Microsoft announced they have made major updates to the Bing Apps for Windows 8 across most of their apps including News, Finance, Weather, Sports, Maps and Travel. The video below walks you through the changes, but here are some highlights of the core changes to each section. News: You can now customize the type of news you want to see by category. For example, if you like sports but not entertainment news, you can tell Bing, and the app will show you only sports related news items. In addition to that, Bing has added RSS feeds and offline reading. Maps: The maps feature has improved [...]

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One of the persistent criticisms of Windows tablets and Windows Phones is that they just don't have the app selection of Android or iOS. Microsoft says however that Windows Phones currently have access to 120,000 apps. Nokia adds,"Of the top 50 apps available for iPhone and Android, 46 of them are available" on the Windows Phone platform. In an interesting and creative move Nokia has partnered with app search engine Xyo to help you discover "replacement apps" for Windows Phones if particular iOS or Android apps aren't available (yet) for Windows Phones. The site is directed at iPhon [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile | Microsoft: Mobile | Search Engines: Mobile Search Engines

Exciting news for Google users who have upgraded to the Microsoft Surface device & Windows RT operating system. You can now download the Google Search App, which is specifically optimized for the Windows Surface and Windows RT. Google announced this on their Google+ page saying: If you just got a new Windows RT tablet and want to use Google Search, you’re in luck—you can now download the Google Search app optimized for Windows RT. It’s got all the good stuff: voice search, instant results and doodles. Just go to our “Get Your Google Back” site at http://www.google.com/hom [...]

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This holiday shopping season is predicted to the the biggest ever for mobile commerce. A new survey from Deloitte expects that holiday sales from mobile devices will hit $36 billion this year, accounting for 5.1% of the $925 billion online total. Your Holiday To Do List So, if you have a mobile store up and running, you'll want to make sure your mobile store is ready to attract, inform, and convert incoming shoppers. Here are some great tips from past columns that should be part of your to-do list: If you have a responsive design mobile site, you'll want to take a second look at the Tune [...]

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With the launch of the iPhone 5, perhaps the most eagerly awaited electronics launch ever, speculation has been rampant on the impact it'll have on the mobile phone market, on Apple's future as an innovator post-Steve Jobs, and on the coolness of the next gadget to get dropped into your pocket. But from a mobile search perspective, iPhone 5 is pretty much more of the same. A more effective version of Siri will be standard in the new phone's iOS 6 - but that was a game changer from the iPhone 4s. iPhone 5 has certainly caused a sales storm, pushing more smartphones into more pockets. B [...]

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In May of last year I had a conversation with someone who told me that Nokia Maps (Navteq) would effectively replace the infrastructure behind Bing Maps. I was surprised to say the least and wrote about it in a story entitled Bing Maps To Be Powered (Replaced) By Nokia? The impression I got is that Bing would control the presentation layer and search on top of maps but that the "guts" would come from Nokia/Navteq. At the time of the story Microsoft offered the following comment: Bing Maps has utilized Nokia content for road data, geo-coding and routing services for several years, through N [...]

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It's perhaps one of the strangest product pitches I've heard. Asked on stage at Web 2.0 Summit by John Battelle about his Bing search engine, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer encouraged the audience to try Bing because, well, it's pretty much the same as Google. The Ballmer 70/15/15 Challenge "I would issue you all a kind of challenge to try any search you want on Bing and Google," Ballmer said, explaining that 70% of the time, there won't be any difference in the results, that 15% of the time, Bing will be better and 15% of the time, Google will be better. Now, if Ballmer had said that maybe [...]

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