Bing Feature Update: Get to know any city more quickly with new destination pages

Last week we told you about the natural language capabilities that make it faster to find and book flights in Bing.

Today we are releasing features that make it easier to research and plan trips to over 3000 cities across the world.

The new feature assembles all of the relevant information about a destination on one page so you can research a city before you go.   The top things you need to plan your trip - including flight information, a list of hotels in the area, popular attractions, local events, local news, civic photos, a map and a weather overview - are now in one place. 

Click into each of the sections to see a full list or gallery relevant to the city.  If you’re searching for a local city, Bing can recognize that you’re close and serve up results accordingly.  Let’s say you’re thinking of travelling to Miami this winter.  Type Miami, FL into the search box, and click “Explore City” to check out the destination city.

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  • 3000+ cities around the world.
  • Page content is contextual based on user location.
  • Rich content include events, news, images, videos, weather, flights, and hotels.

Wherever you’re headed, Bing’s new destination page is a great place to start!

- David Lindheimer, Bing Travel

Source: http://www.bing.com/community/Site_Blogs/b/search/archive/2010/12/20/bing-feature-update-get-to-know-any-city-more-quickly-with-new-destination-pages.aspx

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Coupons: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Coupon Sherpa recently post the top 10 coupon stories of 2010 and I have a few things to say about this last year as well. The good, the bad and the ugly part of coupons.

1. Groupon goes viral -
I am one of those people who signed up and has bought a few things through them. I bought a good deal for a subscription to the newspaper (for the Sunday coupons) and I have been milking that subscription for as long as possible - when there are no coupons in the Sunday paper, I put a hold on the paper to push the subscription out another week or two.  I also bought a teeth cleaning and checkup at a dentist across town and was happy to find out that I am taking good care of my teeth while I'm underemployed without dental insurance. And then finally I bought a holiday lights trip to a local museum but didn't end up going - I chalked it up to donating the $8 to the museum.

The Groupon deals are out there, it just takes a few weeks or months to find one that fits your lifestyle. I can understand how Groupon has gone viral, it is a good idea. And in comparison to other group coupon sites, they would be worth my time checking out.

flickr/cc - sdc2027

2. Newspaper coupons are dying
Though I see the newspaper subscriptions dropping and the girth of the paper slimming down, I have never thought about the Sunday coupons dying out. But thinking about it, I would have to agree that out of 10 coupons I use, only 2-3 are going to ones from the newspaper and the rest will come from printing them off from coupon sites.

I have also noticed that the Sunday coupons appear to be more and more high end cleaning, beauty products or B1G1 free items, though even the buy one get one coupons are diminishing or going to B2G1 coupons.

Unfortunately, this does appear to be bad news for some of us, though not the end of the world. We have always wanted to influence companies and this is one way we are, by printing our coupons online and making the newspaper one less important.

3. Online coupons are taking off
Coupon Sherpa said that, "In 2009, close to 397 billion printable coupons were distributed online, a figure that grew by nearly 25 percent in the first half of 2010." That is an impressive amount and I'm sure that many people, like myself print out 2 or more coupons for more savings and stocking up. But with online coupons have come the ugliness of coupon fraud and even I have been embarrassed by this.

Because of the coupon fraud stores may be taking some more conservative approaches to online coupons. In 2009 1% of 3.3 billion coupons were fraudulent, which isn't a lot, but if you consider that it is a 14% increase over 2008 and who knows where we stand for 2010.

The Coupon Information Corp. updates daily, fraudulent coupons that come out. It's quite amazing the business that is out there for these and unfortunately stores and manufacturers don't have a way to "void out" the bar codes on these fraud coupons. Until then, please be aware that you may be stopped from using them.


Those are my good, bad and ugly from 2010 - read the remaining 7 over at couponsherpa.com


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/IpRp/~3/4AIbMti6F3E/coupons-good-bad-and-ugly.html

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Winter Driving For a Long Car Life

The first sheen of snow and ice sometimes makes us realize how much we aren't prepared for winter travel and if we aren't careful, that car may not last through the season. We all want cars that don't give us headaches and last year after year.

1. Type of oil - switch to thinner oil as thicker oil not allow your engine to get the proper lubrication (consult your manual}

2.  Antifreeze - check your antifreeze to make sure it is filled up and antifreeze is a mix of 50/50 with water. This will help against overheating and engine corrosion or your radiator freezing and cracking. You can check the mixture with an antifreeze tester (cost: $10-15)

3.  Frozen doors and locks - Sometimes you can heat up your car key to thaw out the frozen lock mechanism, but if your car key has a transponder in it that is the worse thing to do. Instead, have some Lock De-icer (cost: $2-3) but for a homemade version, try rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle. There are a few alternatives to handling the icy windows as well.

flickr/cc -joiseyshowaa
4.  Rust and corrosion - fight back the damage that slush and road salt have on your car by washing your car frequently in the winter time. Doors (both inside the door well and along the edges) are the first to show signs of rust. Make sure when you clean your cars interior you also vacuum and wipe down the door well.

5.  Belts and Hoses - check wear on hoses by giving a good squeeze and check for damage, cracks or holes on the outside as those will need to be replaced. Look at your serpentine belt for cracks, frays and chunks missing or if the belt makes noise while the engine is running. Most belts have a life of 30-60,000 miles or 4 years

6.  Battery - check battery for cracks and breaks or have a tech check it out to make sure you have enough life to get through the cold winter months.

7.  Seeing the road - visually check your lights and replace any that are burnt out. Also replace any windshield wipers that cause streaking as well as filling up your washer fluid tank with proper winter related fluid.

8.  Roadside kit - already we are seeing situations of people getting stranded in cars. Having a roadside kit isn?t a bad idea, something that includes a blanket, flashlight with new batteries, some meal replacement bars, jumper cables, flares or a help sign, a can of fix-a-flat and a first aid kit.

9.  Tire tread - check your tires tread to reduce your spin out on slush and hills. Tire tread is considered legally worn out in most states when they are at 2/32? remaining. That would be putting a penny in the tread, with the head down. But it is best to replace them when they reach 4/32?- which is a quarter in the tread with the head facing down (like so)

Most preventive maintenance can be checked out at home and information on how to fix is found online or through your car?s manual. If you have an older, rear wheel drive, like myself, fill up the gas tank and add weight to the trunk to reduce slipping. And remember that if you do slide and spin on the road, you want to turn your wheels in the direction you are flying - it may seem counter intuitive, but it will allow you better control. And finally, go slow and keep some distance between you and the car ahead of you, an accident will make you even later to work or getting home.


Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/blogspot/IpRp/~3/SMY2aDuYrag/winter-driving-for-long-car-life.html

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Most Don't Blame 'Violent Rhetoric' for Tucson Shooting [Polls]

A CBS poll finds that 57% of Americans find no connection between "heated political rhetoric" and the Tucson massacre, compared to 32% who do. But this contradicts what frenzied tweeters were typing minutes after the shooting! How can this be? More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gawker/full/~3/QRMzypGV0z4/most-dont-blame-violent-rhetoric-for-tucson-shooting

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Digital Primetime Arrives Just in Time to Crush the Net

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The following is also my column in next week's Advertising Age.

Digital Primetime Arrives Just in Time to Crush the Net

All of the social media hype has, to some degree, diverted attention from the bigger storyline to emerge over the last few years - the meteoric rise of long-form, streaming video viewing. 

Unlike Twitter and YouTube, which propelled ordinary geeks and moms to cult-like status, the Hollywood content community here has been the runaway winner. There's more demand than ever for professionally created and curated content. 

However, a new dynamic is emerging that could completely upend the economics - that is if it doesn't break the Internet first.

First, a look at the trend lines.

For years streaming video was a two-foot viewing experience that took place largely at desks via PCs. While YouTube's user-generated and viral clips dominate short fare, long-form streaming video is coming into its own and on different platforms. 

The entertainment community - with the help of partners and in a race against piracy - has been aggressive in making their content available as on-demand streams rather than solely as downloads. This means that studio content is now far more widely available than ever before - and it's "couch friendly" too. Online video has become a seamless archipelago that spans a one-foot experience on smartphones and tablets to a ten-foot experience on set-top-enabled TVs.

Consider Netflix, for example. The company's on-demand video rental service is available on dozens of connected devices. This includes everything from the Roku set-top box to the iPhone and iPad. By one measure, Americans are eating it up.

Sandvine reported last week that Netflix alone represents a staggering 20 percent of all downstream US Internet traffic during what's normally primetime (between eight and 10 p.m.) This is remarkable given that the overwhelming majority of Netflix subscribers - 98% according to Sandvine - are not streaming content yet.

XBox Live, which carries Netflix and other content, is seeing a similar pattern. Larry Hryb (aka Major Nelson), Xbox Live's Director of Programming, blogged last week that 42 percent of XBox Live's more active 25 million US users are streaming an average of an hour of television and movies per day. (Disclosure: Edelman, my employer, handles Xbox's PR needs.)

Digital primetime is here. Madison Avenue should be giddy with excitement. Hulu served nearly 800,000 ads in July, comScore reports. What's more, the proliferation of interruptions are not stopping Hulu users from watching an average of 2.6 hours of video per month.

But there are potential challenges ahead as Xbox, Netlfix and Hulu supplant the TV nets as the new kings of primetime.

For starters, as more Americans become "cord cutters" we may opt for ad-free on-demand rentals or all-you-can eat subscriptions. The appeal is interruption-free viewing. Some 13% of Americans intend to cut the cord in the next 12 months, according to Strategy Analytics - a market research firm.

However, the more scary scenario is that all of this video consumption and cord cutting could push the Internet to a breaking point.

Nielsen reports that 64 million people watched at least part of the World Cup online. That's a drop in the bucket by what we'll see in 2014 when Brazil hosts the event. The Internet may not be ready for it.

Akamai President David Kenny says that in five years the average user will consume two hours a day of HD video. To accommodate this insatiable demand, the Internet will need to increase capacity 548 times from where it is today. Factor in net neutrality debates, cable companies squaring off with TV networks and it's easy to be pessimistic that there's enough "shovel-ready" broadband projects underway to pave the way.

Advertisers, not just the content community and distributors, have a significant stake in the future of Internet video. However, the debates around net neutrality and capacity aren't front page concerns for most us. They need to be.

The danger is that the ad community will be left out of the debate. Even worse it may not have a voice in creating viable ad-supported ways for the providers to invest in infrastructure, just as millions of cord cutters flee cable TV for ad-free content and push the Net to the limit.

Photo credit: jeffgunn

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/steverubel/~3/bkUB3RjKK1M/digital-primetime-arrives-just-in-time-to-cru

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Hot or Not: E-mail Marketing vs. Social-Media Marketing

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The following is also my column this week in Advertising Age.

Contrary to popular belief, video didn't kill the radio star, YouTube didn't knock off TV and Twitter didn't shut down blogging. However, in each case the steady advance of new technology definitely forced the incumbents to evolve. One can argue, for example, that some of the more established blogs on the web benefited greatly from building content strategies that engender massive link sharing on Twitter. Much the same, TV ad creative has changed to facilitate additional exposure on YouTube.

Enter e-mail marketing, which, to some degree, has been beaten down by regulation, and has taken a backseat to social networking. Nielsen revealed last week that e-mail's share of time declined 28%, putting it in third place, while social networking, the leader, climbed 43%.

Despite these attention currents, however, the reality is that e-mail is stronger than ever. According to an eConsultancy study of 1,400 U.S. consumers, 42% said they prefer to receive ads for sales and specials via e-mail compared to just 3% who said the same for social-networking sites and 1% who preferred Twitter.

Savvy marketers are beginning to see that if they leverage all of their channels effectively, they can increase their overall ROI and, in the process, establish a deeper bond with customers and influencers.

They will have help.

Quietly and steadily, email marketing is evolving and turning more social, thanks to a blitz of homegrown innovations, acquisitions and start-ups that are reinventing the platform. Many companies are building end-to-end "social CRM" tools that will help marketers manage their relationships by mashing up existing customer touch points and social-networking sites.

Here's a look at some of the companies in the space:

  • Constant Contact, an e-mail-marketing vendor, in May acquired Nutshellmail, a handy tool that helps individuals and businesses manage their entire social-networking presence via e-mail. Nutshellmail offers a suite of plug-ins, including one that makes it easy for businesses on Facebook to add an e-mail newsletter. Constant Contact is planning to build this into an entire end-to-end offering for small -and medium-size businesses.
  • Rapportive, which provides contextually relevant information to Gmail and Google Apps users about their contacts and the companies they work for, last week generated a fair amount of buzz for raising a seed round that included high-profile investors such as Paul Bucheit, Gmail's architect and now a key member of the Facebook team. Xobni, a similar technology that integrates with Blackberrys, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, raised $16 million earlier this year. Meanwhile, Microsoft's new Outlook Connector brings a similar functionality right to millions of corporate desktops.
  • MailChimp, a popular e-mail-newsletter platform, is in the process of integrating Facebook "like" buttons to campaigns. This will provide marketers with detailed analytics that reveal how many and who clicks on "like" and whether they progressed down the funnel toward a sale, thereby increasing overall accountability.
  • Flowtown and Rapleaf, meanwhile, are taking the opposite approach by helping marketers understand the social connectivity and influence of existing members in their online databases. Flowtown has an e-mail-campaign-management system that integrates with many of the larger platforms, as well as an array of powerful insights tools.

As more marketers apply analytics across the entire marketing spectrum (online and offline) and tap into tools like the ones mentioned above, the mentality will change from reach to relationships. In the process, both e-mail and social-media marketing may gain, but what's clear is that the two are increasingly made for each other.

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Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/steverubel/~3/0WfEPNZcvnI/hot-or-not-e-mail-marketing-vs-social-media-m

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