Self-driving cars will change ridesharing forever, and Wadeeny is ready

traffic
Just as BlaBlaCar is helping long-distance car drivers make more of their trips by taking other people along for the ride, Wadeeny is launching today in the UK and Ireland with the aim of doing the same for short trips within cities. However, the Berlin-based startup has its eyes on a far greater opportunity – harnessing the coming rise of autonomous vehicles. Wadeeny originally launched in Egypt in 2011, but the upheaval around the ‘Arab Spring’ led co-founders Hesham Ghandour and Aly El Guezery to shut down and relocate to Germany in search of a more stable locale in which to grow a tech…

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Shove for Chrome lets you forcibly open tabs in a friend’s browser

Shove
Tired of sharing links with friends only to hear they were left unopened? Shove for Chrome lets you forcibly launch tabs on your buddies’ browsers — but there’s a catch. In order for the extension to work, you and your pals need to have Shove installed and have each other added to your contact list. Once you’ve got that sorted, you can beam pages to each other and have them open immediately. You need your friends to install and sign up for Shove before you can open tabs on their browsers You’ll most likely want to populate your contact list…

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Translating text in Android apps is about to get a lot easier

Nexus Marshmallow
Along with improved battery life and Google Now on Tap, Android Marshmallow will bring users another useful feature: the ability to translate text they come across in a range of apps. Devices running Marshmallow who have Google’s Translate app installed will be able to translate text in 90 languages right within apps that support Android’s text selection behavior. As shown in these demos, it’ll work on displayed text as well as anything you type in. You’ll be able to view the translation in a pop-up, change target language and have it read out loud. For those apps that don’t use Android’s…

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Adobe’s Project Comet tackles cross-device design head-on

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The world of UX (user experience) design is critical to navigating the Web, especially via smartphones and tablets. In attempting to make the design process easier, Adobe unveiled a new tool — code named Project Comet — to help manage the tasks of wireframing, visual design, prototyping and previewing, all in one go. The project is geared toward designers responsible for the look and feel of websites across various screen sizes, while keeping a close eye on how content appears in each environment. While it might seem counterintuitive to build a brand new app for that purpose, especially when Adobe already has Dreamweaver and Muse, the company decided against…

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Dropbox rolls out quick-access ‘badge’ to all, making it easier to collaborate on Office files

Dropbox_badge
Dropbox announced today that its previously business-exclusive ‘Dropbox badge’ feature is now available for consumer users, too. As it always has, the badge lets you see if other people are working on shared Word, Excel or PowerPoint files at the same time as you, and whether or not they have unsaved changes – a pretty handy feature to avoid ‘revision clash.’ In addition to showing other people working on a document, clicking the badge also allows you to quickly share a link to the document, open up the file history or add a comment. In order to use the Office-integrated badge…

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Facebook’s Android app will now load your News Feed quicker on slow connections

Facebook News Feed
Facebook has improved its News Feed to load quicker on Android devices with slow connections, in an effort to keep users in emerging markets engaged. To do so, the social network has developed an open source Network Connection Class that helps its app determine how fast your connection is. If you’re on, say, a 2G data plan, Facebook will start retrieving stories and photos while you’re reading other posts. The company says it’s also developed ways to prioritize which stories to load in order to minimize interruptions. So if it detects that you’re waiting on a photo to download fully,…

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Yandex continues its push onto Android with a Launcher for low-end smartphones

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Russia’s Internet giant Yandex continues its experiments with UI. Less than a year after releasing its own browser, the company has announced a new product, Yandex Launcher that targets low-end devices running Android. Currently the launcher is available for users in Latin America, where low-end smartphones make up most of the sales and people are “more eager to try something new than elsewhere,” Yandex spokesperson Vladimir Isaev told TNW. New regions will be rolled out gradually in the future, with fine adjustments in the app recommendation system, one of the launcher’s core features. Yandex’s new product for Android shows, among other…

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Landr just took a big step towards making all recorded musicians sound better

recording studio
Although many people aren’t familiar with it, mastering is a key part of professional music-making. Often described as a ‘dark art,’ it used to require a special set of tools, a lot of time and a well-trained pair of ears, but a product called Landr has turned it into a one-click process – and a new feature could see it take work from human mastering engineers. Mastering is the final step in the production process before a song is ready to be released. First you record a song, then you mix it, adding effects and adjusting volume levels to make it…

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Roku rolls out UI refresh that lets you follow shows, actors or movies

RokuOS7_feat
Roku has announced a new version of its media streaming platform today, as well as a new mobile app that better integrates its Roku Feed feature introduced earlier this year. The update, which is rolling out to devices from “mid-October,” focuses on expanding the Roku Feed to make it easier to find shows and movies you want to watch. Previously, the feed allowed you to ‘follow’ box office movie titles and would then tell you when they became available on any of the streaming services available via the Roku platform. Now, it (far more usefully) lets you follow movies, TV shows, actors…

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