15:42 22 May 2015
Google has introduced a new way for users to share weblinks to people in the same room – making their laptop emit a special tone. The new feature is available with the desktop version of Google’s Chrome browser. A button is placed to the right of the URL bar, which when clicked, emits a tone to share a link to the page which is currently loaded.
In a blog post Google said: "Sometimes in the course of exploring new ideas, we'll stumble upon a technology application that gets us excited.
"Tone is a perfect example: it's a Chrome extension that broadcasts the URL of the current tab to any machine within earshot that also has the extension installed. Tone is an experiment that we’ve enjoyed and found useful, and we think you may as well.
"The first version was built in an afternoon for fun, but we increasingly found ourselves using it to share documents with everyone in a meeting quickly, to exchange design files back and forth while collaborating on user interface design, and to contribute relevant links without interrupting conversations."