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Tag: Boomerang

  • Instagram’s Boomerang Gets An Update

    Instagram’s Boomerang Gets An Update

    Instagram launched Boomerang back in October. It’s a standalone app that lets you capture quick video loops, or as the company puts it, turn everyday moments into something fun and unexpected.”

    Introducing Boomerang from Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.

    It’s been compared to Apple’s Live Photos, which are starting to make their way to Facebook finally after being announced in September.

    Instagram gave Boomerang a new update (via TechCrunch). As it explains in the Instagram Help Center:

    We’ve improved the Boomerang app to make it even easier to create and share Boomerang videos, now available in the App Store and Google Play Store.

    Videos are no longer automatically saved to your phone’s camera roll, so you can take videos and choose to save your best ones. Sharing to Instagram is also smoother and faster.

    For iPhone and iPad, Boomerang now works with your device’s flash so you can make videos in the dark. You can also control the length of your video for up to 20 frames. On iPhone or iPad, tap and hold the capture button, then let go at the perfect moment.

    Facebook (which owns Instagram) recently closed down some of its standalone apps. While Boomerang is separate from Facebook Creative Labs, which housed the shuttered apps, clearly the company sees more value in this one than in things like Slingshot and Rooms.

    Image via Google Play

  • Boomerang: The New Instagram App For Animating Your Pics

    Boomerang is a new app from Instagram that lets you capture quick video loops, or as the company puts it, “turn everyday moments into something fun and unexpected.”

    Shockingly, the app is immediately available for both iOS and Android rather than one or the other. This is always nice in a new product launch, yet still all too uncommon.

    Introducing Boomerang from Instagram from Instagram on Vimeo.

    “Capture a friend jumping off a diving board, defying physics as she flies back and forth through the air,” Instagram says in a blog post. “Transform an ordinary selfie with your friends into a funny video. Get that exact moment your friend blows out his birthday candles, then watch them come back to life again and again.”

    “Press a button and the app does the rest,” the company explains. “Boomerang takes a burst of photos and stitches them together into a high-quality mini video that plays forward and backward. Shoot in portrait or landscape. Share it on Instagram. Boomerang automatically saves it to your camera roll. We’re inspired by the visual stories you tell on Instagram. With looping videos and Hyperlapse, you experiment with motion in new and exciting ways. Now, with Boomerang, we can’t wait to see what you’ll create next.”

    The videos don’t appear in a feed within the Boomerang app itself, but can be shared to other places, such as Facebook and Instagram itself.

    The product is fairly reminiscent of Google’s auto-awesome feature that stitches together photos to make animated gif-like quick-videos or the Live Photos feature Apple recently announced.

    It shouldn’t be long before we start seeing brands get in on the fun.

    Images via Instagram, Google Play

  • Nicole Scherzinger Says Bulimia Caused Rift With Pussy Cat Dolls

    Nicole Scherzinger, once a member of the all female band the Pussy Cat Dolls, says bulimia was to blame for the rift between her and her band mates. The singer claims she suffered from the eating disorder from approximately age 18, right up through her mid-30s. Yahoo! News reports she recently apologized to the other members of the band for her behavior that she says was a result of her illness.

    Scherzinger apologized to her former bandmates–Carmit Bachar, Ashley Roberts, Jessica Sutta, Melody Thornton and Kimberly Wyatt. She said she kept her illness a secret, and as a result would never open up to her band mates and tell them about the problems she was experiencing. She says the bulimia was a result of horribly low self-esteem. She also said describe her lack of self confidence as ‘crippling.’

    “There were a lot of moments when I was with them that I was distant and stand-offish. I never opened up to them to talk about my problems and I would shut myself away–and push them away–because I was battling this horrible secret illness, bulimia,” she said during a recent interview.

    Nicole Scherzinger didn’t deal with her bulimia for many years, which likely means there may be more people besides her band mates with which she caused rifts. Often times those with eating disorders distance themselves from those around them–often in an effort to conceal their illness.

    The ‘Boomerang’ singer is presently dating Formula One champion Lewis Hamilton. Her relationship, along with her career, appear to be blossoming. Hopefully this is the start of a whole new life for Nicole Scherzinger. Perhaps her apology to the remainder of the Pussy Cat Dolls will allow her to truly heal.

  • Email Makes Us Spend Two Hours Reading It

    Email is an important part of our everyday life, even if you don’t think about it while you’re deleting everything in your inbox.

    Baydin, makers of the email plug-in Boomerang, compiled data from 5 million emails and found some interesting stats about our email usage habits.

    The average email user receives about 147 messages every day, and spends more than two and a half hours on email a day. We delete 71 of those messages which only takes about five minutes. Think about that next time you’re wondering how time has moved forward so quickly while checking your email.

    We’re also taking up a lot of time when we’re writing emails. The average person writes about 40 emails a day. Those same people are somehow faster at writing emails that they are not going to send immediately upon finishing.

    People recommend you send emails around 6 a.m. with the expectation that people are going to read them at 8 a.m. In actuality, people want to read their emails at around 5 to 6 a.m.

    If you want people to actually read your email, you’ll need a strong title. Stick to words like “apply” and “connect” in your titles and avoid words like “confirm” and “press” if you want people to open the email instead of just deleting it.

    Finally, Baydin leaves you with three tips that will help you “master email:” “learn to say no and decide quickly, send non-marketing emails before work and during lunch, and reply quickly to important emails.”

    With these tips, you should be able to use email more effectively and become an email master.

    emailmaster