Sorry, kids: Rounds CEO and co-founder Dany Fishel has declared that the “era of rapid, random video chat is over.” Today, the video chat hangout service has announced the retirement of its “Meet New People” feature, forcing teens to talk to their actual friends.
Vine has added sound and motion to the popular microblogging website, Twitter. Learn how to bring your information to life in our Vine webcast on Wednesday, June 19 from 4-5 pm ET. In this one-hour webcast, Gemma Craven (left), EVP, New York group director at Social@Ogilvy will discuss best practices for using the visual social platform and share some of her team's successful vine videos. Register here. 
Google launched a bundle of new features for its Google+ mobile apps this morning, focused on events, photos and Hangouts. The features include beefed up events-organizing tools, tweaks to the social network’s popular Hangouts feature and a suite of changes aimed at improving photo quality.
Yahoo has acquired OnTheAir, a company whose product allows an unlimited number of users to participate in a live video chat.
Google’s popular video chat tool, Google+ Hangouts, is coming to Gmail. Hangouts in Gmail are aimed at the day-to-day interactions that usually happen over email. The new feature will replace Google’s existing video chat. The company will be gradually rolling out the upgrade to all Gmail users beginning on Tuesday.
The history of science fiction is rife with plays on the avatar. Whether a man is able to transfer his mind into another physical being, as in Jim Cameron’s Avatar, or live a virtual life seemingly indistinguishable from reality, as in the Matrix, there seems to be a human fascination with the transformation of our physical presence. Google has just taken us one (whimsical) step forward towards such a dream by introducing a whole series of effects for their Google+ Hangouts service.
Rounds, the Facebook “communitainment” platform that lets users video chat, play games, watch videos, listen to music, look at pictures, take snapshots and engage in other activities together with friends (old and new) announced Wednesday that they will be launching nine new activities by 2012.
How do you use video chat? Do you use it to talk to friends and family? To play games? Watch movies? Keep your long-distance relationship afloat? A new infographic from video chat app Rounds, The Video Connection, explores the ways in which we use video chat, as well as the demographics of those who are chatting.
Rounds, the video chat app that lets you chat, play games, watch YouTube videos and do other activities with your friends, has just surpassed one million monthly active users and, to celebrate, they’ve partnered with Screenr to add new recording capabilities to their application.
Video chat has been big for a while now, but with the launch of Google Plus’ Hangout and Facebook’s Skype integration, the buzz around the “Alive Web” is bigger than ever. A new infographic from Column Five Media and Rounds compares the top players in the video chat game.
If you have an Android smartphone and want to do video calling from your phone, you will either need to have a Nexus S that is running Android 2.3.4 or you need fring, which is a free app that you can find in the Android Market. Today fring announced support for more Android devices including the HTC Flyer, the Samsung Droid Charge, the Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S 2, and LG G2X, with a release of an upgrade to the fring Android app.
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