Last Thursday, NuTsie launched a new iPhone app called Top 100s by Year by Bing and within days it was the #1 download in the App Store. If you haven’t tried it, the app allows you to sort by year from 1948 to 2009 and hear the top songs from those years. Want to know the top songs from the year you were born or relive your high school favorites? Spin the wheel to find the year you’re looking for, click to listen and enjoy!

If you are looking for more information about the song, you can find it along with band info and song lyrics using Bing.

This $1.99 app is offered for FREE by Bing for a limited time. So make sure you download this app and give the Bing app for your iPhone a try while you are at it. Your feedback is always welcome and helps improve the app, in fact you may have already noticed some of the improvements based on your reviews to bring you more music and less interruptions. Let us know what you think on the Digital Dream Door Forums.

Wibe Wagemans - Bing for mobile

What better way to celebrate Earth Day then to congratulate Explorer Eric Larsen and his teammates Antony Jinman and Darcy St-Laurent on their arrival to the North Pole later today. What an amazing accomplishment! We thank them for making the trek to help bring awareness to climate change and for taking Bing along for the ride! 

Awhile back we mentioned that we had sponsored explorer Eric Larsen’s Save the Pole expedition, he had just returned from the South Pole and was getting ready to take off on the second leg of his trip. Destination: North Pole. It has been exciting keeping up with his day to day progress on his journey, from the many stories of how they maneuvered through the ice, to Eric having to get geared up in his dry suit to swim across open water dragging their equipment behind him. His use of social media during his expedition has enabled us to follow along and watch and learn from his travels; through posts on the blog on their website, updates on Twitter and posts on Facebook, we feel like we’ve been there every step of the way.

Eric still has one leg of his Save the Poles expedition which will take him to the top of Mt. Everest this fall and we will be there to cheer him on (ok…we will be there in spirit). You can find information on Eric and his quest on his website, read the latest news and discussions about his expeditions on Newsvine as well get all the up to day information on Twitter and Facebook.

Like Eric says “Remember, it's cool to be cold. Save the Poles. Save the planet.”

Happy Earth Day!

Kristin Meldahl – Bing

Other posts of interest:

Discovering the World with Bing

The Bee is all the Buzz at Bing

The Bing Student Earth Day Photo Contest Finalists

Earth Hour on the homepage

Bing’s Earth Day Photo Contest for Students

The Bing team has an enormous amount of pride and respect for the community we’re a part of in the Pacific Northwest. We think that this is a special place and are we’re thankful for the people and companies who make living and working here what it is. This is why we’re very pleased to join the Seattle Storm today in announcing a multi-year marquee partnership.

This partnership helps Bing engage with Storm’s dedicated fan base in a unique way. Bing is now the official decision engine of the Seattle Storm and you’ll see the Bing logo inside the arena, on the players’ game and practice jerseys, as well as on the big screen during games. We’re also extremely proud and excited that Bing will be the presenting sponsor of the Junior Storm program, a year round program dedicated to supporting youth basketball in our own community.

At the core of this partnership is our commitment to collaborate on community outreach and activities right here in our own backyard. We feel that it is important to show the value of women in sports and to engage kids with the excitement of women’s professional basketball.  Bing will be giving away thousands of Storm tickets to the local Boys and Girls Clubs to give them the opportunity to be inspired by watching players like Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson compete in world-class WNBA basketball.

Bing's Danielle Tiedt (2nd-L) and Karen Bryant 2nd-R) of the Seattle Storm along with players Ashley Robinson (43) Swin Cash (M) and Camille Little (20) unveil the team's new jersey as part of a sponsorship announcement at the Rainier Vista Boys and Girls Club in Seattle, Washington, on April 21, 2010. Rob Sorbo/Microsoft Handout

We are thrilled to be partnering with the Seattle Storm. We are proud of the community they have built in Seattle, and we look forward to many great seasons and great work in the years to come.

Danielle Tiedt – Bing General Manager

Other posts of interest:

Taking it to the field

The Bee is all the Buzz at Bing

With more than 200,000 votes cast in the final round of our student Earth Day Photo Contest, we’re pleased to announce that the winning photo was taken by Alan Bosse, a student studying web design at Gulf Coast Community College in Panama City, FL. His photo of a bee gathering the nectar of a passion fruit blossom was chosen by Bing users to be featured on our homepage in honor of the 40th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22. The photo, titled “Passion and Bee” from the 18+ age division, was taken in Long Beach, California using a digital Fujifilm Finepix S8100.

Photo by: Alan Bosse

Winners in the other age divisions included: a whale off the coast of Maui taken by a student in 4^th grade at Lomond View Elementary in Pleasant View, UT; a butterfly taken by a 7^th grader at Hommocks Middle School in Larchmont, NY; and an iguana in Puerto Rico shot by a high school senior at Princeton High School in Princeton, NJ. You can view all the 12 finalists in a slideshow here.

In addition to their sheer numbers, voters impressed us with their generosity. Bing gave out $5 DonorsChoose.org GivingCards each day during the finalist voting round. To date, people who voted have made donations on the DonorsChoose.org site to more than 6,500 projects across the country, with these projects impacting more than 170,000 students.

Bing will be bringing all of the division winners out to Redmond in late May to meet our team and help pick out photos that will appear on the Bing homepage. All of the finalists have won prizes for themselves and their schools to enable students to continue their passion of photography, including computer equipment, digital cameras and photographic printers.

Be sure to visit Bing tomorrow to see the winning photo on the homepage. Congrats again to Alan and our other finalists, and a big thanks to everyone that participated.

Stephanie Horstmanshof, Bing Homepage team

Other posts of interest:

The Bing Student Earth Day Photo Contest Finalists

Earth Hour on the homepage

Bing’s Earth Day Photo Contest for Students

The human ability to clearly articulate our ideas with conviction, fortitude and authenticity is something that should be developed and nurtured in our young people. Indeed one of Bing’s core missions is to provide a level of clarity on the web and help people find what they asked but also help them discover things that might be related and helpful to more fully informing them on the topic.

We want to foster this love of exploration and learning as well as the ability to articulate one’s beliefs in the leaders of tomorrow. To that end, Bing is working with world-renowned public  speaker Richard Greene and Avatar director James Cameron to host the “Words that Shook the World” competition.  The competition occurs in New York City on April 17 and is open to New York City high school students who register at www.WordsThatShookTheWorld.com/register.htm. Over $12,000 in scholarships are available to the students who deliver the best 2-3 minute speeches on “An Environmental Lesson I Learned from Avatar and How to Apply it in My Community, New York City, America and/or the World”. In addition to the competition, attendees will see a special screening of some of the highlights of Avatar and hear from James Cameron, learn public speaking secrets from Richard Greene, and will learn how Bing can help them become better informed and confident about their ideas.

The Words That Shook The World high school public speaking competitions are dedicated to finding and cultivating the next great speakers and leaders for America and are based on Richard Greene's book Words That Shook The World: 100 Years of Unforgettable Speeches and Events. Bing is proud to be a supporter of the competition as we recognize that reality of tomorrow starts with the dreams and passions of the kids today.

Hope to see you all in New York!

Stefan Weitz

Director, Bing

We’re happy to announce the 12 finalists in our student Earth Day Photo Contest. Voting is officially open! We were really impressed with the almost 17,000 photos that were submitted across the four age groups. Narrowing it down to the top 3 from each age group was quite a challenge, but we think you’ll like what you see.

You can view and vote on all 12 stunning Earth Day themed finalists on the contest site at www.earthdayphotocontest.com. Subjects range from coral to glaciers, even blue-footed boobies.  If you want to check out the competition, use our Visual Search gallery to search through some of the top entries, filter by school, school state, theme and other criteria. We were really excited to see that photos came from around the US, from Florida to California and everywhere in between.

Vote for your favorite photo now and you can help a school project of your choice through DonorsChoose.org. That’s right, Bing is giving out DonorsChoose.org GivingCards worth $5.00 each from April 13th to April 19^th. You can use these cards to donate towards a classroom project of your choice. Projects include new art supplies, helping to fund a school field trip, even environmental school projects. We’re giving these $5.00 DonorsChoose.org GivingCard to the first 20,000 people who vote each day. That means that every day from April 13th to April 19th you have another opportunity to vote in the contest and receive an additional GivingCard*. Pretty cool!

All finalists will win prizes for themselves and their schools. Division winners will also be flown out to Redmond, WA to meet our team and help pick out photos that will appear on the Bing homepage. The grand prize winner will also get their photo displayed on the Bing homepage on Earth Day, April 22.

Congratulations to all of the Earth Day Photo Contest finalists!

Stephanie Horstmanshof – Bing Homepage team

*Offer limited to one GivingCard per day per user from 4/13/10 – 4/19/10.  GivingCards may only be used at DonorsChoose.org and expire on 5/20/10.

Other posts of interest:

Bing’s Earth Day Photo Contest for Students

Add more Bing to your Windows 7 desktop

Have you ever searched for information on something that is happening right now, only to find out that there’s nothing matching what you’re looking for? News on an earthquake that just happened or information on a hot new product announcement may not show up until hours after the event actually occurred. One of the cool features that we have recently released will give you better relevance with real-time social results from the Twitter community.

Bing pulls in social content generated on Twitter to surface the most relevant updates within seconds of a breaking news event. From people on the ground tweeting about what’s happening around them to users sharing interesting news links while browsing at home, the Twitterati can be significantly faster than traditional media outlets in picking up information on breaking events. Further, the Twitterati also picks up information that the traditional media outlets often ignore – such as the latest viral video being shared online.

At Bing, we analyze what topics are generating the most interest on Twitter to bring you the latest and most interesting content. So if you wanted to find out more information on the just-announced Kin phone from Microsoft, you’ll be able to discover it on Bing as the announcement was being made and journalists started tweeting about the product.

On a related note, we are also using Twitter data to show you the most popular shared links for navigational queries. So if you’re looking for the most popular celebrity news on TMZ, Bing will show you which links people are sharing the most on Twitter.

We are currently testing these features with a small subset of our users and queries – so you may or may not see it appearing on your search results page. We plan to make the feature available to our users in the US within a short period. So please keep an eye out for our social results feature - you will start seeing it on your search results page very soon!

Lawrence Kim – Bing Social Search

Last November, we announced the launch of bing.com/twitter which pulls in real-time content from the Twitter community. We are now incorporating the same Twitter data into our main Bing search experience. You can read more on that announcement in these other posts of interest:

New Stuff Coming From Bing This Spring

Bing is Bringing Twitter Search to You