Microsoft has pushed out its Bing Pulse instant polling to everyone allowing anyone interested in gathering quick sentiments about a certain matter from general public in real time.
Initially available to TV Stations and event planners, Bing Pulse was setup and configured on request by a 5-men team at Microsoft. Those hosting polls will request their viewers or participants to visit a specific site asking for their sentiments on a particular topic.
Fox News was the first one to try out Bing Pulse with President Obama’s State of the Union address and it managed to garner over 12.9 million votes from visitors.
With the latest public release, anyone can now use Bing Pulse by simply creating an account and start putting together a Pulse vote around an event. Considering how the system has been used till now, the polling works when it is closely knit around an event or show or something similar. Microsoft senior director Greg Shaw echoes this stating that Bing Pulse will become a part of such an event and will increase and drive user engagement.
According a certain research carried out by Microsoft Research, there are as many as 1.8 million large conferences and events being held across the globe annually and Redmond is trying to grab a fair share of this pie with Bing Pule. Previously companies looking for such realtime polling would either go for a dedicated app or similar mechanism which would be priced at per clicks making the whole idea a lot of mostly and in most cases infeasible.
Those looking to try their hands on the polling system would be glad to know that Pulse 2.0 is free until January 2015 after which Microsoft will start charging. Pricing hasn’t been announced yet as the team itself hasn’t figured out what it will be charging for the service, but our bet is that Microsoft will offer a monthly/annual subscription and possibly a pay-per-use arrangement as well.
