bing

Ever wished Bing would use one of your photos for their wallpaper image? Windows Live and Bing are holding a photo contest to give you that chance.

Designed to promote BING and Windows Live's Photo Gallery, the contest will run through October 22, 2010. Submissions should be sent to WLcontest@hotmail.com and include your image, image title, short description, and your contact information. There is a limit of five entries per person and the following requirements:

• No recognizable people.
• No 3rd party trademarks or logos (such as distinctive packaging or building exteriors / interiors) owned by others.
• No objectionable content, such as alcohol, smoking, guns, violence, or nudity
• No content that is defamatory to any group or individual and/or violates any law.
• JPEG format only with minimum photo dimensions 970px width by 528px height.
• Preferably the image should be submitted in its original size and aspect ratio, which will allow us the most flexibility when sizing and cropping to meet the needs of the homepage.
• Horizontal orientation and at least 1MB in size.
• No watermark, signature or photographer name can be included in the image file. The photographer credit for the winner will be added to the page separately.

Ten winners will be selected to have their photo featured in a Windows 7 theme pack and the grand prize winner will have their photo featured on the Bing's homepage (mobile and desktop) on November 8, 2010. You can find the complete contest rules and guidelines here.

via: windowsteamblog

Microsoft's Bing search engine continues to do well, passing Yahoo! in July for the first time to be #2. Not bad for a market that really no one thought would change much, though we should point out Google is in no real trouble yet. Results are based on Chitika's web-ad network, similar to Google's AdSense.

Bing will also power Yahoo!'s search engine by the end of August, gaining them even more power, albeit hidden. Combined with their powering of Facebook's search, the upcoming Windows Phone 7 and maybe even Mozilla/Firefox (once their contract with Google expires), Bing could see some real growth in the next 24 months.

[via WebProNews]

On Microsoft's own Channel 9 yesterday, they showed off some of the free apps in the new Marketplace for Windows Phone 7.

Now these are hardly "killer" apps, in fact they are more demo apps with the source-code available for developers to build off of and incorporate into their own programs.

The programs demoed were pretty basic, much like the ones you find on Samsung phones:

• Bubble/Spirit Level
• Unit Converter
• Shopping list
• Weather
• Stocks
• 2D game based on SilverLight: 'Unite'
• Translator

The 2D game 'Unite' was kind of neat--it's just meant as brief time killer and is similar to 'Teeter' from HTC except instead of getting the ball in the hole, you need to combine two or more balls.  Looks kind of fun actually.

But the real big thing was the demonstration of Bing Translator, which seems to be an expansion of this new service shown off back in May. Basically, you type in what you want to say and it will translate it for you in text; hit the speaker button and it will speak the phrase for you, even with an authentic accent.

The service is a hybrid one: it uses your data connection for new phrases, but stores old ones on the device. This will enable quick playback of phrases without having to constantly reach into the cloud (Android is 100% cloud based with translation, making Microsoft's solution more preferable). The app also already comes with an impressive list of canned phrases which you can quickly access and supports five-languages on launch:

• French
• German
• Italian
• Spanish
• English

What's neat is like the other apps, Microsoft is making the source-code of this program available to developers, meaning anyone can incorporate and expand upon what they've already offered. This combined with their emphasis on voice could potentially give Android a run for their money (and leave Apple far behind).

Check out the video after the break. It's only 18 minutes of your time.

Most of us are familiar with Google’s Street View and Bing’s  Streetside. These tools allow you to virtually walk down a street in your browser; jumping between panoramic images and allowing you to get a feel for the street or location you are viewing instead of giving you impersonal lines on a map. While Street View is an amazing technology, the jumps between panoramas can be fairly significant; making the prospect of locating a small shop or building somewhat hit or miss.

Trust Microsoft to push the envelope with their services. Street Slide is Microsoft’s latest effort to make experiencing a location from the street level as seamless as possible. Using multiple perspectives to blend between different images, Microsoft presents a letterboxed view of the street. In the unused space above and below the image of the street, you are presented with street numbers that correspond with the buildings you are viewing, as well as navigation controls and corporate logos for individual businesses.

A YouTube video of the demo is after the break, and though Windows Phone 7 isn’t mentioned (some other smartphone is) it doesn’t take much of a stretch to see this coming to Microsoft’s upcoming mobile platform.

[via Engadget]

It looks like Microsoft has updated Bing for Windows Phones, though what the update provides isn’t immediately clear. Microsoft’s download site shows the "Date Published" as 7/1/2010. My Bing version went from 5.1.2010.5040 to 5.1.2010.6280.

The last update we saw to Bing was the big one back in May that gave us turn-by-turn navigation with voice prompts. Grab the download from Microsoft, and let us know if you see anything new and improved.

Thanks to Muirwoody in the WMExperts forums for getting us looking.

For those who don't know, the Zune Marketplace went offline today and users were only given a few hours notice. As of this writing, they're still offline (6pm) and it could take all night before they're done.

But done doing what? That's the cryptic part here as there was no pre-announcement, but as ZDNet did some digging, they found out that Microsoft is arranging a marriage between Bing and Zune.

In fact, you can kind of see it working now. Go to Bing.com, search for your favorite band and you'll get a bunch of info on them plus songs which can be played (see the little 'play' button?). Of course it doesn't stream right now and instead you get the image to the right, but we think by late tonight it'll be a different story.

Nice to see Microsoft taking Zune to the next level and putting these two services together, it just makes sense. To what extent though these features overlap remains to be seen. It would be nice to have a Bing search launch my Zune software and add it directly to my Zune HD or, come November, my Xbox and Windows Phone 7.