Kiran Upadhyay

Back in June, Google announced a rather nifty new feature coming to Chromecast: your friends and house guests would soon be able to connect to your Chromecast without being on your WiFi network, thanks to the clever use of magic ultrasonic sounds. Today, after a few months of silence, that feature launches. One bummer of a caveat, though: it’ll only work if your friend’s phone is running Android, for now. Why? It all comes down to that age-old problem: iOS apps aren’t allowed to do certain things required to make it work, so they’re rolling with it on Android until that changes. Guest mode is off by default. Flip it on, and your Chromecast will start displaying a PIN on its idle screen. Meanwhile, your TV will start emitting ultrasonic sounds, inaudible to the human ear*, which Chromecast-enabled apps on your phone will be listening for. When the two find each other, everything falls into place and the pairing is made.

In Silicon Valley and across the technology industry, there is a real risk of commoditizing engineers. What does that mean? Literally treating engineers like a commodity to be “bought” instead of thinking about the reasons they love to go to work. As the war for talent continues to heat up, hot startups and businesses need to think beyond throwing just money at the problem and gravitate more toward quality and longevity when it comes to making these strategic hiring moves. Throwing ridiculous amounts of money at an engineer is a possible signal that you don’t understand your audience, or your own value proposition – and it is a temporary fix, you’re allowing the market conditions to drive how you treat a very value-based part of the talent community. Money alone isn’t the end all be all of solving problems or building a technology team when you need to differentiate yourself for the long term and retain the amazing engineers you work so hard to hire. It’s no secret that it’s re

Skype has been talking about, and demoing, its new real-time translation software for Skype for a while now, but users will begin getting first-hand experience with the tool as of today. The Skype Translator preview program begins welcoming its first participants into the fold, based on sign-ups to the Translator preview page we told you about in early November. The Skype Translator project offers on-the-fly translation of both spoken and written languages for participants in Skype conversations, making it possible for two people who speak completely different languages to communicate with virtually no barriers to understanding. The preview program starts with support for English and Spanish spoken translation, as well as over 40 languages for real-time text chat. At launch, tis also limited to users of Windows 8.1 software (either desktop or mobile) so Microsoft is playing platform favorites with this early beta program. They’ve also already been testing it out with schools in

For a long time, if you wanted to get into PC gaming and experience the highest quality models, textures, and shaders that developers could come up with, you had to buy an overpriced gaming rig from someone like Alienware, a more affordable PC from a shady OEM, or build a machine yourself. It was easier and cheaper to just buy a console. That’s no longer the case. Pushed by Valve’s Steam Box initiative, several manufacturers have come out with affordable laptops and desktops that can play games at really high settings as long as you’re willing to play at reasonable resolutions — generally, 1080p HD. Curious to see what life was like with an affordable Windows gaming PC in the form factor of a console, I bought the $799 Alienware Alpha early last week. As it turns out, it’s pretty awesome. I don’t have a high resolution monitor to play on, so I hooked it up to the 39-inch TV my roommates and I have in our living room. At 1080p, it’s been able to play any game I’ve thrown at it at H

Remember back in November of last year when I wrote that YouTube needed to build its own tool for making GIFs from videos? Some called me crazy. Many, however, agreed completely. It seems YouTube agreed, too. YouTube is now quietly rolling out its own GIF maker. It doesn’t seem to be enabled on all videos just yet, but it’s definitely there for some. Take, for example, pretty much any video from PBS’ Idea Channel (as spotted first by Andy Baio). Click to one of their videos, hit the share button, and GIF away. GIF creation through the tool is quite simple: tap the share button, set your start/end points, set any captions you might want, and create away. The tool is super fast, and YouTube hosts the GIFs themselves. The final look of the tool isn’t too unlike the mockup I did back with that first post, which means I’m totally going to take 100 percent credit for this idea despite the fact it had probably been in the works for months/years. Need to make a GIF now, but YouTub

In a flawed bit of analysis, Nielsen researchers are claiming that e-book adoption is slow among teens, an interesting finding if it were actually true. “While 20% of teens [are] purchasing e-books, 25% of 30–44 year olds and 23% of 18–29 year olds buy digital copies,” said the report. Despite teens’ tech-savvy reputation, this group continues to lag behind adults when it comes to reading e-books, even with the young adult genre’s digital growth relative to the total e-book market. While 20% of teens purchasing e-books, 25% of 30-44 year olds and 23% of 18-29 year olds buy digital copies. While younger readers are open to e-books as a format, teens continue to express a preference for print that may seem to be at odds with their perceived digital know-how.Several factors may play a role in teens’ tendency toward printed publications. Parents’ preference for print could have an effect or teens’ lack of credit cards for online purchases. But another explanation may be teens’ penc

Remember Wahooly? We wrote about the startup a couple of years ago, describing it as “Klout meets Kickstarter” because it allowed users to gain startup equity in exchange for promoting the company on social media. Since then, Wahooly joined the AngelPad accelerator, rebranded as Chasm.io, and shifted focus to reciprocal sharing (“I’ll tweet your link if you tweet mine”). Now it’s announcing a merger with Loot, an Orlando, Fla.-based startup. Chasm.io co-founder and CEO Dana Severson told me that the merger basically means two things — he’s joining Loot as vice president of sales and marketing, and he’ll be working to bring Wahooly/Chasm.io’s customers onto Loot. So, what is Loot? It’s a mobile app where marketers can offer cash and other rewards to users who perform tasks, like taking photos or sharing content on social media. Severson noted that those tasks don’t have to involve social sharing at all — marketers could just ask you to download an app and play for a certain peri