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Facebook gives Messenger a Material Design makeover on Android

Confirming reports from earlier this year, which spoke of a forthcoming revamp of the Facebook Messenger application for Android devices, Facebook today began rolling out a new, Material Design-styled version of Messenger on Android to all users worldwide. The updated application now features a bright blue navigation bar at the top of the screen with buttons to access chat, groups, settings…

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Rando is a random social sharing app that lets you play Russian Roulette with photos, GIFs and more

A new app from David Barnard, the developer behind the popular Launch Center Pro, promises to be the cure for boredom. Rando, as the app is called, offers a crazy twist on our carefully curated online personas — instead of allowing you to choose a photo or GIF to share with friends, Rando will randomly pick one for you. You can also share random text quotes, then post them to Facebook…

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Two new apps, Daycap and VideoSlam, help you create GIFs and videos to remember your day

Two recently launched applications, Daycap and VideoSlam, make it easy to summarize your day in the format of videos or GIFs, which can then be shared out to social media. Do you need these apps on your iPhone? No. Are you totally going to download them on your lunch break because it’s Friday, they sound fun, and those TPS reports can wait? Yep! Daycap The first application,…

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AT&T will launch online-only packages for DirecTV this year

In an effort to appeal to cord cutters, AT&T will launch three new services that allow users to stream DirecTV online without an annual contract, satellite dish, or set-top box. The plans—called DirecTV Now, DirecTV Mobile, and DirecTV Preview—will be available in the fourth quarter of this year.

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3 gadgets not quite ready for prime time

If flying cars and personal assistants that live inside your light bulbs sound far-fetched, think again. The high-tech apps and devices that debuted at CES 2016 this year prove we’re living in the future. Let’s look at how these products are set to shape — or reshape — our worlds.

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Weebly expands beyond easy-to-build websites, adds easy-to-build marketing emails

Weebly isn’t just for building websites anymore — it recently launched Promote, a platform for building marketing emails. CEO David Rusenko said this is actually Weebly’s second big expansion, after adding an e-commerce platform. But at least e-commerce is, y’know, part of a website. Why move into emails? “Email marketing is the number two concern for small…

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Chase down those ZZZ’s with new Sleepfulness app

If you’ve ever looked at meditation and thought “that stuff just sends me to sleep,” you may just be onto something. Mindfulness Everywhere recently released Sleepfulness, an app to help you pull the plug on yet another long and horrific day, and dispatch you off to the land of nod. “A good night’s sleep means you have a gentler, brighter, and more focused…

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HBO will launch streaming services in Brazil and Argentina this year

HBO announced today it would be expanding its streaming footprint with the launch of standalone streaming services in Brazil and Argentina, which are set to go by year’s end. These join the recently announced standalone service arriving in Spain, also before year’s end, as well as the network’s streaming services that are live now in nine countries…

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Slack voice calling arrives on desktop

Slack was being cheeky when yesterday it said voice chat would start testing “very, very soon”. Today the new “Calls” feature starting rolling out on Slack for desktop and on the Chrome browser.
It lets you start a private Slack Call or launch a conference call in a channel that anyone can join with a click. And in keeping with Slack’s lighthearted style, once…

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Microsoft will soon offer a HoloLens emulator for developers

Want to develop for Microsoft’s HoloLens mixed-reality platform but don’t want to pay $3,000 for the developer kit? Until now, it looked like you were out of luck, but as Microsoft announced today, you will soon be able to use a HoloLens emulator to write your applications, even if you don’t own the actual hardware.

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No More Voicemail is an app that kills voicemail so callers have to text you instead

Voicemail is so last century. The idea of phoning someone then leaving a rambling message when they don’t pick up seems decidedly antiquated in the age of instant connectivity, where friends, family, colleagues and others can be easily reached with a text. Voicemail is so over, in fact, that large corporations like JP Morgan and Coca-Cola have ditched the service entirely. If only…

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Facebook adds 36k Telenor employees to Facebook at Work as it gears up for global launch

Facebook at Work — the enterprise version of Facebook that lets businesses build their own social networks — has racked up over 60,000 companies on a waiting list while still in closed beta. And as it gears up for a full global launch and new features like an app platform later this year, Facebook is announcing its newest big customer. As of today, Telenor, the carrier based…

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Nanigans brings its social ad tools to Twitter

Social marketing company Nanigans announced today that it’s launching support for Twitter.
Nanigans is best known as a Facebook ad automation tool, but CEO Ric Calvillo said last year that one reason for raising the company’s $24 million Series B was to expand beyond Facebook. He’s also started to make good on that by launching on Instagram last August.

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Facebook fights Periscope by showing Live videos higher than saved streams

It doesn’t matter if it was Live if you missed it. And Facebook knows that people watch actually Live streams 3X longer than saved ones. So it’s changing the News Feed to prefer on-going broadcasts. Twitter’s big advantage with Periscope is that they’re both inherently real-time platforms. Periscopes generate notifications for all your followers there, and show up…

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Slack will soon start testing voice and video chat

Slack is gunning for Skype and Google Hangouts with the 2016 product roadmap it revealed today. The biggest change coming: the ability to seamlessly turn a text chat into a voice or video chat will begin testing “very soon”. This builds on Slack’s January 2015 acquisition of Screenhero, when it said these features would eventually be released. At its customer conference in…