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SketchVid Turns Your Doodles Into Eye-Catching Animations For Instagram

As reported on TechCrunch. by Catherine Shu SketchVid is a cool new iOS app that lets even the most ham-handed doodler make striking animations for Instagram. The app lets you trace over or draw on a photo, or sketch freehand. It records your strokes as you are drawing and then automatically turns them into a 15-second video. I have a Jot stylus, but I’m still pretty bad at writing on my iPhone’s touchscreen, let alone drawing. Thanks to SketchVid’s…

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8tracks Launches New iPhone App To Take On Pandora

As reported on TechCrunch. by Romain Dillet Music startup 8tracks just released a major new version of its iPhone app. The 3.0 version comes with a completely redesigned interface, a simpler user experience and a new advertising strategy. At its core, it remains a laid-back radio service like Pandora or Songza, but with human-generated playlists. After launching the app, the music experience is slightly different. You are presented with a horizontal timeline of human-curated playlists. If you swipe…

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Detect edited photos with image analyzer Izitru

As reported on The Verge. By Jacob Kastrenakes Thanks to editing tools like Photoshop, it can be hard to tell what’s real on the web. There have been a number of forensic tools available to those wishing to investigate suspect images, but likely none so easy to use as Izitru, the service introduced on Monday by Dartmouth professor Hany Farid. Izitru, pronounced a bit like “is it true,” lets you upload a photo and automatically get a computer’s analysis of whether…

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Hipstamatic’s Makers Introduce Cinamatic, A New Video Editing App

As reported on TechCrunch. by Catherine Shu Digest Comes To Android The makers of Hipstamatic, the app that was introduced in 2009 and gained a loyal following for its square-format photos and filters before Instagram took over in ubiquity, has launched a new video editing app called Cinamatic. Cinamatic is currently available for iPhones and costs $1.99. Additional filters are available as in-app purchases. Cinamatic uses the same formula as Hipstamatic: first you take a square-format video of three to 15 seconds, then…

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Adobe Voice lets amateurs make videos like a pro (sort of)

As reported on Engadget. BY EMILY PRICE Whether you’re doing a book report or trying to show someone how to boil an egg: video can make it a heck of a lot easier for you to get your point across. Adobe’s new iPad app, Voice, hopes to make the often time-consuming experience of creating your own such videos a lot faster and easier. The app guides you through making a sharable vid, from the conception of…

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Flipt Wants To Help You Make Smarter Home Investment — And Flipping — Decisions

As reported on TechCrunch. by Frederic Lardinois  Tells You How Much Milk Your Wee Bairn Slurped All Day While the U.S. real estate market is still experiencing its ups and downs, the number of online real estate startups continues to increase quickly. The latest entrant in this business is Flipt, which aims to take some of the emotion out of real estate purchase decisions and replace it with a more data-driven approach. Flipt analyzes available residential properties in an area and then…

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Real talk: the new Snapchat makes texting fun again

As reported on The Verge. By Ellis Hamburger More than just photos, Snapchat’s new text and video chat feels immediate and intimate By any measure, Snapchat has had a busy year. 23-year-old CEO Evan Spiegel reportedly rejected a $3 billion offer from Mark Zuckerberg, dealt with a data breach that leaked 4.6 million usernames, and watched as countless “ephemeral” apps launched to compete with his app. Meanwhile, Snapchat, by some metrics, had passed Facebook in daily photo uploads. The night…

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Application Google

Google Now for Android remembers where you parked

As reported on Engadget. BY MARIELLA MOON You probably have a trick or two up your sleeve to remember where you’ve parked amidst a sea of other cars. But if you’re still prone to forgetting your parking spot, Google’s refreshed Android Search app might be able to help you out. The update adds a newGoogle Now parking card that lists the address of the place where you left your car, along with a map that shows how far you…

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Apple Application

iOS App OptimizeMe Encourages You To Make The Most Of Your Day

As reported on TechCrunch. by Catherine Shu Every Fitness App d Wearable Should Have A Mood Tracker I have so many pastimes that I like to say that my hobby is hobbies. I knit, scrapbook, build miniature dioramas, go on long walks, and take many cat photos that I then spend hours editing in VSCO. Unfortunately, I often let my craft supplies sit idle for weeks while I spend hours surfing the web and adding to my 97 Pinterest boards.…

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Application Automotive

Google Maps Rival Mapbox Adds Smart Directions, A Navigation Service For Any App

As reported on TechCrunch. by Ingrid Lunden Mapbox, the OpenStreetMap-based mapping platform that lets app developers incorporate maps into any app, is adding another feature to better compete against the likes of Google Maps, ESRI and Nokia Maps: Smart Directions, a navigation service that developers can customise with extra details such type of terrain, specific places of interest, and current traffic conditions. Its first partner, getting announced today alongside Smart Directions, is Scoot, the electric vehicle-sharing startup live in San…

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