Microsoft Embracing Bitcoin?

It seems like almost daily bitcoin is being mentioned in traditional media and other news outlets. Either a new company announces they will begin accepting bitcoins or some new bitcoin related product or servic is released. It seems like there is no stopping the crypto currency's momentum as more and more people become aware of what bitcoin is and start buying or mining bitcoins themselves. Some of the companies may be unknown start-ups but there are also many large, highly reputable corporations. Well now you can include Microsoft to that list. While you cannot buy a new surface tablet with bitcoins, they are promoting another bitcoin related item on the Bing search engine. Now you can actually get bitcoins from Bing, via their Bing Rewards program which awards points for doing searches or other easy tasks that can be traded in for all kinds of items. All you need to do is use the Bing search engine and you accumulate points each day. Once you save up enough points you can use them to get different rewards such as gift cards from many different retailers and access to services such as hulu plus or Xbox Live. There are also different sweepstakes and giveaways that you can enter to win various items. And now with the newest giveaway you can win $500 worth of bitcoins! Although you can't use your bitcoins to buy anything from Microsoft, I think this is a step in the right direction for the Redmond, Washington based company. Who knows, maybe in the future you will be able to shop from the Microsoft store and use bitcoins to pay. Even if this never happens maybe it will introduce bitcoin to people who have never heard of it before and make others more intrigued so they want to find out more about crypto coins, especially bitcoin. The more people who know about it and tell others about it, the more the currency will be worth because more and more people will be wanting to join in on the crypto coin revolution.

Yahoo and Bing Announce New Ammended Search Partnership

As the number two and three players of the top three search engines on the internet, Bing and Yahoo have announced a recent ammendment to their search relationship, to "improve the search experience, create value for advertisers and establish ongoing stability for partners." The two companies have had an agreement in place since 2009 and this is just an evolution of that partnership. Yahoo will continue to serve Bing Ads and will now be able to give consumers the same experience on both mobile and desktop platforms. Microsoft will be in charge of all ads through the Bing Ads services while Yahoo will be the sole salesforce for the Yahoo Gemini platform, allowing the sales and engineering teams for each product to operate closely together in order to serve advertisers best. Microsoft gives Yahoo a portion of the revenue obtained through Yahoo's search user, a fact that remains unchanged with this update to their agreement. For more information, the full press release is available here.