Microsoft’s search engine, Bing is moving to the iPhone platform in uncommon way: via applications that use Bing API. The most bright example of such apps is Robotvision – a Bing location-based service for iPhone that became available at the Apple Store in a recent time. The application uses iPhone 3Gs GPS module and camera to provide users with information about the nearby environment (e.g. restaurants, businesses, etc.). The application retrieves this data from Bing SE. It also has Twitter and Flickr integration. But the most notable feature of this solution is one called augmented reality: as you change the position of the device to horizontal by flipping it, the units you were looking at through the camera begin to be shown as markpoints on a map. You flip your iPhone back – and the map disappears. Besides this one, Bing SDK allows doing some more funny but probably not so useful things, for example locating the nearest tweets. Unfortunately, it is not as advanced as some apps that allow picking tweets from the crowd of people just by pointing the camera on it. Anyway, this may be considered as a part of a new turn in the spiral of LBS evolution. Microsoft appeared to kinda “walk through the back door”, and they did it smart. It won’t be something unexpected if Bing will strengthen its positions enough to breathe to the Google’s neck in the future. The official demo:
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