If you’re the kind of person who would prefer to order their food online rather than talk to an actual person, then you might have heard of either GrubHub or Seamless as they both offer a great platform to get you food with as little effort as possible. Today, both GrubHub and Seamless are announcing they are merging to take on its rivals within the online meal ordering ecosystem.

The merger will bring together GrubHub’s over 20,000 local takeout restaurants in over 500 cities in the U.S. with Seamless’ over 12,000 restaurants in the U.S. and U.K. GrubHub and Seamless’ partnership will expand its ordering network and product offerings and will also accelerate its product development. At the time of their announcement, GrubHub and Seamless haven’t picked a name for the new combined business, but we’re hopefully it’ll sound as delicious as GrubHub while offering a seamless ability to have food delivered to us while we’re knee deep in a Star Wars marathon.

Now if only they can come up with a way where the delivery person leaves your food at the door, which would make for the perfect way to avoid any sort of human interaction when ordering food.

During last week’s Google I/O, Google announced some major changes to some of its most popular services, one of which was Google+. One of the changes they made to the service was bringing together all of its communication applications, such as Google Talk and Google Hangouts, and brought it together under the unifying umbrella of Google Hangouts. As great as an idea as that was, it seems a number of users are reporting some issues regarding Google Voice.

Users are reporting if they upgrade their Google Talk service from within Gmail to Google Hangouts, they lose a number of key features such as being able to set their availability status, but one of the most impactful features is the ability to place or receive Google Voice calls from within Gmail. Google Voice calls are still possible as you can initiate a call from within the Google Voice web app, which will result in calling one of your connected phone numbers to then route the call to the number you wish to reach.

Fortunately, those of you who would like to have this feature to use Google Voice within Gmail can always revert to the old Google Talk service, but considering how Google is attempting to unify its communication services within Hangouts, we’re hoping the company issues a fix for this soon as it probably impacts a larger number of people that they anticipated would be affected.

Chromebooks do not have any built-in capability to access local content (LAN) in its native mode because there is no access to the chromeOS filesystem to mount a network shared resource. I wish there is “browse network” feature in the ChromeOS file management tool to access shared folders on the LAN.

The two current available options to manage content are:

1- Cloud storage, Google Drive (and other providers) but 5GB would be not enough and not mentioning the upload (to gDrive) AND download (to Chromebook), that is a lot of overhead.

2- Transfer the data to a USB storage and copy it back to the chromebook. It is still faster than the previous option, but still a lot of back and forth between the shared resources and the Chromebook.

I wanted to find other ways to access directly my local content, to stream videos, to play audio files or to read training materials, .PDF file, stored locally. The option I explored and came up with, is to simply use the web protocol the ChromeOS supports natively, HTTP. The solution is to install a web service on a computer within the same network as the Chromebook. Here are few screenshots of the end result.

Read full post →How To Stream Local Content to Chromebooks

Konami announced last month it would be repackaging six of its Metal Gear Solid games when they released Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection. At the time of the announcement, Konami said they would be releasing the collection sometime this summer, but we now have a confirmed release date.

The Metal Gear Solid: The Legacy Collection will be made available in the U.S. on July 9 for an insanely discounted price of $49.99. In case you need to be reminded, the Metal Gear Solid games that will be included in this collection are Metal Gear Solid, Metal Gear Solid 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Metal Gear Solid: VR Missions and Metal Gear Solid 4: Trophy Edition. That’s six Metal Gear Solid games for only $50. If you’re a fan of the series that owns every piece of Metal Gear Solid content, you can’t pass up a deal like this, especially since all of the games will be packaged together.
Read full post →Metal Gear Solid: Legacy Collection Arriving On July 9 For $50

We recently caught a glimpse of the Sony Xperia UL thanks to a leaked image of the smartphone circulating the Web just a few days ago. It looks like we didn’t have to wait long to hear Sony’s official announcement for the handset as they unveiled the Xperia UL today.

The Xperia UL features a 1.5GHz quad-core processor, a 5-inch 1080p display, Adreno 320 GPU, 2GB of RAM, 13MP rear-facing camera and looks to be a slightly thicker version of the Xperia Z. Just like the Xperia Z, the Xperia UL will be both water and dust resistant, but the device will also offer the ability of taking burst photos of up to 15 frames per second as well as coming with a dedicated camera button and a wide range of connectivity, such as NFC, DLNA and an IR-port.
Read full post →Sony Xperia UL Announced In Japan With 5-Inch 1080p Display

Google Field Trip recently made the transition of being an Android-exclusive application thanks to its iOS application, and it looks like it came at a great time as Google has announced it will allow its Field Trip users to gain free access to 13 museums for an undisclosed limited time.

Field Trip users can receive Free Entry cards inside of the app’s “nearby” tab when they’re found to be close to one of the 13 museums. Once they’re offered a Free Entry card, all you’ll have to do is show the card to anyone who would normally stop you from entering a museum for free, which hopefully results in you gaining complete access instead of having your smartphone chucked into a nearby bush.

Unfortunately for Field Trip users around the world, the 13 museums the application will gain you free access into are all located in six major U.S. cities. The list of museums participating in Field Trip’s Free Entry cards promotion are as follows:

Read full post →Google Field Trip Gives Users Free Admission To 13 Museums

Madden fans will know this year will mark the 25th year anniversary for EA’s most beloved sports video game franchise, and they’re making a pretty big deal of it with this year’s Madden 25. Normally, EA would sell standard editions of their latest Madden game on current generation consoles, PC, handhelds and mobile devices, but seeing as this is a pretty big year for the Madden franchise, they’re going all out with a special Anniversary Edition of their upcoming game.

For Madden 25, EA is making a $99.99 Anniversary Edition of the game available at a number of retailers, but the pre-order bonus Amazon is offering with their customers’ purchase of the game is one we’re sure football fans are going to want to jump on immediately. In addition to providing additional in-game content, Amazon has teamed up with DirecTV to offer a $10 discount on a new subscribers’ monthly bill which also includes NFL Sunday Ticket Max at no additional charge.

Those of you who aren’t able to watch DirecTV due to the service not being available can use the code Amazon provides in its Madden NFL 25 Anniversary Edition to watch a season-long trial of NFL Sunday Ticket. In this case, since you can’t watch DirecTV, you’ll be able to stream it on a number of other devices.

As we had reported earlier, the deal Yahoo made to acquire Tumblr for $1.1 billion is now official, and in our previous report, we asked how Tumblr users are feeling about this. We expect that there will be mixed feelings, with some possibly happy that Yahoo is now throwing their weight and support behind the website, and with others a bit more apprehensive and worried that Yahoo might begin to over commercialize it with ads and whatnot. The latter seems to be the case, at least that’s what WordPress’ founder, Matt Mullenweg, seemed to imply in his blog (source link below).

Mullenweg stated that on average, WordPress typically imports about 400-600 posts an hour from Tumblr, but since news of the acquisition went official and started to spread, the blogging platform noticed a huge spike to over 72,000 imported posts in the last hour! It’s definitely way too early to tell if Tumblr users are defecting to WordPress, or if they’re simply playing it safe by keeping an alternative blog ready to go should they decide they do not like where Tumblr is heading after the acquisition, but what do you guys think?

Earlier today we had reported that Yahoo’s board of directors had reportedly approved the company’s buyout of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and sure enough it turned out to be true as Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, announced the acquisition herself on her Twitter account. The company has officially announced that they will be acquiring Tumblr in a $1.1 billion cash deal, and that they will be keeping Tumblr’s CEO, David Karp, on board, and that Tumblr will continue operating independently as a separate business. Interestingly the company has also added that they promise not to “screw it up”, which we guess is good news for Tumblr users who might be worried that with Yahoo acquiring the company, things will be changing drastically and not necessarily for the better either.

According to Marissa Mayer on Yahoo’s Tumblr page, “Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love.  In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences.  The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance user experience.” While it definitely sounds promising, what do Tumblr users have to say about this? Are you worried or excited about this acquisition? [Press Release]

It seems that Google might have something to announce later today, or at least that’s what has been hinted at in a recent post by Google’s very own Vic Gundotra who in his Google+ post, revealed he was struggling to sleep and that he cannot wait until tomorrow. Could we be looking at some major updates that Google will be bringing to their apps, like Hangouts, or maybe Google+? Or could it even be the announcement of the next major version of Android which unfortunately did not seem to be mentioned during Google I/O. It could also be possible that the announcement might have something to do with the next-gen Nexus 7, all of which are possibilities! In any case we’ll try not to speculate too much for now, but we’ll definitely be keeping our eyes peeled for an announcement of sorts, but in the meantime what do you guys think? Could Mr. Vic Gundotra simply be speaking in general, or is he hinting at something?