Yesterday I wrote about what Microsoft sees are technology trends in consumer tech, the Imagine 2011 conferrence had Yusuf Mehdi showing where Microsoft is planning to take Bing. There are three demos uploaded each touching upon something interesting.
The first video shows Bing becoming more of a web app by allowing you to check in to your flights, check the flight status and even allow you to print boarding passes, coupons etc. This makes Bing more than just a search engine or even a decision engine. These are real tasks that one can perform using Bing. Here’s the demo:
There’s talk about combining web information with structured data such as restaurant menus to provide specific and direct results, more like a enhanced Yelp.
Update: Looks like MSFT has pulled the demo from the Imagine 2011 website and Youtube. The video showed you typing “Print” in the Bing bar and you would be presented with options that you can print, such as coupons etc.
In the second demo, Yusuf demos subtle HTML5 enhancements in Bing. According to statistics with Microsoft, the navigation bar on top is used quite a lot (I use it too). With the new Bing, the navigation bar and related search options will remain on static as you scroll through the page. Demo video:
In the third video Yusuf Mehdi talks about something that I tweeted earlier today. One of the problems with social search is when to invoke the social recommendations. Yusuf Mehdi talks about these use cases and emphasizes their partnership with Facebook gives them an advantage in understanding user preferences and present social recommendations based on specific use cases where social recommendation actually matter. Demo video:
There’s a demo of a slick Bing video player as well, around 3 minutes into the video.