Announced Monday morning, and partially released over the night, Bing’s AppEx team has updated six core Windows 8 applications: News, Weather, Finance, Travel, Sports, and Maps. These are among the applications that are pre-installed on Windows 8, meaning that they are present on north of 60 million computers that run Microsoft’s new operating system. Before we dive into short summaries of the feature updates, keep in mind that inside these apps is a large piece of the Windows 8 experience; assuming that consumers use what is in front of them, these applications consume a considerable portion of usage time for the average Windows 8 user. Thus, they must be first-rate, or Windows 8 as a whole suffers. This is not the first set of updates that Microsoft has released for the stock set of Windows 8 applications, but it is among the largest wave of improvements.