Slack introduces voice calls, brings group calls to paying users

Slack is officially moving away from being a messaging service to bringing in voice calls. All users, whether you use Windows or Mac apps, Google Chrome extension, or Android and iOS apps, have access to one-on-one voice calls. You should see a phone icon in the upper right portion of the channel header for those on the desktop, while those using the mobile app can “Start a call” in the app’s channel or DM drop-down menu.

If you want to make group calls in any channel or group DM, you need to be part of a paid team.  If someone from your team starts a group call, you’ll get a message prompting you to join the call. As mentioned before, calls also have the emoji response feature, which allows you to share what you think about the call or the topic you’re talking about.

Source: Slack

Deezer sells Stitcher to E.W. Scripps

Less than two years after Deezer bought podcast app Stitcher, the streaming music service is selling it off to media company E.W. Scripps for US$4.5 million. The Stitcher team will be joining Midroll Media, a podcast producer and advertising network. At the moment, Deezer says podcast content will be available on their platform. For how long, we can’t say. According to Scripps, Stitcher has 8.5 million registered users and is installed in 50 models of cars. The company didn’t say though how many active users the service has. Stitcher believes this acquisition will help both advertisers and content partners with “an expanded portfolio of opportunities” to help reach their target audience. We can’t say yet how they’d do that though.

Source: Engadget

Google turns your Live Photos into GIFs

A new Google app for iOS will turn your shaky Live Photos shot into a looping gif with its new app. Motion Stills combines Live Photos with their own video stabilization technology and their auto-creating gif capabilities to bring you images with moving foreground and backgrounds that are frozen. Think cinemagraphs. Without going into the technical explanation of how their technology works, it’s like Google added a virtual tripod to reduce the shakiness and its algorithm separates the moving objects in the foreground from the background to create the movement. Another thing is it chooses an optimal loop point so it cuts off before any awkward moments after you’ve thought you’ve ended a video but it’s still recording. It does this photo magic on your phone so it won’t even need to be online. But, of course, if you want to share these on social media, you’ll need to be connected.

Source: Engadget

Twitter redesigns Android app

Twitter is trying to align with the “best of Android” with its latest refresh of its app. And by aligning, they mean following the Material Design look. One of the new things the app has includes being able to swipe on the top bar to move between Home timeline, Notifications, and Direct Messages more easily. If you use Google’s native apps, Twitter’s new navigation menu will remind you of that. You can access that by swiping the screen from the left to see things like your profile, Highlights, lists, settings, and the Connect tab. Composing a tweet is much easier now as there’s a floating action button for it. The update is rolling out to all users globally so watch out for the update.

Source: Twitter