Announcing New Bing Maps & Local Features: Interior Views, Enhanced OpenTable Integration, Real-Time Transit, and Streetside for Mobile

Throughout the last few months, Bing Maps & Local has focused on how our product can help with everyday decisions and deliver innovative experiences to a wide audience. The end result is a more functional, easier-to-use, and differentiated experience. The theme for this release has been around three areas: i) Delivering new types of visual detail, ii) Simplifying local tasks, and iii) Improving maps on mobile. With that in mind, today we’re announcing four new features we’re really excited about:

· Interior Views: Provides users with immersive 360-degree panoramas of local businesses
· OpenTable Integration: Lets users interact with OpenTable directly from restaurant pages
· Real Time Transit on Mobile: Gives users real time info if a bus is on-time or delayed
· Streetside for Mobile: Brings users street-level imagery + some mobile-exclusive enhancements

Interior Views

Have you ever showed up to a restaurant excited to try it for the first time only to be disappointed by its look and feel? Wouldn’t it be great if you could explore the inside of a restaurant just as you can explore the streets with Streetside? Reading reviews of what other people say about a place’s atmosphere is helpful, but you’re the real judge of whether a restaurant’s décor, size, and appearance fit what you’re looking for. And if a picture is worth 1000 words…well, each of our new Interior Views could make a very large book.

· Through a partnership with EveryScape Eats, Bing Local lets you “step inside” and explore full panoramas of restaurants.
· Interior Views are accessed by clicking on the “step inside” panoramic thumbnail on a Bing Local details page.
· Clicking the thumbnail opens the experience (built on Silverlight) and enables you to jump inside the restaurant, move from room-to-room, and explore 360-degree views.
· Current coverage is ~5,000 restaurants (majority Boston metro area) but will be expand continually for breadth and depth in more cities.

A few great examples are: CanlisDavide RistoranteGennaro’sIvy Restaurant

OpenTable Integration

Our new Interior Views help you decide if a restaurant is the right place to go…so it only makes sense to better help you get a reservation. When you go to a local details page for one of the 15,000 restaurants signed up with OpenTable, you can now search for available reservations directly in Bing. Enter in the date, time, and party size and Bing pulls up what’s open. Click on a time you want and you’re brought to the page to finalize your reservation. Simple. To recap:

· Reservations through OpenTable are now available right on the local details pages.
· Every restaurant that is an OpenTable customer will have this functionality.
· Bing Local makes planning a night out easier and faster so you can spend more time on the important things (like what you’re going to eat once you get there!)

Real-Time Transit & Streetside for Mobile

At Bing, we want to help our users answer a lot of questions. Two of these questions are: “When is my bus really coming?” and “What’s the place I’m walking to look like?” With Real-Time Transit and Streetside added to Bing Maps on mobile, we can check those two questions off the list.

Real-time Transit for Bing Mobile on the iPhone adds up-to-the-minute data for Seattle, Boston, and San Francisco transit agencies. In one release cycle, Bing added transit routing and is now the first search engine to offer real-time transit information.

Streetside on Bing Mobile gives you the street-level imagery currently available on the desktop but with a few “enhancements.” If you pinch the screen to zoom out, the Streetside imagery will be stitched together so you can flick your finger and easily pan through streets. Also, the names of local businesses in the current street-level view appear under their respective buildings so you can learn more about what you’re seeing.

Below is a video to see Real-time Transit in action, but to learn more about the entire Bing Mobile release and see all the features and screenshots, head to the Bing Mobile Post.

The Rubicon has Been Crossed -Local Pages as Transaction Interface

Yesterday was a seminal moment in Local. It largely went unnoticed but it reflects the rapid monetization of location pages by the major search engines.

Bing* announced a number of local, map and mobile upgrades that improve an already good, but under rated and under used product. Clearly, they are battling toe to toe feature wise with Google Places and will be giving as good as they get. It is nice to see their staying with Local and keeping in Google’s rearview mirror with a general purpose Local platform.

But the part of the announcement that caught my attention was the following:

Mobile (iPhone):

  • Check-in: Share your current location with friends and family via Facebook, foursquare or Windows Live Activity Stream.
  • Plans: From the Bing homepage or a local search result, people can plan a night out and share the plan with friends via Facebook, who can comment or join the plan.
  • Opentable and Grubhub integration: With the integration of Opentable and Grubhub into Bing for Mobile, once you find your restaurant of choice, you can reserve a table on OpenTable or order takeout from Grubhub without leaving the Bing app.

Local enhancements:

  • OpenTable will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to book reservations from the restaurant details page in Bing.
  • FanSnap will be integrated into the local search vertical, allowing people to purchase tickets to a concert or sporting event through the events details page in Bing.

These features when examined in conjunction with new features of the Google Places indicate the arrival of a new era for place pages.

Hotel Booking tool

You recall that recently Google Places’ started including hotel booking options directly on the Places page.  These pages are now (finally?) becoming an entry point for financial and social transactions as opposed to just informational or contact based information.

In this role the search engines will be sitting between the customers and merchants or booking services. This change, while having been predictable, can affect many local business going forward in much the same way that the shift from cash to credit cards has affected them.

On the one hand, it will remove friction from the transaction while on the other, someone will be inserting themselves in the sale, with or without your explicit permission. It is a double edge sword and one that can be a net plus or not depending on how the search engines and social sites handle the process going forward. Historically, whenever a large corporation stuck out their hand in partnership to me, it inevitably ended up in my pocket and no longer felt much like a partnership.

Transparency is one way that could keep this from becoming totally unbalanced. But secrecy seems to be the order of the day as far as the Google Hotel booking system is concerned.

Does the new willingness of Google and Bing need to end up this way? No in fact, like the credit card it might actually increase bookings and sales for SMBs and potentially remove a layer of blood suckers that currently exist in the affiliate world. But then again it seems that the power relationship is so uneven that as the demand of capital markets make their presence felt, more and more of the profit will go to the big boys…

*Full disclosure: Bing is a sponsor of many of our Get Listed University events.