Posts Tagged ‘bing’

Waiter, there’s Augmented Reality in my iPhone!

Monday, September 28th, 2009

robotvisionJustin, with his Android phone, will shrug his Google-loving shoulders and say “who cares?”, but I’m excited. My iPhone just got a new App this morning called Robotvision, a piece of Augmented Reality technology that overlays real-time business and restaurant information, as well as other fun stuff, onto my phone’s 3GS camera view.

I hold my iPhone up, look for, say, Bars and Restaurants within a mile, and BAM! Flags showing the nearest options hover in front of me. Tap on a restaurant to get the address, driving directions through the map app, or to call with the oft-forgotten phone functionality that my gadget possesses. Tap to search bing and get a summary of their hours, ratings, photos of the place, etc. Lay the iPhone down and a map view appears, all of the tagged locations raining down in pin drop formation.

I can also see all of the nearest Tweets and Flickr photos with a click of a button. Less useful, but novel and fun.

This is a preview of the Augmented Reality of our future. Human vision? Bah! It’s time for Robotvision.

Google vs. Bing

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

blogGreetings world.  This here is the Dev team over at Zoom Creates. We work with the internet a lot.  In fact, when the internet isn’t working, we all freak out a little bit.

One of the biggest uses for the internet over here in the Development department is the search. We search for programming syntax, open source tools, blog post and screen cast tutorials, our own names, Keyboard Cat videos; all the essentials. Google has been the king of the hill for a long time, and it’s well-deserved. If you can’t find what you are looking for on the first two pages of a Google search, you’re probably searching incorrectly. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t always room to improve, though, and competition drives innovation.

The latest competition comes from Microsoft. Their new Decision Engine (supposedly better than a search engine?) is called Bing, and it’s supposed to knock Google down a few notches. We here on the Dev team are pretty biased, but we’re always willing to give something a try. We decided to do a couple of quick searches and share our results, and were actually pretty surprised.

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