Bing Maps Wows 'Em At TED2010 277
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the where-we're-going dept.
from the where-we're-going dept.
theodp writes "In an eye-candy filled presentation that earned him a standing-O at TED2010, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. In his eight minute spiel, an extension of a shorter tech preview video, the Bing Maps architect shows how geo-tagged Flickr images can be precisely incorporated into streetside views, demonstrates indoor panoramas at Pike Place Market complete with live video overlays, and even takes the audience into space with Microsoft's Worldwide Telescope. " This is a really exciting video and worth your 8 minutes.
How did you watch the 8 minute video? (Score:1, Interesting)
sopssa, this article was submitted on Sunday February 14, @06:06AM. You posted the first reply on Sunday February 14, @06:07AM.
How did you notice the Slashdot post, watch the 8 minute video, and post a reply here to Slashdot in approximately one minute?
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:1, Interesting)
Actually I've found Bing to be quite good on the searching aspect. Live/MSN search was crap, but Bing actually returns good results (better than Google sometimes too). Integrating Wolfram Alpha and other data sources to results works quite good too, especially if you're constantly doing such searches (calculations, conversion of units, food nutrition info, traveling). Google has such things like calculator on it too, but it's not as much comprehensive. On Bing it usually saves you from looking what site might be good and the first click and typing the info again.
One more point for Microsoft? (Score:5, Interesting)
"3D is currently not supported for your browser. For a list of supported browsers, see Help."
Seeing help:
Supported browsers.
* Internet Explorer 6 or later
* Mozilla Firefox 3.0 or later
* Safari 3.1 or later
I'm using Firefox 3.6. But I guess it's not my browser that isn't supported. It's probably because I'm running it on Gentoo. I guess I will have to stick with Goggle Maps after all.
[sarcasm] One more point for Microsoft for web neutrality.[/sarcasm]
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, look at the XBox. They pour untold millions into that thing, and it is, at best, on par in only the US and UK markets [wikipedia.org]?
Actually, I find a lot of those numbers surprising. I know several people with Wiis and PS3s, but no one with an XBox. Well, not anyone who would admit to it, I suppose. But, it is important to interpret data honestly [xkcd.com].
Being on par (and slightly winning) is really good with consoles, especially with a console that is only on its 2nd iteration. PS1 and PS2 basically dominated the market, killed Sega off from it and made Nintendo skip a generation.
I actually own all the consoles, they're slightly better on different things. First of all, lets get the Wii out of the way since it's targeted to general people and not gamers as such (not that it's not fun for gamers too, it is). PS3 is great with its OS and store. I find it much nicer to use, especially as a media player device, than 360. However, 360's Live as a social gaming, friends and such beats PS3's system. PS3 also is technically better, but it came at really high cost at first and now they had to drop things to get PS3 Slim to lower price.
But the fact is, consoles are something only a few companies can dominate and they all do put millions into it. The current generation of consoles is actually interesting since there are no actual losers - PS3 and 360 are competing about players, are pretty much par with each other, while Wii takes players and general audience.
The next generation will be much more bloody.
Re:8 Minutes of my life (Score:3, Interesting)
That's ass backwards. The PS3 is the embarrassing little box that comes with the owner disclaimer of "Oh, well I bought it for a blu-ray player".
Worldwide Xbox 360 sales are just ahead of the PS3. In the US it more then doubles them, and is the defacto gaming console of the gamer type (note console, computers let out of this comparison). Your own link showed that, not sure how/why you ended up writing what you did when your own evidence clearly contradicts your statement.
Furthermore, for video game sales the 360 the biggest sellers of all the consoles (meaning a lot of people that own Wii's don't really buy games for it, and there are few blockbusters for the Wii, but in its defense when a blockbuster comes along it sells very very well).
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
I believe that it is the French who enthusiastically applaud interesting farts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_P%C3%A9tomane [wikipedia.org]
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's my million dollar idea. Why can't I have a search engine where I can click on a search result 'never show results from this domain again'. It might take awhile but you could build up nice filtered list after awhile. Hell, even being able to share your list with people and the community builds a good filtered list to get rid of the crap.
Re:Innovation on Bing (Score:1, Interesting)
after reading you post I searched for my own site on Bing, a map of my not so famous city. It is returned first in the results and it has the new title and description that I've put a few days ago. Sweet!
On Google it's not the first result (still ok for me) but is has the old title and the old description. And, what really pisses me off is that on top of the results they put their own map, which for my city, it's worse then mine. Now I would like to compete with their map for the 1'st place, the problem is that they reserved that place for their own product and you can not compete for it.
Bing should really not load that picture on the background, or they should load it after the rest of the page (the search box = what I really want) is loaded.
The presentation is really impressive, they use our universe (really!) as a canvas in which they stitch user photos, video, POIs etc. They have a unified product as opposed to Google.
Good to see some real competition for a company so big as Google. It will be better for... well, for me!
Re:I actually prefer Bing Maps over Google Maps (Score:3, Interesting)
I have found that Bing is much more accurate that Google.
Interesting. One big complaint about Google's mapping is that the street number data is usually a linear interpolation of the number range for the block. There are better data sources available for some areas. USC has an experimental geocoder [usc.edu] which uses parcel map data; when you put in an address, you get the centroid of the parcel from land ownership records. They have full coverage for Los Angeles, and are adding other areas.
(Incidentally, how is geocoding for Japan coming along? Japan tends to assign house numbers as serial numbers, not by position, so interpolation won't work. Somebody must have collected that data for at least Tokyo and Osaka by now.)