All posts in “bing”

Innovative Video Platform Qwiki Arrives on Bing

June 15, 2012 / Comments Off on Innovative Video Platform Qwiki Arrives on Bing / Posted in: Blog, Personal Opinion


Jordan Benedet is a Manager on the Client Strategy and Innovation team at
Social Media Group.

I originally became aware of the interactive video platform Qwiki in December 2010 when researching innovative new online platforms for an internal initiative at SMG we call “Innovation Camp”. The original deck I presented to my colleagues is embedded at the end of this blog post.

Qwiki really stood out to me as a rising star because it integrated various media formats, such as images, video, and maps on specific topics into one cohesive and seamless user experience. The added content recommendation algorithm at the end of each Qwiki turns the platform into a gateway for users to visually explore related information with ease. Qwiki is just over two years old, and has raised $10.5 million in funding to date. Their platform is currently accessed by approximately 1 million people per month.

Bing was apparently on the same wave length as me; as they have been in talks with Qwiki for over a year to tightly integrate Qwiki functionality into Bing search results. Now when you search for certain topics on Bing that contain a Wikipedia entry, a Qwiki link is also visible and easily playable in line with search results. Brilliant!

Qwiki on BING

Doug Imbruce, the CEO of Qwiki, recently stated that “We’re finally completing the vision … of a 360-degree publishing platform … the embedding-side of Bing proves that we can create the kind of massive scale and distribution that can help us change, and forever improve, the way the world gets information.”

Bing has been focusing on creating a seamless user experience for their visitors, and I think they have done a great job of integrating an external platform into their search eco system. One surprising tidbit of information is that no money has been exchanged during this deal yet, as the value of integrating the platforms was high enough to make both parties extremely happy to proceed.

Whats Next For Qwiki?

This integration should really help Qwiki expand awareness, raise additional funds, and continue to grow into the ultimate interactive publishing platform.

Qwiki has been quiet over the last year as they developed the second iteration of their platform. They recently released a Qwiki Creator tool that allows users to make their own interactive qwikis by uploading specific types of content. A full developer API will also be available which will allow content creators to mass produce qwikis at scale from their own content.

SMG Innovation Camp – Qwiki

 

 

Social Media Roundup for June 11, 2010

June 11, 2010 / Comments Off on Social Media Roundup for June 11, 2010 / Posted in: Blog

Bing Adds Facebook & Twitter Updates

Bing lovers can rejoice! On Wednesday Microsoft launched their social implementation of Bing, which indexes data from Twitter, Facebook fan pages, and Facebook updates that are shared to “everyone.” There is also the functionality to play/pause the feed which will refresh the content or keep it static. The social view of Bing can be found @ bing.com/social.

Google Announces Caffeine

This week Google announced the details regarding their new and improved indexing system Caffeine. The new system will provide more content, and 50% fresher more relevant results from web searches. This is a fantastic update for those looking for the most recent article, stories, blogs posts, or forum threads. Google states that content on the web is blossoming, and to ensure scalability, Caffeine will add hundreds of thousands of gigabytes per day to their web index!  Wowza!

Twitter Announces in House URL Shortener

My momma always said that clicking on shortened links is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re gonna get! Twitter has announced their plans to improve how shortened links are viewed in tweets, by implementing their own service. The new feature will shorten links using the t.co URL, but the actual link or variation of the link will be visible within the tweet, which wont count towards the max character count. Twitter hopes this will remove remove the obscurity from shortened links and let users know where they will end up. The new shortener will be rolled out during the summer, and be tested by twitter and developers.

Test Your Focus

The New York Times has released an online assessment that will put your focus and task juggling skills to the test! Living in the digital world of today, our brains are hit hard with multiple stimuli at the same time. Managing the information can be difficult, as Kord Campbell found out when he missed an email that could have cost him $1.3 million. The key is knowing your strengths and weaknesses, as it will help you create more efficient personal workflows. Research has shown that heavy multitaskers have trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant data, and in turn experience more stress.

Adidas racks up the cameos in Star Wars Cantina 2010

Just in time for the FIFA World Cup™, Adidas has released a new Star Wars themed video for their Adidas Originals collection. It has quickly reached over 2.7 million views!

See if you can spot David Beckham, Daft Punk, Snoop Dogg, Franz Beckenbauer, Noel Gallagher, Ian Brown, Ciara, Jay Baruchel, and DJ Neil Armstrong.

Social Media Roundup for October 23, 2009

October 23, 2009 / 2 Comments / Posted in: Blog

Friday already. The SMG-ers had a big week. I hope yours was cool too.

I saw this video a while back and my friend Anne shared it on Facebook today. I think we all need quick hit of adorable ahead of our weekly SMG Roundup.

Cute overload eh?

Henry Blodget at Silicon Alley Insider reported findings from Perry Drake that Facebook now accounts for 25% of U.S. online pageviews. Wowzers.

I’d be remiss in not mentioning that Facebook announced public status updates would be searchable on Bing this week. And in a related news, Twitter has inked a deal that offers Bing and Google Search access to their public status updates (Details at TechCrunch). It makes perfect sense given the that Pew Internet and American Life Project announced this week that 19% of Internet users use status updates (via Mashable). If you want to dig deeper into this news from the world of Social Search, check out the analysis from Charline Li and Jeremiah Owyang.

Coca-Cola has opened up voting for a team of three people to visit the 206 countries where Coca-Cola is sold in 365 days as the next stage in its Expedition206 campaign. The winning team goes on a global quest to find out what makes people happy and share their discoveries through the official campaign site and across Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Flickr. (via Brand Republic)

Yesterday, SMG was proud to sponsor the afterparty at meshmarketing. It was an incredible lineup of speakers, workshops and heavy-hitters from the social media scene. I’ll migrate the #followfriday meme to the SMG blog and suggest you look up some of the wonderful speakers who had great insights – @kdpaine, @esotto, @danmartell and @jquipp.

Given my Internet services background and how much we rely on Yammer for team communication here at SMG, I was interested when Yammer experienced an extended outage earlier this week. For a time, Yammer was reduced to Twitter to communicate with its customers. Given how critical Yammer has become for business, it seems like a great opportunity for Yammer to take a look at thier systems for customer communication and ensure they’ve got redundancies in place in the event of an outage. Read about it on the Yammer Blog and at The Washington Post.

Finally, we are pleased as punch that our client Ford Motor Company has won the Society for New Communications Research 2009 Fellows’ Choice Award for Brand of the Year. From the SNCR release “Brand of the Year: Ford for its innovative use of social media to improve the way the company communicates with its stakeholders”. For more on this great news, please see the Digital Snippet on Ford’s SMPR site.