Photo sharing app Piictu announces that they are closing their service May 31st and joining Betaworks company Kandu. It seems that many photo sharing apps are going the way of the dinosaur. The latest addition to the list is Piictu. The company had raised $1.73 million in seed funding, however it never took off. The app allowed users to share photos with captions but only allowed users to share photos in the context of what they were doing. Rather than disappearing from the digital realm, however, Piictu is joining with Kandu, a betaworks company that has yet to launch.

New Chrome 27 Stable version includes a number of optimizations so that all users will enjoy an even faster browsing experience. As if you didn’t already have a million reasons to switch over from browsers like the painful-to-use Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s clunky Firefox, Google just launched an updated stable version of its Chrome browser that boosts page loading times by a staggering 5%! “The Chrome team is excited to announce the promotion of Chrome 27 to the Stable Channel,” says the always pithy company in a blog post. According to Google, the speed boost comes courtesy of a new “smarter behind-the-scenes resource scheduling.

BeatDeck allows musicians and labels track their song performances across various social media accounts. For musicians, keeping track of all the different social media sites and analyzing the data. BeatDeck offers a free solution to this problem. Unlike other music startups, the service focuses solely on the music industry instead of the consumer. The service launched today and plans on licensing the data that they collect to labels and music stores in order to help them sign and recommend the next superstars. The first part of the service allows artists to sign up and connect all of their social media accounts. From their, BeatDeck allows artists to track their performance and compare the information across the various channels. They can see their fans’ age, gender and location.

Extension allows you play, pause, skip tracks, thumbs up and down songs right from within the Chrome browser toolbar. With free online music streaming services being more popular than ever before, users are always in search of ways to make the listening experience more convenient and accessible. Chrome already has wonderful Google Chrome browser extensions for Google Play and Last.fm that allow you to control music playback without having to visit the actual site, and now there’s a new extension available for arguably the most widely used site of all – Pandora. SoundControl Beta for Pandora is a Chrome extension that also lets users control the site right from within the toolbar. You can play, pause, skip, thumbs up or down track and also toggle a detachable mini player.

After a week of rumors, Yahoo! officially announces its buyout of Tumblr for $1.1 billion with vows to keep the service independent. It’s official. Yahoo is buying out the up and coming blogging platform Tumblr for $1.1 billion, mostly in cash. This acquisition, of course, was met with numerous negative comments from Tumblr users during the week leading up to the deal. In fact WordPress, Tumblr’s main competitor, has actually noted that they have had 72,000 post imports on Sunday. To put this into perspective, WordPress generally only sees 400-500 daily post imports. Despite all of the negative comments from users that Yahoo will change Tumblr, both companies have noted that Tumblr itself will remain independent.

SafeIP lets you encrypt all your Internet traffic with a private proxy, protect your online identity, and is completely FREE without ads. Safe IP is a cool program that provides anonymous, private, and secure web browsing for FREE. With ever increasing govt and private efforts to monitor your online activity, VPNs, proxies, and other methods for protecting your privacy have never been more important. “SafeIP means a safer and freer Internet experience,” says the company. “Our goal is to help you make your web surfing and Internet usage safer and without censorship by providing the SafeIP service to all, at no cost and without ads.

Control how long you want your tweets to be visible to the world at large. We sometimes forget that by using social networking sites we put tremendous amounts of information out there for anybody to see and collect. Taken individually  the stuff we create is not always sensitive information, but over time, and taken as a whole, it cane be. Also, as we age and our lives change we don’t necessarily want past thoughts and observations to come back and haunt us. Stuff we thought was witty and cool to tweet about back in our teens will usually make us look downright foolish later on, especially to prospective employers or college admission deans.

Feds seize assets from Mt. Gox Dwolla account and accuse the service of violating money transfer regulations. Bitcoin is growing rapidly with several companies investing thousands of dollars on the venture. The Japanese startup Mt. Gox is one of the largest Bitcoin exchange services that allow users to convert USD to bitcoins and vice versa. Their most popular service is Dwolla – an e-wallet that allows real time transfers between individuals and companies. As of yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security has seized all of the assets in the Mt. Gox Dwolla account for violating money transfer regulations. Dwolla had no choice but to acquiesce to the request. As a currency exchange service, Mt.

Quick how-to-guide for getting one of the more popular VPN services around up and running so that you can begin protecting your traffic from the prying eyes of hackers and govts, and thwart arbitrary geographic content restrictions and Internet filtering regimes. We can all agree that Internet always has and always will be plagued by challenges to content access and data security, and it’s only the solution that many disagree about. One of the of the easiest solutions that many choose is a VPN connection. A VPN is a virtual private network with “virtual” encrypted connections routed through the Internet to remote servers.

Google has unveiled the Google Play Music All Access service at their I/O that will directly compete with other on-demand music services like Spotify. For those not paying careful attention to the news, today marks Google’s I/O conference where they have already made dozens of announcements regarding their products. One of the announcements today was the launch of an on-demand subscription music service called Google Play Music All Access. The new Google Play Music All Access is built on Google’s already existing music store for Google Play. The service features a recommendation engine that will guide users towards new music they may not have already discovered by listing tracks from artists users already have in their library.