Kiran Upadhyay

Facebook wants to turn mindless, passive video consumption into “time well spent,” and now it’s giving social media stars a powerful tool to foster communities around their content. Today Facebook launches Facebook Creator, offering influencers Live Creative Kit for adding intros and outros to broadcasts, a unified inbox of Facebook and Instagram comments plus Messenger chats, cross-posting to Twitter and expansive analytics. Facebook promised the Creator app back in June at VidCon and today it launches globally on iOS with Android planned for the coming months. It’s actually a rebrand and update of the 2014 Facebook Mentions app that was only available to verified public figures and Pages, but now is open to everyone. Weirdly, it still appears as “Mentions” in the App Store for now.

Here is a small but fun experiment that YouTube is rolling out today: videos that let you switch between different camera angles while the video is playing. These multi-angle videos are only an experiment right now and there’s only one video that actually showcases this feature so far. If you want to give this a try, head over to Madilyn Bailey’s YouTube channel — she’s a popular indie artist on YouTube who is probably best known for her cover songs. The YouTube team took her performance at the most recent YouTube Music Night and turned it into a multi-angle video. As YouTube tells me, the process of creating these videos is automatic on the user’s side, but the technology the team developed to support this is not ready to scale to everyone yet. YouTube is not the first video site that is trying this. Over the years, there have been multiple startups that focused on nothing else but developing similar features. And there have been apps like the Marc Cuban- and 500 Startups-back...

Be My Eyes, a new Danish non-profit ‘startup’, has taken a commodity technology, the humble video call, and, by combining it with a community of sighted volunteers, used it as the basis for an iOS app that lets you help a visually-impaired person ‘see’ through their phone’s video camera. Specifically, Be My Eyes — which recently caught the attention of Twitter and Square founder Jack Dorsey — works as follows: If you’re a sighted person you register with the service and wait for the app to send you a notification that a visually-impaired person who has also signed up requires help. Once a match is found, the two of you are connected via an audio/video call, essentially enabling you to ‘lend’ your eyes to the visually-impaired person who points their phone’s rear-facing camera at whatever it is they want to see. The two of you then collaborate over the call to solve the problem. Unfortunately, however, I’ve been unable to try out the app for myself. Since officially launching yes...

New changes to Skype and the support of third party apps have left many users frustrated, particularly where call recording is concerned. With suggestions that the service isn’t as secure as once thought, could now be the time to start looking for an alternative VoIP call recording service? Quit Skype? Are You Mad?! Had you told me 12 months ago that Microsoft was going to disable the Skype desktop API, thus rendering many third-party call recorders useless, I’d have suspected you (or they) were mad.  Although a temporary delay has been announced , the writing is clearly on the wall. Like many people, I use Skype extensively, both as a telephony system (I work from home, and my Office 365 subscription gives me free monthly call credit) and for podcasting with two online colleagues. The best solution for podcasting in this way (and for bringing in someone over the phone) is a call recording app – I use  MP3 SkypeCallRecorder . To find that the technology giant ...

Facebook is due to announce the launch of video advertisements in users’ news feeds on Tuesday, according to  The Wall Street Journal , citing anonymous sources. The newspaper added that the new program, which has been anticipated for some time now, is set to launch on Thursday on mobile applications as well as on the desktop browser. The ads apparently are designed to play automatically—a move that is surely bound to irritate many users of the social network.  Ad Age   reported  in September 2013 that Facebook video ads had been originally slated for October 2013, but were then delayed. The  Journal , which added that Facebook would charge $2 million per day to let advertisers reach its data-rich user based, noted that a teaser for the Lions Gate film “Divergent” is expected to be one of the first ads. Last week, TechCrunch published what it claimed was a leaked slide deck for video ads on Facebook. Facebook continues to face on...

Cloud storage service Box — which some say is great for photo storage — has stepped into the online collaborative note-taking game with the launch of  Box Notes , a new free service that lets you create documents, share them with friends and work on them in real time. Box Notes is currently in beta and you can sign up to ask for an invitation. A few users we know have already got access to the service a few hours after registering their email. Essentially, Box Notes is a blank online text field for you to start writing. The rich text formatting tools aren’t shown by default, but highlighting any word will have those appear for you to add a link or leave a comment. The commenting system is part of the focus on collaboration, encouraging users to add profile pics so your coworkers can see you through the new ‘note heads’ — similar to chat heads — which are little circles with your picture. When in collaboration mode, these note heads always show up outside the lef...

Spare a thought if you will for the hipsters amongst us, and the travails they face on a daily basis. It’s hard finding the right Urban Outfitters flannel and skinny-jeans combo to go with your finely-groomed, ironic upper lip hair. It’s hard when you rush to your nearby organic-cooperative craft ale bar only to find that their seemingly endless supply of copies of Vice Magazine have run out. Perhaps most crucially, it’s hard finding bands to talk about that your equally hip friends have never heard of. MusicFellas  aims to solve the latter problem. Recently formed in India by four enterprising music fans, it aims to offer a service that bridges functionality found in iTunes and Spotify, and make it easy to discover quality Indie music, as well as showcasing undiscovered artists. It also hopes to revolutionize the way we consume and pay for music. An ambitious project if there ever was one. But does it deliver, or does it hit a bum note? A Beautiful Streaming...

YouTube is great to check out videos on the fly. It’s fast, dynamic and incredibly easy to find other related videos. However, if you have to go offline, that won’t do you much good. Why not download those videos to your computer instead? Not only does this let your enjoy your videos offline, you can also use them in presentations or your own projects. Downloading a single YouTube video is simple, but it’s a bit harder to download all the videos from a particular YouTube channel in one go. Today we’ll be offering you three ways to tackle this problem. 1.  4K Video Downloader  (Cross-platform) One of the easiest ways to download all the videos from a particular channel on YouTube is by using third-party software like  4K Video Downloader . A big advantage of this particular tool is that it is available for all operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. This makes it a great all-round tool that solves our problem. However, depending on your needs, it may come at a p...

How do you usually spend your Friday nights? In the pub with your mates? With an  Xbox  controller in your hands? Or do you prefer to be curled up on the sofa in a dimly-lit living room, peering at your television screen, awaiting the next gallon of blood to  trickle across the screen ? If you chose the latter option then you’re in the right place. The Internet Archive is home to  gigabytes of media  that anyone can view or download for free. Finding what you’re looking for can often prove problematic however, mainly because there’s just  so much  to see. Those of you who are fond of suspense, thrills, blood and guts will be pleased to know we’ve hacked and slashed our way through the tripe to find some of the best  scary films available  in the public domain. Nosferatu  (1922) [ IMDB ] An incredibly important, successful and controversial production for a variety of different reasons. The film was an unofficial movie adapta...

Sometimes I confuse the things I did in real life with things I did in video games. Like that one time I discovered a giant Duracell battery in my backyard and had to carry it all the way back to my ship… errr. Anyway, what would it be like if video game characters were real? And they were all up on that Facebook shiz? This might be what it would look like.

Looking as stylish as a large i-phone, this $35 "low-cost computing-cum-access device" is a 5/7/9 inch touchscreen gadget packed with internet browsers, PDF reader, video conferencing facilities, open office, sci-lab, media player, remote device management capability, multimedia input-output interfa

This post will be updated: more details to follow (scroll down) -- http://www.google.com/tv -- coming Fall 2010! We currently spend more time watching TV than we have ever done throughout history. Advertisers spend $70 billion dollars a year on TV advertising. There are over 4 billion TV viewers around the world -- and only 1 billion PC users! TV just works. It gives you access to really cool stuff. It's pervasive -- you don't have to think about how it works. It has hardly evolved; it has basically been the same service. Today we are torn between PC and TV. Split loyalty -- they are both awesome. Now, people have tried to bring the Web to the television before, but it's always been a closed system with limited numbers of apps and a cut-down cross-section of the actual Web. The answer: Google TV -- the best of TV and the best of the Web. A new platform that will change the future of television. The key is a new method of navigation: with Google TV you...

We've known about Microsoft's plans to release a stripped-down, free version of Office 2010 for quite some time. What's been slightly less publicized is the fact that Office Starter will only be available on brand new computers. That doesn't seem like such a big deal, but there's more to the story. Take a look at the image above. Microsoft wants OEMs to preload Office 2010 (most big companies like Dell, HP, Acer, Toshiba, etc. already do this). However, instead of using a free 60-day trial like they did with Office 2007, Microsoft wants those same OEMs to pony up for Office Starter. If they're willing to tack on the added bloat of the Bing Bar and Live Essentials, it'll only cost them $2 per PC -- otherwise, it's $5. That doesn't seem like much, but you're talking about millions of new PCs over the next three or four years (likely how long it will be until Office 2010 is replaced). OEMs, maybe it's time to look at alternatives. Maybe ...

A large part of our time on the computer is spent within the browser these days. And if the recent past is any indicator, this will continue to grow in the future as well with the likes of Chrome OS where all you get is a web browser to interact with your computer and the outside world. A good thing about browsers as opposed to other desktop software is the fact that they are extensible. Firefox and Chrome are excellent examples of the same. Many Google chrome add-ons and extensions are available for customizing almost every aspect of browsing. The one aspect we are going to look into here is quick navigation. Google’s Chrome OS Takes Devices Anywhere Granted, you can use keyboard shortcuts for faster navigation and browsing but with so many add-ons available, there are plenty of choices to make your pick and navigate faster with a lot less work by combining the functionality offered by various extensions. Here are 5 of the better ones: Google’s Chrome OS Wounds Windows, Undermines...