Wednesday, June 3. 2009

OK...Now, Bing Maps are Part of Bing.com

Microsoft wants you to know...
Bing Maps are now part of Bing.com...It took them a few days since Bing was launched but now the maps are up.
And MSFT wants you to be cognizant of the bigger change...

As you are probably aware the brand change impacted the Virtual Earth platform and Live Search Maps, with Live Search Maps becoming Bing Maps and the Virtual Earth platform becoming Bing Maps for Enterprise. For more information, I encourage you to join the Bing community located at, http://www.bing.com/community. The new community site also includes a new Bing Maps blog. You can also follow Bing on Twitter, via @bing.

Posted by Joe Francica in Microsoft at 12:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

EPA Holds Reverse Auction for Bing Maps for Enterprise (Virtual Earth) Contractor

FCW reports the announcement was made public on a Fed Biz Opps site.

The reverse auction to find a contractor to develop the app/provide the license for two years is already underway; bids close June 11.

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Microsoft at 06:00 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0) |

Monday, June 1. 2009

Bing Maps not yet in Bing

Bing (Preview) is live in the U.S. so I gave it my standard search test "kite boston." It rewrote it as Kites in Boston, MA and returned a kite shop some 20 miles away as the top result. I don't like that Bing rewrote the query in the input box; it'd be ok if it responded with "I thought you meant this and queried on it instead," but left my text as it was.

Amusingly:

- The provided map of results moves obediently with you as you scroll down the page. I found that distracting, but perhaps I'll get used to it.

- The map still says Microsoft Virtual Earth on it. (I just noticed that in the Google returns, the map is not logoed at all; it just includes copyright. Perhaps that's a space consideration?)

Posted by Adena Schutzberg in Google, Microsoft at 06:12 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0) |