Articles about Bing

It's Oscar time, baby -- woo! It's time to start planning your parties and get-togethers. Hopefully you've seen all of the nominated films. Sadly, I have not seen any, which is tragic, as I love the cinema. Unfortunately, I can no longer afford to regularly go to the movie theater (who can, nowadays?), and I am opposed to pirating films. I've heard wonderful things about American Sniper, Whiplash and The Theory of Everything -- maybe I will try to see one of them on Saturday (Whiplash looks like the best of the bunch).

Microsoft announces that its search engine is predicting the Academy Awards. Believe it or not, Bing has a pretty good overall track record -- it predicted the Patriots to win the Superbowl long before New England was guaranteed a spot in the game. With that said, it predicted Beyoncé to win best-album Grammy, but the more talented Beck won instead. Will Bing see success at the 87th Academy Awards?

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It's difficult, if not impossible, to have too much storage space. There has been a slow, but steady move to the cloud, and there are numerous names vying for attention, from Google Drive and Mega to OneDrive. Numbers talk, and it's the amount of free space that can sway users to one service or another.

Google has been giving away Drive storage with Chromebooks for some time, and now Microsoft is getting in on the action. Agree to receive promotional emails through Bing rewards, and you can bag yourself an extra 100GB of OneDrive storage completely free of charge for the next two years. If you're in the US, that is. Or if you use a proxy...

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Award shows can be rather lame, depending on many things; the host, the nominees and the overall presentation. The Grammy Awards are my favorite of them all, however, as music is one of my favorite hobbies.

Sadly, while I enjoy the overall spectacle and the show, I often disagree with the results. As a Hip-Hop fan, I was disgusted last year when Kendrick Lamar did not win best rap album. Good Kid, m.A.A.d. City should have won, but I digress. This year, Microsoft is making Bing your one stop shop for all things Grammy, including karaoke and predictions.

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After introducing the "while you were away" feature to help ensure you don’t miss out on tweets because of, you know, getting away from Twitter from time to time, there's now another feature that will help you to get more from the microblogging site. By teaming up with Bing, Twitter is now able to provide on-the-fly translations for tweets in foreign languages.

This is not an entirely new feature; Twitter has brought a translation to the web and mobile version of its service before, but it disappeared. Now the feature is back. It works in the iOS and Android apps as well as in Tweetdeck and on the Twitter website.

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In the world of searches, there's one name that rules supreme -- Google. But new figures show that while the search giant is still the most popular way to track down content online, it is starting to lose ground to Microsoft and Yahoo. The latest statistics from comScore are in broad agreement with those published by StatCounter a couple of weeks ago.

Both sets of numbers agree that Microsoft and Yahoo are eating into Google's lead when we look at US searches conducted in December and compare them to November. While Big G will not be happy to see that its grip on the search crown is loosening slightly, the company has little to fear just yet.

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Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day! Today, we celebrate the birthday of one of the most important figures in USA history. Heck, his impact on civil rights transcended America and had an impact globally. While today is not technically his birthday -- that is on January 15 -- the federal holiday is always on the third Monday of every January. To have a federal holiday is a great honor, putting him in the same league as other American heroes like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Sadly, racism and prejudice are still alive today, although far less so. Dr. King's inspiration helped plant a seed that causes generations of Americans to become less hateful as time marches on. Even seemingly simple things like sports and music have helped bridge the gap between cultures and skin color. Today, in celebration of Dr. King, Bing Maps will take you on a virtual tour of the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. Won't you join the ride?

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My feelings about President Obama are irrelevant, but one thing is very relevant; the issues. Regardless of whom is president, you should pay attention to what he or she says, so you can be knowledgeable about your country.

If you are someone that actually cares about issues, you are in luck. You see, both CNN and MSNBC are embracing Bing Pulse during Obama's State of the Union. What does this mean? Rather than just consume the speech, you can interact with it by digitally agreeing or disagreeing with the Commander in Chief.

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Human beings are bombarded with too many options nowadays. Whenever I hear someone say they are bored, I just want to shake them; we live in an exciting time where there is essentially an infinite amount of multimedia at our fingertips. Between TV, movies, music and books, not a second of your day should be empty.

Unfortunately, the problem with having so many options, is actually narrowing them down to one. Whenever I decide to buy a new book, I fire up my Kindle and explore. You know what happens? I can't decide on what to download! An easy way to stay on top of the most popular and relevant books is to check the New York Times Best Seller List. Today, Microsoft announces that Bing can now help you search for best-sellers.

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When Mozilla announced that Yahoo would be replacing Google as the default search choice in Firefox in the US, there were raised eyebrows everywhere. After all, Google has been baked into Firefox for the past decade, and Yahoo’s days as a top search engine are long gone. Or were long gone at least.

Yahoo’s inclusion in Firefox has given the ailing search engine a major boost, helping it achieve its highest US search share since 2009. Unsurprisingly, this share increase came at the expense of Google.

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Do I believe in psychics? No. I do not believe that people have magical powers that can predict the future. With that said, I like watching the Long Island Medium, Theresa Caputo, on TV. If you aren't familiar, she claims to talk to the dead, and transmits messages from the deceased to their families. I watch it from an entertainment perspective only.

I prefer my predictions to come from good ol' fashioned computers. Microsoft's Bing has seen some success in its predictions, but today, it is taking it to another level. You see, the search-engine is now predicting the events of 2015! As a Jets fan, and overall hater of New England sports, I hope Bing is wrong, as it predicts Tom Brady and the Patriots to win the Super Bowl.

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Bing has been unceremoniously dumped by Facebook. The social network had been using the Microsoft search tool to power its Graph Search platform for some time now, but no longer. While no announcement has been made, Facebook confirmed the news to Reuters.

The lack of official announcement meant that the dropping of Bing was immediately noticed. Facebook does not have a replacement partner in mind -- there is no danger of the social network teaming up with Google -- but will go it alone instead.

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Microsoft's current vision is mobile first, cloud first (if two things can be simultaneously first), and this is perfectly demonstrated by what is being done with Office. Office has been pushed to not only mobile devices, but also the cloud and now Word Online gains the power of Bing in the form of Insights for Office.

The new feature makes it possible to perform searches from within Word Online so you can conduct research with fewer clicks. It could be as simple as looking up a definition, or you might be inspired to look up images related to the document you are working on.

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I'm a big proponent of smartwatches, but it wasn't always this way. At first, I thought the concept was stupid; after all, it duplicates existing smartphone functionality. When I finally tried one, the Samsung Gear Live running Android Wear, I became hooked. Sure, it is not a need-based product, but instead, convenience-based.

Unfortunately, while Android Wear is useful, it is also a bit limited in its functionality. Luckily, third-party developers can add apps, and believe it or not, an unlikely developer, Microsoft, had delivered one of the best -- Torque. Today, the company releases version 2.0 of that app, and not only does it further improve the Android Wear platform, but it can now be used with Android smartphones too.

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With so many people in the world, it is easy to feel like you don't matter. In the USA in particular, the country is deeply divided, causing nearly half the country to feel misrepresented on the issues. Even worse, citizens may feel alone in their ideals and beliefs, as they don't necessarily know how others feel.

Today, Microsoft is not only aiming to help people be heard, but also offering transparency into the thoughts of others. Bing Pulse 2.0 is a new way for participants of live events, or TV-watchers at home, to vote in real-time on various topics. In other words, it is a great tool to engage an audience.

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As 2015 draws ever closer, we’ll begin seeing retrospectives highlighting the most memorable moments of the past year.

With a month of 2014 still to go, Bing has jumped in first with its look back at the people, moments and events that have shaped the year. There are some interesting highlights but some even more curious omissions.

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