Bing is launching deals on its mobile search site. If you go to m.bing.com from an iPhone or Android mobile phone, the menu now includes "deals."
Clicking on it gets you a list of deals near your location, and you can sort by what's nearby and by categories such as restaurants or movie theaters.
Local deals are the new hotness in the Web world, with companies like Groupon landing large investments.
Microsoft says the new Bing deals feature has 200,000 deals in 14,000 cities through a partnership with DealMap.
It's not entirely ready for prime time based on some surfing I did this morning.
A search on an Android mobile phone for local deals in Seattle turned up a deal at Gossip Espresso & Tea in the Chinatown-International District. Pay $1 for a $3 bubble tea. I clicked on it. The deal expired on Feb. 16, two weeks ago.
Others worked, but were not built for buying on a mobile phone.
Another deal featured a coupon for pizza at Via Tribunali in Capitol Hill. Pay $15 and get $30 worth of food. When I click on it, it takes me to a Fresh Guide coupon website that is not optimized for a mobile phone. Paying for the deal requires filling out Web forms, which takes forever on a touchscreen keyboard.
There is an option on the mobile site to e-mail the deal to someone, so I could e-mail it to myself and fill it out later when I'm back at my desktop or laptop. But e-mailing stuff to yourself is not really in the spirit of cloud computing.
Update 2:58 p.m.
I just did another search for Seattle deals on the Bing mobile site and the Gossip Espresso & Tea deal is no longer showing up as a deal.
Update 5:20 p.m.
The Bing deal feature is not available for Windows Phone 7.
The feature is built using the Web standard HTML5, which the browser for Windows Phone 7 does not support. Microsoft plans to ship an update this year to Windows Phone 7 with Internet Explorer 9, which does support HTML5. When that happens, Bing deals will work on Windows Phone 7.
Microsoft said it removed the expired deal from Gossip and provided the following statement: "We?re working with Dealmap to ensure deals offered are current."
Rachel Weisz Miranda Kerr Sarah Shahi Anna Paquin Diane Kruger
No comments:
Post a Comment