Microsoft's Bing Shows Some IPhone Love
Microsoft may finally have figured out what makes the iPhone tick, but it’s the company’s Bing search engine that did it and not its mobile phone developers.
A couple of weekends ago, the Bing name seemed to be everywhere on the top iPhone app charts. At one point, Microsoft (MSFT) says, there were seven programs bearing the Bing name in the top 26 most frequently downloaded free iPhone apps. Most of them were apps that give consumers access to popular music for free, with names like Pop 100 by Bing, Ryan Seacrest’s MixTapes by Bing and Bing Hip Hop 100.
Most of the apps were created by outside developers. Bing paid the developers a sponsorship fee to keep the music free for consumers, at least for a limited time. The one catch: in most cases, consumers had to also download Microsoft’s main Bing app –which the company released last last year and which is used for searching Bing –before using the free sponsored apps.
