Hasta La Gadget!

Whether or not you believe that laughter is the best medicine, it should do some genuine good at Google’s just-launched Hangout Comedy Club. The multi-day event is raising funds for Comic Relief by measuring the laughs at comedy gigs hosted through Google+ Hangouts — yuk it up and Google will optionally make a donation. The particularly brave can also sit in the virtual front row and heckle from the comfort of home. Sanderson Jones has already taken to the Hangout Comedy Club stage as we write this, but those who miss out on his show can check out subsequent gigs at the source link.

Filed under: Internet, Google

Comments

Via: Google Official Blog

Source: Hangout Comedy Club (YouTube)

Now you know you’re subscribing to that ish.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

Comments

Source: Scholastic

PlayStation is expanding its streaming footprint one piledriver at a time with the new Live Events Viewer. Announced at E3 and available today, the app will let you buy and watch pay-per-view events — starting with this Sunday’s WWE SummerSlam — directly from your PS3 without the need for a cable subscription. Sony is promising that new programming will be available on a weekly basis and that there will be free content in addition to PPVs, too. All that’s available right now are UFC and WWE specials, but according to the US PlayStation Blog, concerts, races and “other entertainment events” are en route. You could also get your scripted and unscripted fisticuffs fix on the Xbox 360, but you need an active Xbox Live Gold subscription to use them.

Filed under: Gaming, HD, Sony

Comments

Source: PlayStation Blog (US)

Glowing Chromecast reviews have come in from all angles, but what if you didn’t get an order in and missed out on the sold-out dongles? If you have an Android 2.2 (or higher) device you can give its features a whirl using an app called Cheapcast. Designed to mimic Google’s $35 dongle, it instantly gives a phone or tablet the ability to stream from Chromecast-enabled apps to other devices on the same WiFi network. If the device acting as a receiver has a small screen, you can also connect it to a TV with no WiFi via an HDMI cable. Cheapcast’s Google Play page warns that since it’s at the early stages, it can’t display Chrome tabs, and some of its other functions might still be on the fritz. It’s free to download, though, so there’s nothing keeping you from trying it out — it might even quench your desire to get a Chromecast, if only for a while.

Filed under: HD

Comments

Via: AndroidCommunity

Source: Cheapcast (Google Play)

Each week Ross Rubin contributes Switched On, a column about consumer technology.

Sold out for weeks after its launch, everyone seems to be in love with the Chromecast — the ultra-cheap, ultra-small, interface-free, HDMI-toting TV appendage that stole the show from the new Nexus 7. Building beyond the DIAL device-discovery protocol that Netflix and YouTube have supported, Chromecast is a client of Google Cast, which enables the kind of second-screen control for volume and other features implemented by the device.

Google has gotten the jump on similar products such as the Plair TV dongle by natively supporting three of the most popular services to use on televisions — Netflix, YouTube and Pandora. Furthermore, it has also enabled a backdoor to many other services by building in support for displaying Chrome tabs on a Chromecast-connected TV. In doing so, it treats the TV as an extension of the browser just as Apple’s forthcoming OS X Mavericks can treat an Apple TV-connected set as another Macintosh screen.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Google

Comments