Today is New Years Eve in Australia and Bing’s HTML5, video powered homepage is celebrating in style. Head to http://bing.com.au right now to see the fireworks display from Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong from last year. You’ll any of the modern browsers to see the video, lets hope they film again this year, the result is impressive.

Whatever you’re doing to celebrate tonight, enjoy and take a break from that computer for a while.

Microsoft have switched on the long promised HTML5 version of their Bing search engine. Bing began by making search more visual with a daily image, but now through the power of HTML5 video, that image comes to life as a video. Unfortunately this is another entrant to the US-only release list, but there is a relatively easy way for those outside the US to use it.

In the top right of Bing there is a Country selector, click this, then choose United States from the list. Of course this then means you will get US-oriented results. If you can’t be bothered with that, then check out the video below of Bing’s HMT5 video homepage.

Sure this does absolutely nothing to the quality of search results, but is an interesting showcase of the possibilities of HTML5 and makes for a unique search experience, Google, your plain white page is growing old.

More @ Bing

It’s not often that we stop to appreciate the creative work that public relations company do. When it comes to technology, PR companies play a pivotal role in developing the publicity around a product or service. Wether it’s working with creative types to realise a vision, or dealing with temperamental journalists to tap into their audience, its not the easiest job in the world. Far too often I see companies aim for the low hanging fruit.

As I write this post, yet another over-amplified, shouting add is on TV, treating potential customers like idiots. On that note, if you have a ‘sale’ every single week, that’s not a sale, its the price.

The holy grail for an PR company, must be to create something that people actually watch. Not once, but many times. Occasionally PR companies are successful. Possibly the best PR campaign I’ve ever seen is a co-creation from Bing and JayZ.

With JayZ launching his autobiography – Decode It, and Microsoft looking to grow Bing market share and increase relevance with a younger audience, it was a mutually beneficial arrangement. Every day for a month prior to the launch of the book’s release, they posted a page from the book in public across 13 major cities in the US, but didn’t stop there. This was a global campaign, so the pages were posted internationally as well.

The 320 pages were not simply thrown together randomly, but placed in well thought out locations that was represented in the content. These pages were found everywhere from building-sized billboards, to the bottom of a swimming pool, to the inside of custom Gucci jackets, even an entire Cadillac was wrapped in lyrics. With such a massive distribution of the branding message there needs to be a way to tie the message together. That was done by the common message attached to every page ‘DECODE JAY-Z with Bing.’

Clues to the page locations were released through Facebook, Twitter and radio, finding the pages became a game, powered by Bing. These pages and their locations were captured by mobile phones and contributed to the book, which was being assembled digitally as pieces were uncovered – http://bing.com/jayz

It’s a campaign that actually expects a little from the consumer, instead of treating them like idiots.

So how successful was this PR campaign ? Jay-Z’s Facebook followers grew by more than 1 million, Decode it reached the best sellers list.. and stayed there for 19 straight weeks. Bing was happy with major media coverage, and an 11.7% increase in visits.

The entire campaign landed an astonishing 1.1 Billion global impressions. Lesson complete. This is how marketing should be done.

More @ http://bing.decodejay-z.com

While the US has had Bing’s Visual Search feature for some time now, its finally Australia’s turn to get the AJAXY goodness. Clicking on a Category, users are presented with a visual thumbnail view of data. Initial launch categories include:

·      Popular celebrities
·      Recipes
·      Cricket players
·      Tennis players
·      Melbourne restaurants
·      Sydney restaurants
·      Top iPhone apps
·      Top Twitter users
·      Top Windows Phone 7 apps
·      Travel destinations
·      World beaches
·      World leaders
·      Australian prime ministers
·      Dog breeds
·      Bing home page images
·      Cocktails

Once your inside a category, you can filter the content instantly with the filters on the left hand side of the page. Take Cricket Players for example, filtering based on their country ‘Australia’ will show only our stars.

The whole visual search system works really well for those categories that exist, the challenge now for Bing is to continue to add more and more categories. Providing quick access to information we care about is the name of the game here.

Microsoft’s Bing division has announced today that they are integrating elements of Facebook into their search results. These come in too varieties. The first is searching for a contact’s name, this brings up their Facebook Profile (if it’s public) and provides easy links to add them as a friend or send them a message right from the results page.

The second part of today’s announcement is the use of Facebook Likes to influence search results. So wether your searching a particular business, band, product or service the search results will include a section called ‘Liked by your Facebook Friends’. This is actually a really valuable use of your social graph, helping to assist in when result suits you best. These more personalised search results will require you to be logged into Facebook on that machine.

More info @ Bing Community

While Bing in the US is getting all kind of fancy features, Bing internationally has been slow to get the same feature set. One of the most useful features we miss out on in Australia is Bing Travel. While it hasn’t officially launched here, there’s some great news down under – it already works !

With a few events coming up shortly, booking flights is on the agenda, on the off chance that it’d work, I tried Bing Travel. With all it’s ajaxy goodness, searching for flights allows for real-time filtering to find the best deal. Sorting is available for a number of criteria, including Price, Airline, Leave/Arrive times, number of stops and duration.

To try it for yourself, head on over to http://travel.bing.com

Check out today’s image on Bing. It’s very timely to match in with today’s big race – The Melbourne Cup. Rolling over the image you’ll see a number of square that link off to associated racing stories, one noteworthy item is the Birdseye view of the Flemington racecourse.