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Google on Tuesday announced a minor feature addition that will likely take the online video world by storm: YouTube slow motion videos. The company claims its tool can create a smooth, slomo video that looks as if it was filmed with a high-speed camera.

To create a slomo video, visit the Enhancements tool or the YouTube Editor and apply it to one of your existing videos. You’ll get a smooth, slomo video that makes it look like it was filmed with a high-speed camera. Here’s a video reduced to 1/8th speed to give you an idea how it looks:

Below is a before and after example. Here’s the original video:
Before:

This is the same video reduced to one-eighth the speed:
After:
We’re wondering what kind of impact this feature addition will have, now that slomo can be imitated by anyone who uploads videos to YouTube. There will definitely be a surge of such videos at first, but will the overall popularity stay at the new high, will it fall back down to its current level, or will it hit a new low?

Google seems to think this is a good thing: “What’s the best way to make slomo better? Let everyone make their own slomo video on YouTube.”
If you’re wondering, YouTube currently also offers the following enhancements:

1. Auto-fix: Performs a one click-fix to enhance the video’s lighting and color.
2. Lighting and color: To manually adjust lighting and color, click the icon next to Auto-fix to open a panel of controls.
3. Stabilize: Adjusts the video to correct any shakiness.
4. Trim: Clip parts off the beginning and/or end of your video.
5. Filters: The left side of the page shows pre-set color filters that you can apply to your video to give them a stylish and unique look.
6. Face blurring: Protect the anonymity of people in your video.

You’ll notice that none of these are based on a specific type of video, however, so today’s feature addition is arguably the most interesting yet.

Source - www.youtubecreator.blogspot.in, www.thenextweb.com

Google’s former try on a social network, Buzz, has gone through a slow, painful death behind closed doors, and it seems as if Google has finally decided to officially pull the plug on the service. After being unavailable to the general public for a year, Google announced on Saturday that all Google Buzz posts will be moved to Google Drive.

Back in February 2010, Google launched Buzz, perhaps a precursor to Google+, and was a service that the company hoped would bring you the news and keep the chatter to a minimum.

More than a year later, Google Buzz was shuttered and company Vice President of Product Bradley Horowitz said at the time that the lessons that Google learned from the products short existence would be used in other services like Google+.
Google says that it will transition all user data from Buzz over to Google Drive till July 17th — none of which will count against a user’s storage limit. The first set of files are private and contain a snapshot of the public and private Buzz posts that a user authored. 

The second set of files will be a user’s public posts on Buzz and be viewable to anyone with access to the link. Google says that these posts could appear in search results and in their Google Profile, if it’s linked to the Buzz posts.

Comments made on Buzz posts in the past will be saved to the author’s files and not yours. Authors are the only ones that can change the sharing settings of those files — Google emphasizes that should the author make their posts public and you have a comment on there, you have no control over its appearance. The company’s response to any reaction: delete your Buzz content now if you don’t want that to happen.

Google says all Buzz files will be treated “the same as any other Drive file”, meaning that they can be downloaded, updated, or deleted.

If you’re interested in finding out what you’ve shared or commented on, you can do so by going to your Google profile page.

Source :- www.thenextweb.com, www.makeuseof.com, Google News, Google Drive Blog.

This means that by using the “Reset profile settings” users can revert any changes that were made to their browser either by themselves or by malware, The Next Web reports.
All settings are reset to their original state, without wasting time to do everything manually.
The feature lets you reset the default search engine, homepage, content settings, cookies and site data, as well as the extensions that were added to the browser.
We can assume that the list will change, with a possible future version allowing users to choose in more detail what they want to reset and what to keep the same.
Google has been ramping up its efforts to fight malware targeting Chrome, apps and extensions.
Chromium is the open source Web browser project that shares much of the same code as Google Chrome. Google often adds new features there first.
Source :- www.thenextweb.com, www.softpedia.com

If you don’t see the point of keeping data you have stored across assorted Google services separate then you’re in luck: The company agrees with you. So now your storage will be shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+.

Google on Monday announced a change to how it offers free cloud storage to its users: 15GB will now be shared across Google Drive, Gmail, and Google+. This change will start rolling out over the next couple of weeks.
Previously, Google offered 10GB for Gmail plus another 5GB for Drive and Google+ Photos. Now the company has decided that it makes more sense to unify the free storage across its three services.
As part of the change, Google is tweaking its Drive storage page to show a pie chart that breaks down your storage use across the trio. Here’s how it looks:
As before, you can still upgrade your storage space. Plans range from $4.99 per month for 100GB to $799.99 per month for 16TB.
What is most interesting for Gmail users here is that the 25GB upgrade is no longer the limit. Any additional storage you purchase will also apply to Google’s email service.

Google Apps

The Google Apps story is only slightly different: Google is offering its business customers 30GB of unified storage across Drive and Gmail. Storage will also be shared with photos customers upload to Google+ larger than 2048px, and just as before, files created in Docs, Sheets and Slides don’t count against this storage quota.
Here’s the updated Google Drive storage page for enterprise customers:
Google Apps customers are also no longer limited to 25GB for their inboxes. Once again, additional purchased storage can be shared and used by Gmail.
This unification will help Google market how much storage it offers by default, as well as push its storage plans to existing users. It’s not so much a smart move, as a necessary and obvious one.

Source :- www.googledrive.blogspot.com, www.bgr.com & www.thenextweb.com.

Over the years, you’ve continued to surprise and delight us. And the past year was no exception. Who would have guessed that a tux-rocking K-pop star would shatter records left and right or that Sesame Street would go global with 1 billion views? That’s one of our favorite things about our global audience: you’re as unpredictable as you are creative and irreverent.

The Chromebook Pixel comes with a 12.85-inch high resolution IPS display (2560×1700), equal to 239 PPI, at a rather unorthodox 3:2 aspect ratio.
Under the hood is an Intel Core i5 Ivy Bridge processor with Panter Point PCH, along with 4GB of DDR3 RAM. There’s only 32GB of storage via an SSD, but that’s bolstered by 1TB of additional cloud storage through Google Drive.

Jealous yet? We are.

 Source :- www.thenextweb.com

Via: www.cnbc.com, www.bgr.com

Source: Anonymous [1], Anonymous [2]

Facebook has just acquired Parse, marking its entry into a whole new business category: paid tools and services for developing mobile apps.
The company is buying the mobile-backend-as-a-service startup (yes, the industry acronym is mBaaS) in a deal that we’ve heard is worth $85 million. [Update: And we're hearing that excludes retention.] Neither company is commenting on the size of the deal, except that Facebook said it’s not “material.”

Parse was founded about two years ago by a small group of seasoned Googlers and Y Combinator alums who got together to build a useful set of back-end tools for mobile developers. They originally called their back-end service, the “Heroku” of mobile in a homage to what was one of YC’s biggest exits to date — the $212 million sale of Heroku to Salesforce.com. They offer services that help mobile developers store data in the cloud, manage identity log-ins, handle push notifications and run custom code in the cloud.
Facebook won the deal amid what we’ve heard was a competitive process with many of other Valley’s other biggest potential buyers. Parse CEO and co-founder Ilya Sukhar said that he chose Facebook over other suitors — without naming names — because the company was a better cultural fit.
“I don’t think any of the other conversations created anywhere near the excitement level that we had for Facebook,” he said in an interview.

Why Parse? Facebook is in a big push to become more relevant than ever to mobile developers. It doesn’t own its own mobile OS like Apple or Google. It doesn’t make its own devices.
Instead, it’s a horizontal social and identity layer that runs through thousands of apps of iOS and Android, in deep custom integrations in devices made by hardware makers like HTC, and in its latest project, Facebook Home.

In that sense, Facebook has to prove value to mobile developers in other ways. Facebook integrations can make apps stickier when users add friends, and the company’s mobile app install ads help developers acquire new users.

Now through the Parse deal, the company will be able to offer back-end services for data storage, notifications and user management. This is a brand new kind of revenue stream for Facebook, as the company is keeping Parse’s freemium revenue model. Parse currently has over 60,000 apps and roughly the same number of developers. They focus on monetizing the top 10 percent of their clientele.
“This fills out one of the pillars of Facebook platform that we’ve been thinking about for awhile,” said Facebook’s Director of Product Management Doug Purdy. “Since 2007, the Facebook platform has been about being an identity mechanism with sharing. But over the course of the last six months, we’ve been thinking about how we can help applications get discovered and how they can be monetized.”

He added, “In order to provide the best experience possible, developers also need to build a whole host of infrastructure. Parse is a natural fit. They’ve really just abstracted away a lot of the work necessary to get an app up and running.”

The deal is a big exit for Parse, which had raised just $7 million to date from investors including Ignition Partners, Start Fund, Google Ventures, Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Data Collective, Yuri Milner, Aaron Iba, Garry Tan, Justin Kan, Chris Fanini, Sean Knapp, Don Dodge and David Rusenko.

As for Parse users, the company says apps won’t be affected in any way, that developers won’t have to integrate Facebook and that existing contracts will be honored. Parse has a freemium model with a basic free version for up to 1 million requests or pushes per month and a limit of 20 bursts per second. A lowest paid version is $199 a month with 15 million requests a month, 5 million pushes per month and a burst limit of 40 per second. Then there’s an enterprise version where the rates are negotiable.

In the long-run, by getting closer to the development process Facebook could increase the likelihood that third-party apps integrate with them and buy their ads. When added to the direct fees Facebook will collect from Parse subscribers, the acquisition could become a critical part of how Facebook earns money from the burgeoning app economy.

Parse has come a long way. In just under two years, we’ve gone from a rough prototype to powering tens of thousands of apps for a very broad spectrum of customers.
Some of the world’s best brands trust us with their entire mobile presence, and a growing number of the world’s brightest independent developers trust us with their next big thing. We couldn’t be happier.
As stewards of a good thing, we’re always thinking about the next step in growing Parse to become a leading platform in this age of mobile apps.
These steps come in all sizes. Most are small and incremental. Some are larger. Today we’re excited to announce a pretty big one.
Parse has agreed to be acquired by Facebook. We expect the transaction to close shortly. Rest assured, Parse is not going away. It’s going to get better.
We’ve worked with Facebook for some time, and together we will continue offering our products and services. Check out Facebook’s blog post for more on this.
Combining forces with a partner like Facebook makes a lot of sense. In a short amount of time, we’ve built up a core technology and a great community of developers. Bringing that to Facebook allows us to work with their incredible talent and resources to build the ideal platform for developers.
We think this is the right way to accomplish what we set out to do. We’re excited about the future of Parse!
Ilya, Kevin, and James

And here’s Facebook’s statement from Director of Product Management Doug Purdy:

Last week, we hosted our first Mobile Developer Conference, where we launched several new products to help mobile developers integrate Facebook: Open Graph for mobile, better Facebook Login, and new developer tools. Today, we’re making it even easier to build mobile apps with Facebook Platform by announcing that we have entered into an agreement to acquire Parse, a cloud-based platform that provides scalable cross-platform services and tools for developers.
By making Parse a part of Facebook Platform, we want to enable developers to rapidly build apps that span mobile platforms and devices. Parse makes this possible by allowing developers to work with native objects that provide backend services for data storage, notifications, user management, and more. This removes the need to manage servers and a complex infrastructure, so you can simply focus on building great user experiences.
We’ve worked closely with the Parse team and have seen first-hand how important their solutions and platform are to developers. We don’t intend to change this. We will continue offering their products and services, and we’re excited to expand what Facebook and Parse can provide together.

The buy seems largely motivated by Facebook's continued interest in conquering mobile, an effort that recently culminated in the release of Facebook Home. Parse provides the social network with a new way to go about its mobile-first mission; it offers the company instant access to a pool of mobile developers who might be more motivated to weave Facebook hooks into their applications. Facebook also will, by continuing to sell and manage Parse's backend services, pick up an entirely new revenue stream and become a service provider of a different kind.

Parse offers a free plan for developers with smaller application audiences, but sells a paid service that starts at $199 per month.

Source :- www.developers.facebook.com, www.techcrunch.com, www.news.cnet.com