Hasta La Gadget!

Anyone who’s tried out the new Hangouts feature in Gmail in place of the traditional Google Talk option got a bit of surprise when they went to make an outbound call from their computer. That feature gets disabled when the new Hangouts replacement is switched on, leaving folks looking to make calls with no other option than to revert to the old Google Talk in Gmail or seek out another alternative. That’s apparently just a temporary change, though, as Google’s Nikhyl Singhal has now confirmed that both outbound and inbound calls will “soon be available.” Unfortunately, he’s not getting any more specific than that for the time being. He did, however, reiterate that “Hangouts is designed to be the future of Google Voice,” and that “making/receiving phone calls is just the beginning,” further adding that “future versions of Hangouts will integrate Google Voice more seamlessly.”

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Source: Nikhyl Singhai (Google+)

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s rumors, Yahoo and Tumblr have jointly announced a “definitive agreement” for the former to acquire the latter for $1.1 billion. The agreement makes it clear that Tumblr will be “independently operated as a separate business” with its own branding and line of development. A frankly worded press release says that this arms-length arrangement will help Yahoo “not to screw it up” and promises that the 300 million monthly visitors to the blogging site will continue to experience Tumblr’s “irreverence, wit, and commitment to empower creators.” If all this is to be believed, those who have allegedly fled to WordPress, for fear of Tumblr being shut down or re-versioned, may have slightly jumped the gun.

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Source: yahoo.tumblr.com

That cat’s out of the bag a day early, it seems. Yahoo’s board has approved a $1.1 billion cash deal to purchase the blogging site Tumblr, according to The Wall Street Journal. We were expecting Yahoo to announce the acquisition during tomorrow’s NYC media event — CEO Marissa Mayer may instead use the last-minute gathering to detail the company’s plans for integrating the popular platform. It’s unclear how Yahoo intends to utilize its latest procurement, but with a 10-figure price tag now public, we can only imagine that Tumblr will be put to good use. We’ll be covering tomorrow afternoon’s event live, so stay tuned for more details from New York City.

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Source: Wall Street Journal (Twitter)

In all honesty, Blake Griffin himself could start a social network that served no purpose outside of featuring his dizzying (and disgusting, if you will) array of dunks, and it’d probably go over quite well. Instead, he — along with other superstars in the National Basketball Association — will soon see replays of in-game highlights making waves across Twitter in more official fashion. Hot on the heels of a deal between ESPN and Twitter comes this: a partnership between the NBA and the aforesaid social network that’ll get video highlights to the world while the game is still ongoing.

#NBARapidReplay will be the hashtag to watch for as the playoffs progress, and as you’d expect, short advertisements will appear alongside those clips. Twitter’s foray into the television universe is hardly a new one, but it’s becoming ever more obvious that the company is following the ad dollars into the homes of everyday viewers. Up next? A deal to tweet highlights from the 2014 Masters golf tournament… but only in extremely soft spoken, lowercase, predominantly pompous characters.

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Source: Bloomberg

If the 850 hand-drawn emoji included in Hangouts aren’t enough for you, we’ve got some good news — there’s a small collection of Easter Eggs that add even more whimsy to your discussions. The commands are mostly initiated with an IRC-like “/” followed by certain words. For example “/ponies” sends a colorful little filly prancing across your window. There’s also “/ponystream” which overruns your chat with young horses. Of course, you can also punch in the Konami code (if you don’t know what that is by now, there’s no hope for you) which will change your background to pleasant drawing of a mountain and a tree. Sadly, that one is only visible to the person doing the typing. So far we’re having mixed results with the web interface for Hangouts and the commands don’t work on the mobile version. But in the Chrome app, everything is golden.

Filed under: Internet, Google

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Via: Droid Life

Source: Moritz Tolxdorff (Google+)