May 2009 - Posts
Drop pearl@eventslineup.com an email to register for this event. Agenda:
Check out this site for Bing Video and Twitter Updates right from the source:
http://www.decisionengine.com/Default.html
Bing also have a discover bing site: http://www.discoverbing.com/behindbing/progressionOf.aspx
Press release:
Microsoft’s New Search at Bing.com Helps People Make Better Decisions
Decision Engine goes beyond search to help customers deal with information overload.
REDMOND, Wash. — May 28, 2009 — Microsoft Corp. today unveiled Bing, a new Decision Engine and consumer brand, providing customers with a first step in moving beyond search to help make faster, more informed decisions. Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business. The result of this new approach is an important beginning for a new and more powerful kind of search service, which Microsoft is calling a Decision Engine, designed to empower people to gain insight and knowledge from the Web, moving more quickly to important decisions. The new service, located at http://www.Bing.com, will begin to roll out over the coming days and will be fully deployed worldwide on Wednesday, June 3.
The explosive growth of online content has continued unabated, and Bing was developed as a tool to help people more easily navigate through the information overload that has come to characterize many of today’s search experiences. Results from a custom comScore Inc. study across core search engines show that as many as 30 percent of searches are abandoned without a satisfactory result. The data also showed that approximately two-thirds of the remaining searches required a refinement or requery on the search results page.
“Today, search engines do a decent job of helping people navigate the Web and find information, but they don’t do a very good job of enabling people to use the information they find,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO. “When we set out to build Bing, we grounded ourselves in a deep understanding of how people really want to use the Web. Bing is an important first step forward in our long-term effort to deliver innovations in search that enable people to find information quickly and use the information they’ve found to accomplish tasks and make smart decisions.”
A New Approach to Internet Search
Based on the customer insight that 66 percent of people are using Internet search more frequently to make complex decisions,* Microsoft identified three design goals to guide the development of Bing: deliver great results; deliver a more organized experience; and simplify tasks and provide insight, leading to faster, more confident decisions. The new service, built to go beyond today’s search experience, includes deep innovation on core search areas including entity extraction and expansion, query intent recognition and document summarization technology as well as a new user experience model that dynamically adapts to the type of query to provide relevant and intuitive decision-making tools.
- Great search results. Relevant search results are still a top priority for people, yet Microsoft studies show that only one in four search queries deliver a satisfactory result. Bing helps identify relevant search results through features such as Best Match, where the best answer is surfaced and called out; Deep Links, allowing more insight into what resources a particular site has to offer; and Quick Preview, a hover-over window that expands over a search result caption to provide a better sense of the related site’s relevancy. Bing also includes one-click access to information through Instant Answers, designed to provide the sought-after information within the body of the search results page, minimizing the need for additional clicks.
- Organized search experience. More and more customers are regularly spending time with search engines, engaging in complex, multi-query and multi-session searches. Respondents also said an organized search experience would be twice as useful in helping find information and accomplishing tasks faster. Bing includes a number of features that organize search results, including Explore Pane, a dynamically relevant set of navigation and search tools on the left side of the page; Web Groups, which groups results in intuitive ways both on the Explore Pane and in the actual results; and Related Searches and Quick Tabs, which is essentially a table of contents for different categories of search results. Collectively, these and other features in Bing help people navigate their search results, cut through the clutter of search overload and get right down to making important decisions.
- Simplify tasks and provide insight. Microsoft’s research identified shopping, travel, local business and information, and health-related research as areas in which people wanted more assistance in making key decisions. The current state of Internet search isn’t optimized for these tasks, but the Bing Decision Engine is optimized for these key customer scenarios. For example, while a consumer is using Bing to shop online, the Sentiment Extraction feature scours the Internet for user opinions and expert reviews to help leverage the community of customers as well as product experts in trying to make a buying decision. In Bing Travel, the Rate Key compares the location, price and amenities of multiple hotels and provides a color-coded key of the best values, and the Price Predictor actually helps consumers decide when to buy an airline ticket in order to get the lowest prices.
The new brand portfolio will include the following changes to existing Microsoft programs:
- Microsoft’s mapping platform, Virtual Earth, will now be branded as Bing Maps for Enterprise.
- Technology from Microsoft’s April 2008 acquisition of Farecast is now a central part of Bing Travel.
- Microsoft’s popular cashback program, now dubbed Bing cashback, with more than 850 merchants and more than 17 million products available, will be fully integrated into the Bing Shopping experience.
Microsoft is committed to building better tools to help people find the shortest distance from their initial search query to the point of making an informed decision. Bing is an important first step toward this long-term vision and a strong indicator of Microsoft’s commitment to move search technology forward for customers.
Microsoft released an updated version of Zune HD. Here’s the difference:
It is an undeniable fact that Steve Jobs is good in presenting… whether it’s product launches or a big announcement from Apple. Here’s a summary of the tips and tricks in presenting that Steve Jobs used:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-ntLGOyHw4&feature=related
If you are a software architect in Singapore, feel free to join the Architect Council session organized by Linda, Architect Evangelist of MS Singapore. They will be talking about:
You can get more details at http://mssg.earth9.com/singapore/edm/2009/05/18/architect.html
LiveSide reported that US Trademark Office rejected “Bing” trademark request by Microsoft this morning. In a document filed this morning, the reason given is due to a similar trademark registered to Bing Mobile Inc.
Bing is rumored by many to be a possible new brand name for Microsoft Live Search and you can see Bing.com being registered by Microsoft across many countries. However, nothing is confirmed as of yet if it’ll be the new brand and Microsoft is keeping silent about it – which is pretty normal in this case.
We’ll just have to wait a couple more weeks to see if more news will surface on the new brand – if any.
Windows 7 will be released with an updated ink input mode over Windows Vista. Here’s a summary of what type of improvements they have:
Handwriting Overview:
Smart Corrections:
URL Corrections:
Improved Asian Writing: (screenshot abstracted from: http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/04/23/ink-input-and-tablet.aspx)
And my favorite, Math Handwriting Recognition
"The required version of the .NET Framework is not installed on this computer."
********** Exception Text ********** Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Deployment.InstallAddInFailedException: "The required version of the .NET Framework is not installed on this computer." at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Deployment.ClickOnceAddInDeploymentManager.InstallAddIn() at Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Office.Runtime.SolutionInstaller.<>c__DisplayClass7.b__0()
If you receive this error while trying to install a VSTO application using clickonce, you can try the fix below:
Missing File in Windows 7: %ProgramFiles%\Reference Assemblies\Microsoft\Framework\v3.5\RedistList\FrameworkList.xml. To fix it, simply copy the file from a non Win 7 machine and everything should work.
Microsoft recently release the beta version of My Phone which allows you to:
- Back up and restore your phone's information to a password-protected web site
- Access and update your contacts and appointments through your web account
- Share photos on your phone with family and friends
Check out the website to test it out: http://sn1-p2.myphone.microsoft.com/mkweb/Start.po?mkt=en-US
This got to be the most interesting post I’ve seen today! The article talks about a boy who used his skills learnt in the game “World of Warcraft” (which I happens to play a few months back) in his real life escape from a moose while on a trip with his sister.
He used the skill “Taunt” and “Feign Death” during his escape attempt. More about this story can be found at http://www.switched.com/2007/12/10/boy-saves-sister-from-moose-attack-with-skills-learned-in-warcra/
This sound so much like an April fools joke but they’re serious about it..
“Google, concerned by the recent departures of several top executives, has developed an algorithm to try to identify which employees are likely to quit, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal.” as reported by http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/biztech/google-algorithm-spots-quitters-before-they-resign/2009/05/20/1242498783966.html
Based on the article, the folks in Google are so concern about brain drain that they device mathematical formula to do data analysis on employee review, promotions and pay histories to calculate the chance that employee might jump ship.
Thou Google has always pride themselves with coming out with interesting ways to co-relate certain data with future trends, I’ll be quite concern if my employer is calculating my chance of leaving the organization and I wonder what will they do if the “mathematical formulas” identified me as a high risk employee.
Hi everyone –
I’m happy to announce that we’ve just launched 3 brand new learning tracks on Ramp Up* (www.MyRampUp.com):
1. Web Development with ASP.NET
2. Move from ASP to ASP.NET
3. Move from PHP to ASP.NET
Ramp Up (www.MyRampUp.com) is a free online learning program for developers. We’ve just launched three ASP.NET tracks: “Web Development with ASP.NET”, “Move from ASP to ASP.NET”, and “Move from PHP to ASP.NET”. These tracks, along with the other currently offered ones (eg, Windows Mobile 6, SharePoint for Developers, Visual Studio 2008), teaches the important skills in a guided path, making the learning process easier and more efficient. The easy-to-access content (provided by subject-matter gurus) is specifically tailored for the Ramp Up program, and offered in a variety of forms (article, v-lab, codecast and slidecast). Check them out now at www.MyRampUp.com, and see how Ramp Up can help you become more employable by learning important and marketable skills.
The adCenter Spring Upgrade is complete, and these features are designed to give you more control over targeting, bidding, and distribution of your advertising campaigns. Because of the number of new features and improvements, we're splitting the info into a couple of blog posts. Check them out:
More detail:
http://www.adcentercommunity.com/blogs/advertiser/archive/2009/05/18/the-adcenter-spring-2009-upgrade-is-complete.aspx
Received an email from Amazon today announcing some new features for their EC2 offering:
We are excited to announce the public beta of several new features for the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2): Amazon CloudWatch, a web service for monitoring AWS cloud resources, Auto Scaling for automatically growing and shrinking Amazon EC2 capacity based on demand, and Elastic Load Balancing for distributing incoming traffic across Amazon EC2 compute instances. Together, these capabilities provide you with visibility into the health and usage of your AWS compute resources, enhance application performance, and lower costs.
Monitoring
Amazon CloudWatch is a web service that provides monitoring for AWS cloud resources, starting with Amazon EC2. It provides customers with visibility into resource utilization, operational performance, and overall demand patterns -- including metrics such as CPU utilization, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. To use Amazon CloudWatch, simply select the Amazon EC2 instances that you'd like to monitor; within minutes, Amazon CloudWatch will begin aggregating and storing monitoring data that can be accessed using web service APIs or Command Line Tools.
Auto Scaling
Auto Scaling allows you to automatically scale your Amazon EC2 capacity up or down according to conditions you define. With Auto Scaling, you can ensure that the number of Amazon EC2 instances you're using scales up seamlessly during demand spikes to maintain performance, and scales down automatically during demand lulls to minimize costs. Auto Scaling is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and available at no additional charge beyond Amazon CloudWatch fees.
Elastic Load Balancing
Elastic Load Balancing automatically distributes incoming application traffic across multiple Amazon EC2 instances. It enables you to achieve even greater fault tolerance in your applications, seamlessly providing the amount of load balancing capacity needed in response to incoming application traffic. Elastic Load Balancing detects unhealthy instances within a pool and automatically reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored. Customers can enable Elastic Load Balancing within a single Availability Zone or across multiple zones for even more consistent application performance.
Like all Amazon Web Services and features, Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no up-front fee, minimum spend or long term commitment. Auto Scaling is free to Amazon CloudWatch customers. Each instance launched by Auto Scaling is automatically enabled for monitoring and the Amazon CloudWatch monitoring charge will be applied.
For more information on these new features and details on how to start using them, please see the resources listed below:
· Amazon EC2 Detail Page
· Release Notes
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