Bing with Mark Vozzo at SBTUG

It’s going to be interesting to see what the Bing team have been up to lately – this Wed at SBTUG Mark Vozzo is going to be covering all the new stuff in Bing. He’ll be on after the pizza break (remember we have Gary Hayes talking about Augmented Reality in the first session).

One of my frustrations with Bing is that most of their new stuff doesn’t show in Australia – it is US only, meaning you have to change your region in order to view it. And even then it won’t always work – for example, I still can’t get the Bing app on my iPhone. It’s a strange move by the Bing team, and I hope they change their approach because it’s really hurting them – just take a look at the search engine usage in Australia (Google: 92%, Bing: 3%) compared to the US (Google: 63%, Bing: 12%) and you’ll see what I mean.

So, whilst it’s hurting Bing in Australia, it’s also disappointing for you and me –by default we miss out on some of the really cool things Bing is providing. Mark’s session is aimed at bringing us up to speed with some of these tools. Mark is an online analytics lead with the Digital Marketing Group at Microsoft in Sydney (and a passionate speaker – I had the pleasure of hearing him present last week). He’ll be covering the following, amongst other things:

• Wikipedia integration
• Wolfram Alpha integration
• Image Search (infinite scroll & filtering capabilities)
• Visual Search
• The ‘new’ Bing Maps
• Photosynth integration within Maps
• Street side photos (How Microsoft is integrating with User Generated Content from Flicker)

On this last point, you may be interested in the following video from Blaise Agüera y Arcas (one of the Architects on the Bing Maps team). Here’s the quick overview:

And here’s a longer video from when he announced a ton of updates at TED2010 in February this year:

If you are interested in what the Bing team has been up to, then I recommend you get along to SBTUG this Wed (that’ tomorrow night) to hear Mark speak, along with Gary Hayes. Fortuitously, some of the Bing stuff is a nice follow on from Gary’s Augmented Reality talk – the Street side view is a great example of reality being augmented with additional data.

Here’s the details:

Where: Microsoft, North Ryde (map)
When: Wed 30 June 2010, starting at 6pm
Web: Full details on the Sydney Business & Technology User Group (SBTUG) site
RSVP: Please RSVP here so I know you are coming

I hope to see you there.