Microsoft aims to bring new life into its aging MSN portal with a shiny new homepage alongside plan to rebrand several of its Bing-powered applications.

Not only will Windows Phone apps like News, Finance, Travel, Sports and Weather be rebranded to MSN, but Microsoft is also planning to release iOS and Android versions as well. Read more »

Amazon made its Fire TV set-top box official back in April, which is also when it became available for purchase in the US. However, it hasn’t been available anywhere else. Until today.

The Fire TV is now up for pre-order in both the UK and Germany, marking the device’s entry into Europe. Read more »

By now you must have seen the numerous photos of female celebrities in compromising positions floating around on the internet. Some of these celebrities included the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.

The subject of the photographs aside, it was being said that several of these photos were obtained by hacking into the iCloud account of these celebrities. As you may know, iCloud backs up the photos on your device automatically to the cloud, some thing most of these people were unaware of and thought deleted the photos from their device deleted them completely. Read more »

Dropbox has revamped its Pro plan with more storage, improved link sharing and remote wipe. The Dropbox Pro plan remains at $10 a month (or $100 per year) but you get 1TB of storage for that.

Having a Pro account lets you share password-protected links. Sharing links is arguably one of the best features of Dropbox and now you won’t have to worry about the link getting in the wrong hands. Read more »

Amazon has announced that it will be acquiring gaming video broadcasting service Twitch for $970 million in cash. This move comes somewhat out of the blue, especially since there were pretty strong rumors of Google/YouTube acquiring Twitch a couple of months ago.

For those not aware, and I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t, Twitch is a popular online service for broadcasting gameplay video and for watching videos of other people playing games. Although it may not be as well known to the general public as something like YouTube or Vimeo, Twitch is extremely popular in the gaming community and is the fourth largest source of US traffic behind Netflix, Google and Apple. Read more »

LG today has taken a step forward in home audio optimization with the introduction of its new LG Music Flow system.

By combining its new Music Flow Player app and a wide range of new speaker units, Music Flow is set to help you easily create a robust multi-room home audio system, sans any wires. Read more »

It seems Google is working on a new subscription service for YouTube, called YouTube Music Key. With this service, users will be able to listen to music videos on YouTube without any ads, in the background or even when they are offline, by paying the monthly subscription fee.

YouTube currently has one of the largest library of music videos on the internet but often you just have to listen to the music without watching the video and the YouTube player on mobile won’t let you play audio in the background. There are also other things to worry about, such as ads and not being able to play without an internet connection, all of which YouTube Music Key will solve. Read more »

If you’re getting sick of seeing “promoted tweets” in your Twitter timeline, well, get ready for Promoted Video ads to show up in there too. Twitter has announced a beta run of a new service that lets advertisers promote videos.

It works in basically the same way as the promoted tweets that have been available for a few years now – but combining those with a video card. So, in your timeline the Promoted Video ads will look just like a regular tweet that has a link to a video in it (and which you can play in-place on the Web or in the Twitter apps for mobile). Obviously though, below you’ll see that “Promoted by” mention as you do for promoted tweets. Read more »

Today HTC’s published an update to its Gallery app in the Play Store. This update enables owners of the One (M8) to use the new Duo Effects Gallery, which is a Web viewer that lets you share the interactive viewing experience of the Duo Camera’s effects with anyone.

This Web interface lets people you’ve shared your works of art with change the focus point in an image, as well as choose which part of the picture has effects applied. UFocus, Foregrounder, and Dimension Plus effects are now shareable with whoever you like. Read more »

Leak is a new service that lets users send anonymous email to others. You just have to go to the website, enter the person’s email ID, choose if want to be identified as a friend, co worker, family member, friend of a friend or just ‘someone’, type out your mail and send it.

The other person will receive the email from Leak, which does not, in any way, reveal your true identity other than how you chose to be described. This allows you to be open with them without revealing who you really are. Read more »

After unlinking Hangouts from Google+ in the recent past, it seems Google is now planning on doing the same with its photos service. Currently available as part of the Google+ social network, the Photos service will soon become independent, according to Bloomberg.

After it becomes an independent service, users can access it separately without needing to have a Google+ account. It would still continue to be available to Google+ users. Read more »

We talked about the Bolt service a few days back. The app is now officially available on iOS and Android, but only in New Zealand, Singapore, and South Africa for now.

Bolt lets you have a group of close friends that you can instantly send photos or videos to. Just tap on their contact name and it takes a photo and sends it. You can press and hold on the contact name to send a video. Just like with Snapchat, the photos and videos are not sent and are removed from your device when you swipe them away. Read more »

Apple has acquired BookLamp, a startup that has been developing big data style book analytics services. The deal is said to have cost the Cupertino giant somewhere around $10 million to $15 million.

BookLamp is known for their work with Book Genome Project, a platform that allowed users to find suggestions for books to read based on natural language analysis of other titles. Read more »

Google is currently updating its Maps app on Android devices to version 8.2. Upon release we saw the changelog and it had biking elevation info, voice actions in navigation, better My Places menu but Google didn’t say anything about the Explore Nearby page.

Explore Nearby has been sighted by a couple of users and it manifests via a shortcut right next to the GPS button in the Maps interface. When you select it you’re taken to a separate menu that gives you information on where you are, what’s the weather and lists points of interests, broken down by the time of day. Read more »

Amazon has made a new service official today. It’s called Kindle Unlimited and it provides all-you-can-read access to 600,000 books in the retailer’s portfolio, and it also lets you listen to thousands of audiobooks.

All of this costs $9.99 per month, hence why many people are calling it a ‘Netflix for books’. Read more »