Microsoft Bing on Monday announced a partnership with
GoFundMe to help small businesses affected by COVID-19.
Small business owners with a Bing Places for Business account can set up a
GoFundMe fundraiser to gain financial support.
Bing will showcase the GoFundMe fundraiser on the Bing local listing page. Bing Places customers can also update temporary store closure
information and create special announcements in Bing Places to help customers find the latest updates about businesses.
To get started, customers can create or sign in to their Bing Places for Business account, click the “Get Started” button in the “Set up a GoFundMe fundraiser” module in the
dashboard and to go to the GoFundMe fundraiser creation page, then follow the prompts on GoFundMe as directed, and the fundraiser will show up on Bing local listing pages, where customers can click
directly to GoFundMe to donate.
For those in education and research, Microsoft released a Bing-powered COVID-19 tracker widget for developers to embed on their sites. The data serves up based
on geography.
The dataset, pulled from publicly available sources like the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control, is available from bing.com/covid/dev or GitHub.
Microsoft aggregates the data and adds latitude and
longitude information to make it easier to use. Since COVID-19 data is constantly changing, the platform has 24-hour delay to ensure the accuracy of the data. Through the API, the data is available
for non-commercial, public use geared toward medical researchers, government agencies, and academic institutions.
The company is also releasing a Bing-powered COVID-19 widget, which can be
embedded in on the site with a few lines of HTML, and is customizable based on location and language.