Bubble Motion Rebrands As Bubbly, Retires Old Voice Messaging For Good

“Voice Twitter” app, Bubble Motion, has just rebranded itself as Bubbly, and revamped its interface as it enters version 3.0 of its mobile app. The Bubbly app has been around for two years now, but this rebranding marks a pivotal shift in the company’s direction away from its original model of providing voice text messages. When it started in 2005, its service allowed people to record voice clips, sending it to friends via ordinary SMS. The recipient would dial the code in the text to retrieve the message from Bubble Motion’s system. The analog nature of this made the app popular in its target emerging markets of Indonesia, the Philippines and India. Two years ago, the Singapore-based startup decided to get in the smartphone game and launch an app that made it a lot more like Twitter. Instead of sending messages to another person, you’d now record a voice clip and broadcast it to your followers. The new version 3.0 responds to requests from smartphone users, who asked for more audio layers such as background audio imitating a coffee shop or club atmosphere, or voice filters to alter recordings by adding reverb or changing pitch. The iOS app had some of these filters already, and the new version brings these to Android, as well. Its CEO, Thomas Clayton, spoke to us about the Bubbly app in February, and said the older voice message function was receiving “zero attention” from the company. But Bubbly is careful about not alienating its feature phone base. Clayton emphasized that the new “Twitter” service is 95 percent subscribed to via feature phone users, who dial in to retrieve voice blasts via the old circuit-switch method. The company is planning to add private and group posts made from smartphones to SMS available in its next update, scheduled for next month. “More than four billion consumers in emerging Asian markets still use feature phones,” he said. And as this base eventually go to smartphones, it’s the company’s hope that they’ll stick with Bubbly on the other side. Since Clayton spoke to us in February, Bubbly’s user base has grown from 25 million to 30 million. The company has raised $50 million in funding so far. In 2011, it got $10 million from investors like SingTel Innov8 and Sequoia Capital, and in 2012 it got another $5 million from Japanese firm, JAFCO Asia. You can download Bubbly for

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This Telescope Shoots Lasers to Unlock the Mysteries of the Cosmos

Ground-based telescopes have long struggled to achieve the image clarity and resolution of their orbiting cousins due in large part to atmospheric distortions. That's why we build observatories on mountain tops: to minimize the amount of atmosphere between the telescope and incoming starlight. But with the help of a cutting-edge adaptive optic system, astronomers are getting an unprecedented and undistorted look at deep space sans the perilous rocket launches.

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Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/iVcUHf-2Hvk/this-telescope-shoots-lasers-to-unlock-the-mysteries-of-659070582

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Texas State GOP Rep. Sanford Says Pro-Choice Demonstrators Are Chanting "Hail Satan" (Little green footballs)

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Everything You Thought Was Real in The Great Gatsby Was Visual Effects

At this point even the most gullible of filmgoers must realize that nearly every movie has been digitally enhanced in one way or another. Long gone are the days when talented VFX artists were only called on to bring spaceships and dinosaurs to life; these days directors like Baz Luhrmann spend millions on effects to simply help bring even a few lamp posts to life.

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Selena Gomez Wardrobe Malfunction: Rogue Skirt, Nude Underwear Alert!

Source: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/2013/07/selena-gomez-wardrobe-malfunction-cover-that-thing-up/

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Tracy Morgan Welcomes Daughter Maven Sonae

Daughter Maven Sonae Morgan arrived Monday, July 1, his rep tells PEOPLE exclusively.

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Intergalactic magnifying glasses could help astronomers map galaxy centers

June 30, 2013 ? An international team of astronomers may have found a new way to map quasars, the energetic and luminous central regions often found in distant galaxies. Team leader Prof. Andy Lawrence of the University of Edinburgh presents the new results on Monday 1 July at the RAS National Astronomy Meeting in St Andrews, Scotland.

If a star passes too close to a giant black hole found in the centre of a galaxy, it will be shredded by the strong gravitational field. This produces a flare-up in the brightness of an otherwise normal looking galaxy that then fades over a few months. In a large scale survey using the PanSTARRS telescope on Hawaii, Prof. Lawrence and his team studied millions of galaxies to search for this rare effect. They did find flare-ups but with very different behaviour to the 'star shredding' predictions.

Instead of seeing a fade over months, the objects they found look like 'normal' quasars, regions in the centre of galaxies where material is swirling around a giant black hole in a disk. But the quasars in the survey were not seen a decade ago, so must now be at least ten times brighter than before. Monitoring with the Liverpool Telescope on La Palma showed that they are also changing slowly, fading over a timescale of years rather than months.

The biggest surprise however was that the quasars seemed to be at the wrong distance. Measuring the characteristic shift in lines found in the spectrum of the quasars allows astronomers to measure the speed at which they are moving away from Earth. Knowing the way in which the universe is expanding enables scientists to deduce the distance to each object.

In the new survey, the quasars are typically around 10 billion light years away, whereas the galaxies that host them seem on average to be about 3 billion light years distant. The distances are rough estimates, so it could be that the estimated galaxy distances are completely wrong and that they are actually much further away. The black holes in their centres have then have flared up very dramatically, explaining why they seem so bright. But past studies of thousands of well-known quasars have never shown events on this scale.

If however the estimated galaxy distances are right, then Prof. Lawrence and his team believe they are looking at a distant quasar through a foreground galaxy. Normally this has little effect on the light of the quasar, but if a single star in the foreground galaxy passes exactly in front of the quasar, it can produce a gravitational focusing of the light which makes the background quasar seem temporarily much brighter.

This "microlensing" phenomenon is well known inside our own Galaxy, producing a brightening when one star passes in front of another. (It is for example also now being used to detect exoplanets). Microlensing may also be the cause of low-level "flickering" seen in some quasars. But this is the first time it has been suggested to cause such giant brightening events.

Prof. Lawrence sees real potential in this newly-discovered effect. "This could give us a way to map out the internal structure of quasars in a way that is otherwise impossible, because quasars are so small. As the star moves across the face of the distant quasar, it is like scanning a magnifying glass across it, revealing details that would otherwise simply be impossible to detect."

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/dx2MD1m0pB4/130630225229.htm

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