Chromecast Adds Comedy Central, Sesame Street Go, Nickelodeon, TuneIn And More

Google continues to build out its lineup of content partners for the Chromecast streaming media device. This time, partners include Comedy Central, Sesame Street Go, Nickelodeon, and TuneIn, providing a good mix of comedy, kids and radio/podcast content for direct broadcast to your TV or display.

Other new channels include EPIX, YuppTV and Encore, which add additional TV and movie content, including live broadcast Indian television, and U.S. blockbusters. The new apps debuting today should help make Chromecast an even better companion for Thanksgiving gatherings, offering up something for the family to gather around while waiting on that turkey to brown.

It’s interesting to see some content partners, like TuneIn, debut on Android TV first and then make their way to the Chromecast later. Casting functionality is a different approach to the native, local software available on Android TV, but media providers testing both models will be able to shed more light on what stands the most chance of prevailing long-term.

On the one hand, Android TV built directly into televisions and set-top boxes shows a lot of promise – you don’t need anything else, just pick your app and go. On the other, smartphones are ubiquitous as it is, and you’re more likely to have the content you want on the device you always have with you than on a local service, especially if you’re using it away from home or at a new location.

So long as Chromecast keeps signing on media partners, and those same partners continue to loosen up about how and where their content gets consumed, my long bet is on simple streaming, rather than separate platforms.

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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