It’s the end of an era. Microsoft announced last month that this year’s Consumer Electronics Show keynote will be the company’s last for the foreseeable future. The show definitely won’t be the same without Microsoft’s chief executive officer Steve Ballmer kicking things off with his unique brand of charisma, but all good things must come to an end. According to reports, Microsoft won’t have anything big to announce at this year’s keynote. Instead, Ballmer will reca...

Microsoft announced and launched a new deals website on Friday tied to its growing Bing suite of services. Bing Deals is a shopping site that compiles specials from GroupOn, Target, LivingSocial, Nordstrom and others. “Instead of building another program, we’re harnessing deals from major providers and retailers,” said Bing senior director Lisa Gurry. Microsoft’s Bing Deals offers more than 200,000 specials across the United States and, as a deal aggregator, it should eliminate the need to sign up...

Microsoft has lost $5.5 billion, an average drain of $1 billion per quarter, on Bing since it introduced the search engine in 2009, CNNMoney reported on Wednesday. Despite the losses, Microsoft’s Bing reached a 30% share of the U.S. search engine market in April of this year, slowly narrowing the gap with Google, although comScore’s figures pin the search engine’s share at just 14.7%. Despite the constant drain, Microsoft still has a plan for Bing. During the company’s financial analys...

Microsoft’s Bing team took the wraps off of a new location-sharing application for Windows Phone on Thursday called “We’re in.” The application is similar to foursquare and Latitude in some respects, and yet still very different. The idea is simple: you can create an invitation that will allow your friends to share their location for a specified amount of time. Say, for example, you want to share your location and see where four of your friends are, for one hour, while you all head tow...

Microsoft has struck a deal to provide English search results in Baidu, China’s most popular search engine. According to The Wall Street Journal, Microsoft anticipates that the Bing-labeled English search results will help expand its Bing brand in China. Baidu also hopes that the partnership will help its efforts to expand its search engine to the global market. Chinese users typically use Google for English search results, however, the Chinese government has blocked that search engine — and other Goo...

Several new features set to be introduced in Microsoft’s upcoming “Mango” update for Windows Phone were revealed this past weekend. We already knew that Mango is set to be a major update to the Windows Phone platform — perhaps the most anticipated new feature is improved multitasking support — but Microsoft had been keeping several upcoming additions under wraps. Newly revealed features include Bing Audio, which will identify songs by listening to music, a la Shazam; Bing Vision, which w...

During the BlackBerry World Keynote in Orlando this morning, Research In Motion announced that it is working with foursquare to include support for the social-network in an upcoming version of BlackBerry Messenger. Users will be able to share their location information as their BBM status, but RIM execs didn’t go into much detail on how check-ins will work or just how feature rich the implementation will be. The native foursquare client, for example, allows users to find nearby deals, compete with frien...

Just moments ago on stage at BlackBerry World 2011, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis (no, the other one is also CMO, dummy) announced a strategic mobile partnership with Microsoft (translation: we’re super scared of Andy Rubin). Starting around the holiday timeframe, Microsoft’s Bing maps and search will be the preferred search and mapping solutions for BlackBerry products. We’re talking about a system-level integration, “far beyond a search box,” RIM sai...

According to data collected by Experian Hitwise, Bing’s share of the U.S. search market surpassed 30% last month. Microsoft’s Bing search engine is less than two years old, but a series of key deals and increasingly effective mobile integration pushed the service’s share of the U.S. search market up nearly 6% between February and March to 30.01%. Yahoo!’s share of the U.S. market grew as well, from 14.99% in February to 15.69% in March, while Google’s share declined 3% to 64.42% ...

Microsoft has filed a complaint with the European Commission in regards to Google’s search operations in the European Union. “Our filing today focuses on a pattern of actions that Google has taken to entrench its dominance in markets for online search and search advertising to the detriment of the European consumers,” said Microsoft’s general counsel, Brad Smith. “Google has engaged in a broadening pattern of walling off access to content and data that competitors need to provide...

Analytics company ComScore has released its October search engine market share numbers and… instead of making you fire up your search-site of choice and finding the information yourself, we thought we would just put it right there for you. October’s search numbers are as follows: Google 66.3%, up from 66.1% in September; Bing 11.5%, up from 11.2% in September; Yahoo 16.5%, down from 16.7% the month prior; Ask.com 3.6% down 0.1% from the previous month; and AOL 2.1%, down from 2.3%. We are curious...

According to research firm Nielsen, Microsoft’s Bing search engine has overtaken Yahoo! as the second most-used search engine in the United States. There is, however, a little catch. Nielsen’s numbers, which are for August of 2010, only count what they are calling “intentional searchs” and do not include contextual or slideshows searches. The company pegs Yahoo!’s U.S. search share at 13.1% and Bing’s at 13.9%; Google is still dominating with a cool 65%. To further cloud...

If you bought a Samsung Fascinate from Verizon Wireless, you might have been feeling a certain way at the fact that the default search engine on the device is Bing and not Google. In addition to Bing being the default, Google Search isn’t even a selectable option. It is well known that Verizon and Microsoft have entered into a multi-device agreement to promote Bing, appearing as the exclusive option on Verizon’s BlackBerry handsets for instance. It wasn’t known if users would ever be able to...

We have a couple quick Microsoft tidbits here. Today, Microsoft announced that the official Bing mobile application for Android is available to all Verizon customers. If you have a Verizon Android device, and don’t like the ease-of-use and integration that is provided with Google, you can run on over to the Android Market and download Bing. You’ll also be thrilled to know that Bing for Android will be coming pre-installed on future Verizon Android devices. Joy.Also, as a follow-up to a previous po...