TechFireBall -Keep Update Yourself With Fresh Tech News

Urban legend has it that some of the greatest ideas in history started with a napkin. The Gettysburg Address, the poem that gave way to the U.S. National Anthem, and the premise of the Harry Potter series—each were reportedly born into the world through the medium of sketches on scrap paper—and when app creators put pen to paper for their ideas, this is often a canvas of choice. While rapid prototyping with the napkin and the whiteboard holds its charms, less charming is the prospect of translating quick sketches into working code. Last summer, a group of Garage interns tackled this problem by creating a prototype of their own: meet Ink to Code, a Microsoft Garage project, now available in the United States and Canada. Ink to Code is a Windows app that enables developers to draw wire frame sketches and export them into Visual Studio, expediting the process of prototyping Universal Windows Platform (UWP) and Android user interfaces. The Garage Internship takes a unique, ent...

Montreal-based travel booking platform Busbud has closed an $11M Series B round led by iNovia Capital. New investors backing the company include Teralys, Claridge and Plaza Ventures. Existing investor Real Ventures also participated in the round. As its name suggests, Busbud’s platform is focused on intercity bus and coach travel. But it’s also inked partnerships with some of the multi-modal travel booking platforms which are also aiming to simplify travel planning and ticket buying online, as a route to expand its reach. Busbud says its website has about 3 million unique monthly visitors from 100+ countries at this point. It also offers ticket booking via its Android and iOS apps. On the bus travel supplier side, it says it has more than 1,300 partner operators in its marketplace. Erik Blachford, former CEO of Expedia, and Philippe Vimard, former CTO/COO of publicly-listed eDreams/ODIGEO Travel Group (and currently CTO of doctor booking platform Doctolib) are also joinin...

American Express announced today that it has acquired Mezi, the AI-based virtual travel assistant, for an undisclosed amount. After the deal closes, Mezi will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Express. Its technology is already powering AskAmex, a personal concierge app for cardholders that launched its pilot program last year. Mezi users send requests for flights, hotels and restaurant reservations through the app’s SMS-like interface. Mezi then makes suggestions and, once it figures out what users want to do, forwards requests to human assistants to finalize bookings. Founded in 2015 as a personal shopping chatbot, Mezi builds its own deep learning and natural language processing systems instead of using services by IBM Watson and other providers. Its co-founders, CEO Swapnil Shinde and his twin brother, CTO Snehal Shinde, previously launched Indian streaming music service Dhingana, which was acquired by Rdio in 2014. After selling Dhingana, the Shinde siblings crea...

After an insistent number of leaks, Lenovo-owned Motorola has today finally launched an upgraded variant of their Moto X4 smartphone. While most of the hardware and software remains the same, Moto has bumped up the RAM to 6GB and is now offering Android 8.0 Oreo out-of-the-box. That’s it. The Moto X4 6GB variant is no different from its previous iterations, but the bigger RAM is going to draw in users looking for an almost stock Android and smoother user experience. This variant of the device, as the rumor mill had suggested, will be available for purchase on February 1 at midnight (i.e 11:59 PM on 31st January). Before we talk about the pricing and location where you’ll be able to grab the Moto X4, let us take a brief look at the specs sheet of the device: Specifications : The Moto X4 sports a 5.2-inch full HD LTPS IPS screen with a display resolution of 1920 x 1080 and pixel density of 441ppi. It is powered by the octa-core Snapdragon 630 SoC clocked at 2.2 GHz, which ...

Having taken a lot of the heat over the past year for their collective failure to curb blatantly false and misleading news on their platforms, tech giants Google, Facebook and Twitter have started tweaking their algorithms and removing fake profiles to prevent their respective platforms from being used for nefarious purposes by politically-motivated groups and individuals. As part of its continuing efforts to preserve journalistic ethics and curb the spread of propaganda disguised as reportage, online social media giant Facebook has announced an initiative called ‘The Facebook Journalism Project‘ whereby the company will award up to $1 million in journalism scholarships over the next five years. As part of that plan, the company says it is teaming up with four organizations that represent journalists from diverse backgrounds. The National Association of Hispanic Journalists, Asian American Journalists Association, Native American Journalists Association and National Lesbia...

More than anything, Paytm is synonymous with cashbacks. But, the flip side of the coin is equally rewarding. In a recent development, the employees of the company, owned by One97 Communications have drawn significant returns by liquidating the stocks owned by them via ESOPs (employee stock ownership plan). Following this secondary sale of stocks by employees, Paytm is now valued at $10 billion which makes it the second most-valued internet company in India. More than 200 existing and former employees traded their stock holdings in the company for a payout of nearly $47 million (₹300 crore). The new valuation is a brilliant upsurge from the company’s valuation in May 2017 which is when it weighed at $7 billion after an investment of $1.4 billion from Softbank. With this, the multi-armed enterprise lags behind only Flipkart, which is estimated to be worth $12 billion. Paytm, with a workforce of 5,000, rewards its employees with ESOPs taking multiple criteria into considerati...