Kinect wins Gadget of the Year

Bing gets you ready for Halloween

Microsoft and Hadoop

Windows 8 user suggestions

Bing Deals

Windows Phone 8 wants your suggestions

Windows 8 will sync vis Windows LIVE

How to kill a botnet

Facebook and Skype

Baidu and Bing

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Bing Lasso

Skype & Office 365

Sir Richard Branson and Microsoft

Intelligent Healing with Kinect

Windows Phone to take the lead?

Bing & Glee

Session : Building applications with Bing Maps : what is the opportunity for ISVs

Speaker : Johannes Kebeck, Microsoft Account Technical
Specialist Mappoint ' Microsoft UK

In this interview with Vlad Vinogradsky, several members of the EastBanc Technologies team - Wolf Ruzicka (CEO), Evgeny Popov (Microsoft Practice Lead), and Vadim  Zagorodniy (Project Lead) – told the story behind the project, explained the reasons for hosting the solution in the Windows Azure, described solution architecture, and showed a few awesome applications (including a free Windows Phone 7application) for commuters they have developed using the data provided by the solution.

For additional information about the project see the official case study “Firm Uses Cloud Services to Unify Data from Transit Systems, Improve Access to Schedules”.

VOTE FOR THE NINEYS!

Microsoft Flashes!

Free swag for Jailbreakers!

Bing loves football (and ESPN)

Microsoft uses Karoake on China's Bing Dictionary

• Avatar Kinect!
• Bing helps you get a new car
• Bye Bye Bob
• The h.264 scoop

This is what people learn on Bing

Will Kinect put an end to gym memberships?

The future of touchscreen

Photosynth & Photoshop!

Whilst there are now a number of Windows 7 theme packs with collections of the Best of Bing images,  new this month is a Bing desktop gadget which combines the daily image with a search bar – so it’s even easier to search the web, and you don’t miss out on the image of the day.

There’s a great write up of the gadget over at My Microsoft Life, otherwise jump straight to the gadget over at the Windows 7 Desktop Gadget showcase. 

Ten winners were selected this week, whose stunning photos of clouds from all over the world now feature in a Windows 7 Theme Pack that has just been released. Cooler still, the overall winning entry, an awe-inspiring shot of a snow-capped Mount Ranier, was featured on the Bing homepage this week.

Congratulations to Somana Konganda and the other nine talented winners. You can find the new desktop theme, Windows Live Clouds, over at the Windows Personalization Gallery. 

Check out the Phones!

Socializing Bing

New Windows Phone 7 ads- yay or nay?

Geek 2 Chic!

Boat for Kinect???

Bing offers a huge array of statistics on 446 Premier League players, laid out on the page like those football sticker/baseball card albums you remember from your childhood. Hover over a player, and up pops key stats, including their team, number of goals scored, yellow and red cards, international caps and estimated value. (Did you know that Fernando Torres is the highest valued player in the Premiership, at £30.5m? Me neither, and I’m a Liverpool fan!)

You can filter search results with a single click via the left hand bar, on height, nationality, team and position, as well as sort results based on the criteria I mention above (Wigan’s Gary Caldwell is currently the league’s biggest villain, with 2 sendings off already this season).

At the top of the page, a number of searches are picked out for you to check at a glance – check out who has scored the most goals (Dimitar Berbatov), Most International Caps (it’s the veteral goalkeeper Edwin Van der Sar, with 130), most yellow cards (Salif Diao), Red Cards and even the league’s tallest players (not Peter Crouch, surprisingly but Birmingham City’s Nicola Zigic at 203 cm).

Click on a player, and you’ll be shown relevant web search links as well as images of the player in action. Sadly no video at this point, but you can imagine seeing the weekend’s goals and game highlights dropping in at some point.

Whether you’re a sports fan or not, this is a great example of how Bing’s Visual Search brings relatively dry information to life. Here in the UK, similar Visual Searches are available for London and Edinburgh restaurants, Academy Award winners, World Leaders, US Politicians, UK Prime Ministers, Top iPhone apps, Celebrities, Film Legends and a host more. Check out Bing Visual Search in your country to see what’s available.

But for now, I’m heading back to the Premier League Search to memorise some more stats. You never know when this kind of trivia comes in handy!

Windows 7 Idle Cycles turned useful

Windows Phone 7...where they'll hit first

Seesmic 2 built in Silverlight

Bing it on your printer

Zune marketplace expands

ScholarLynk
Bing on Droid
FREE Halo Reach (Sorta)

Follow Laura
Follow Paul
PING on Facebook

For example, a tag using several of the options would look like this:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="300" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="5" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="48.8756271_2.3493838" Pushpin="48.8756271_2.3493838" Culture="fr_FR"]

or:

[sl-bingmaps background="transparent" width="100%" height="400" NavigationVisibility="1" CopyrightVisibility="1" LogoVisibility="1" ScaleVisibility="1" ZoomLevel="17" Mode="Aerial" StartLocation="51.50809105417733_-0.07589511573314667" Culture="en-GB"]</p>

In order to use this plugin, you’ll need to first create a Bing Maps Key here. For further instructions, check out Kebeck’s post.

From this menu, you can select one of the following: “clip art,” “videos,” “webpages,” and “Maps and Places.” Using any of these options lets you automatically insert content pulled from Bing, but probably the most useful will be the option to insert content from Bing Maps.

When you select this option, a task pane opens on the right-hand side of your screen, allowing you to search for a location or pull up a location you’ve previously saved. You can optionally edit the details of the item or just click “insert” to add it to your email.

That’s definitely a handy feature to have when trying to share directions via email – you don’t even have to go to another web page, you can do it all from your inbox.

When you load up the app for the first time, you’ll see the mobile food carts represented on the map (hilariously) as sporks, not pushpins. You can then filter vendors by prices, neighborhood, features and cuisine.

The Food Cart Finder isn’t Bing’s first map app with a hyperlocal focus. “Local Lens,” which launched in February is probably the most notable of Bing’s hometown-focused mapplications. This app displays blog posts and news articles as an additional map layer across a select number of U.S. cities. For example, an article about road construction would be pinned to the area of the highway being worked on. A robbery story would be pinned to the house or business where it took place.

Oodle Rentals is also a somewhat hyperlocal map app, too, as it allows you to search for and locate nearby rental properties from classified site oodle.com. All of these map apps and more can be found at bing.com/maps. 

I’ll admit, I was aware of some of these, but some were new to me.

Have you seen them all? Check out this list:

• Top 100s by Year by Bing: Currently free, this app lets you find and listen to the top songs from any particular year from 1947-2009.
• Hip Hop 100 by Bing: This app lets you listen to the latest news Hip Hog songs of 2010. It’s free for 60 days, then $.99 to buy.
• Pop 100 by Bing: Same as above, but for Pop songs.
• Classical 100 by Bing: Classical music top 100, again, $.99 to buy after 2 months.
• Ryan Seacrest’s Mixtapes by Bing: Listen to music, view photos, search videos, read news, and connect with Seacrest via Facebook, Twitter and email. New playlists added weekly. This one is $1.99 after 60 days.
• Chicktionary by Bing: Currently free (usually $1.99), this is a word game where you create words using letters…hatched by chickens.
• Conde Nast Traveler Gold List: Search, browse, share, and book the best hotels, resorts, and cruise lines around the globe as chosen by the world’s most trusted travelers the readers of Conde Nast Traveler. Powered by Bing.
• Vanity Fair Trivia Movie Madness: Trivia questions from Vanity Fair’s stable of film geeks with 25 levels.
• ESPN World Cup Trivia by Bing: World Cup 2010 may be over, but you can still quiz yourself on your knowledge of the games.

The team also notes that Bing functions as the search provider in a number of other apps, including Whrrl, iTV and Flixster, too.

To find these apps in iTunes just search by name.

However, if you’ve never monkeyed around with your phone’s settings, you may not know where to look to find this option. It’s not a feature you’ll find within the Web browser (Safari) itself, you actually have to go into the phone’s settings to make the switch.

It’s not hard though – it just takes a few steps:

1. Launch the iPhone’s “Settings” app
2. Scroll down to “Safari” and tap it to see Safari’s settings
3. Tap “Search Engine”
4. Tap “Bing”
5. Exit the Settings app

Done!

That was easy, wasn’t it?

For an even more feature-rich experience, including social search and barcode scanning, check out the native Bing app here.

Photo credit: gdgt

“You can create dynamic maps that allow your visitors to pan and zoom, or static maps that don't have those features,” it reads. You can choose from Road maps, Aerial maps, Aerial maps showing the road labels, or a 3D Birdseye map.

To use the plugin, you just add a shortcode to your post like this, for example:

[bingMap location="Buenos Aires, Argentina" zoom="13"]

Or a more complex shortcode using all the available attributes may look like this:

[bingMap location=”Seattle, WA” width=”250” height"=”250” title=”Bing Maps Rocks” type=”dynamic” maptype=”AerialWithLabels” zoom=”15” pp1=”Seattle, WA”]

To use the plugin, you’ll first need a free Bing Maps Key. Then you can download and install the plugin from here.

The data in OSM comes from people who record it using GPS devices as well as from free satellite imagery. Once online, it can then be edited by anyone who may know more about a particular area or spots an error. At present, there are around 250,000 users contributing to the project.

By adding OSM as a layer in Bing Maps, you can now easily access this rich data from a familiar source: Bing. The data hasn’t been modified in any way, except to fit into the “tile schema” of Bing Maps, explains Chris Pendleton via blog post. Also of note, the data is being hosted on Windows Azure CDN, which is designed to support globally distributed apps such as this.