"Bing is certainly moving well beyond a search engine," said Ryan Gavin, general manager of search, cloud and content at Microsoft. "It's increasingly become a service layer or intelligence platform for Microsoft."
Even though Bing has managed to get a 19.5 percent share in the search engine market, it's rolling out more services under the Bing name. As part of this move, it's making its audience participation tool, Bing Pulse, available to everyone.
Pulse began in February 2013 as a tool for getting audience sentiment usually around partnerships with large TV networks. Viewers could go to a web page hosted on Bing through their mobile device or PC and click "agree" or "disagree" to give their feelings in the moment on, say, a presidential debate or a referee call during a sports game. You could also send out polling questions during a live event.
Before this 2.0 launch, Microsoft had to make custom polls for each event. TV networks or event planners had to call someone on Pulse's small 5-person team and get them set up.
With this wide release today, anybody can make an account and start putting together a Pulse vote around an event. Pulse 2.0 is free until January 2015 and then Microsoft will start charging. The Pulse team still hasn't figured out the exact pricing, but it'll likely be a pricing plan based around each event or monthly/annual subscriptions.
In playing around with Pulse so far, the tool works best when the audience feedback is closely tied in with the broadcast or an event, said Microsoft senior director Greg Shaw. As an example, Pulse was brought in to gauge audience sentiment for a debate between former NSA Director General Keith Alexander and ACLU executive director Anthony Romero on whether the NSA was making us safer at the Aspen Ideas Festival. A Pulse stream with audience agreement was projected on a board during the debate and when Alexander saw he was losing the audience, he would start to bring out new facts and sharpening his argument. "Seeing and hearing that voting was having impact and was part of conversation was driving engagement," said Shaw.
Microsoft is trying to take advantage of the millions of conference and large events that could benefit from more audience participation--there are 1.8 million of these kinds of events a year, according to Microsoft's research.
Before Pulse, the main way to get this kind of audience sentiment was through audience response systems where the event planner would have to hand out individual clickers that cost between $49 and $59 or create some customized app.
Besides making some money selling to TV networks and event planners, Pulse is part of a drive to own the so-called second screen. Plenty of people are on their smartphones or tablets while watching TV or while they're at events. Microsoft wants to be a part of that action.
"There's a lot of growth in the notion of having a second screen during live event," said Shaw. "More and more, there's been government, school, business and nonprofit meetings where there hasn't been any audience response but there's a desire to do that. We're not saying this is the next major product at Microsoft but it's an important space and we think Pulse compliments and helps augment a lot of what Microsoft offers."
