Google+ rolls out movie-making features, claims 300 million users

Google+ rolls out movie-making features, claims 300 million users

3:04pm EDT

By Alexei Oreskovic

(Reuters) – Google Inc on Tuesday unveiled new technology that creates polished movies, complete with music soundtracks, from collections of home videos and photos that users post on its fledgling Google+ social network. The new features mark Google’s latest move to try and differentiate its 2-year-old social network from Facebook, the world’s No. 1 online social network with 1.15 billion users.Google said on Tuesday that 300 million users visit the web page of its social network every month, up from 190 million “in stream” users in May. The company noted that its users upload 1.5 billion photos to Google+ every week.

“We want to be more than just a lightweight sharing service. We want to be the archive of your life,” Google+ Vice President of Product Management Bradley Horowitz said on the sidelines of an event in San Francisco to announce the new features.

The world’s No. 1 Internet search company has rolled out a number of photo-centric features for Google+ this year, which take advantage of the company’s computing horsepower. On Tuesday, it showed a slew of new features that touch up snapshots with better lighting and focus, and even erase unwanted bystanders from pictures.

The feature automatically analyzes home videos that users take on their smartphones and have uploaded to Google+, automatically producing short movies. The technology combines the best clips of similar videos, adds music, and mixes in related photographs.

Other new features include incorporating SMS text messages into Google’s messaging service and new location-sharing capabilities.

About bambooinnovator
Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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