t [...]
Doing the calculus in the aftermath of the aborted Yahoo-Microsoft deal, the numbers just don’t seem to add up. Like how could a company that is now hemorrhaging revenue and talent be less than satsfied with a $44 billion buy-out offer at a 40% premium over current stock value. Like why, instead of creating a [...]
A bumper crop of new PS startups is following the contour of the social media, analytics and online market movement. iMedExchange is a private online community for physicians, designed to foster professional and personal connections, increase productivity within the practice, and deliver career and lifestyle opportunities. iMedExchange faces some tough competition, most notably Sermo. The [...]
Two illustrious Internet audiences, the Web’s leading authorities on online security and the leading practitioners of advanced search engine marketing, descended on Seattle last week. What the two groups had in common was a bright line between White Hat “best practices” and stealthy Black Hat maneuvers, although which tactics were being censured and which advocated [...]
Nordstrom will offer a new purchase option that will allow Internet shoppers to shop online and then then pick up their selections in the physical brick and mortar department sore. Shoppers have been clamoring for the privlege for some time. The innnovative “buy online, pick up in-store” program was soft-launched two weeks ago, and is [...]
Wetpaint, a Seattle leader in social publishing with nearly one million hosted user-powered sites, has announced its award-winning platform can now be seamlessly embedded into any website to accelerate user-generated content creation. The company is releasing Wetpaint Injected on the same day it announces a $25 million Series C round of funding which it will [...]
Ever wanted to go face-to-face with the world’s leading search engines? This Tuesday night could be the next best thing to doing just that as Vanessa Fox, the creator of Google Webmaster Central and Nathan Buggia head of Microsoft’s Webmaster Central, host a Developer get-together at the Solo Bar, 200 Roy Street starting at 6pm. [...]
Enter your email address below to receive updates each time we publish new content.
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]