Google Now Lets You Make Free One Minute International Calls

Need to make an international phone call, but don’t want to deal with the mystery connection fees and huge minute-by-minute charges?

Google has just quietly launched a rather nifty new feature: free international calling to 25 different countries through Hangouts/Gmail/Google+.

The catch, if you want to call it that: only the first 60 seconds are free. After you burn through that first minute, it’ll go back to costing a few cents per minute.

One other weird bit: according to Google’s instructions on how to make this work, you’ll need to have some calling credit on your Google account (presumably for them to charge if you go over the 60-second limit.) On the (huge) upside, the account being pre-paid means no massive surprise charges.

60 seconds, or just enough time to say “Hey, man — you’re not online. Get on [insert your favorite free Voice Over IP service here] so we can talk for more than 60 seconds.”

The countries that can be called for a minute on the house:

Australia
Belgium
Brazil
Canada
China
Dominican Republic
France
Germany
India
Indonesia
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Mexico
Netherlands
Norway
Peru
Poland
Russia
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
UK
As before, calls to the US are free beyond the 60-second limit — a feature that I use pretty much every day, because the cell signal at my house is garbage and T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi calling doesn’t work with my Nexus 5 yet.

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document? That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...

Kiran Upadhyay

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