Qi Lu, President of Microsoft’s Online Services Division, spoke about the continued evolution of the web, and explained how Microsoft is helping its customers gain access to new features, tools, and experiences.

The ubiquitous nature of smartphones and the increasing breadth and depth of services living in the cloud has giving the world a new landscape for building and interacting rich experiences. Add to this the speed of change and growth online and we have something truly special.

Think about this—it took 100 years for print media to be ad funded. This time period dropped to 19 years for radio, and 13 years for TV. Digital, on the other hand, was ad funded almost from point 0.

But all this data only tells us where we are and barely hints at where we are going.

Qi walked us through where the web is headed. We’ve evolved from a topical experience (static html pages), to social (where people are key), and now geo-spatial (location based information) and tasks (applications for smart devices).

This evolution is going to require a re-organization of the web—making searching the web much more intuitive.

Bing has started down this path.

Currently, when you perform a search, you search alone. It is you and the vast expanses of indexed web pages, with the search engine trying (and most often only semi-succeeding) to serve up relevant results. Microsoft is going to introduce new Bing features that will add a social element.

Now you will have search results supplemented by popular opinion (the social masses), trusted (your inner circle of people you actually now) and expert opinion (industry and product leaders).

Social search supplementation will carry over to mobile devices, utilizing the location-based features geo-spatial to make the tasks you try to complete much easier and natural to complete.

Tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Nokia (which owns Navteq) are creating a fully digital representation of our world.

Now we can navigate the world immediately around us for services, products and discounts in real time.

Thanks,

ddv

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