Airbnb acquires Montreal-based luxury vacation rental site

It’s being reported that home rental service Airbnb dropped around US$300 million in cash and stock to buy upscale vacation site Luxury Retreats. Airbnb won’t disclose financial terms of the deal, though. The figures mentioned above were from a report by Bloomberg. Airbnb has over three million homes for rent in over 50,000 cities and has expanded its business bit by bit. In the past year, it started letting travelers book day trips and excursions through the site. Now, they’re moving into the luxury space with this acquisition.

Luxury Retreats has over 4,000 homes in 100 locations around the world. They offer more upscale villas for the affluent crowd and include a concierge service. The company will stay in Montreal at the moment and act as a standalone brand but over time their listings will be integrated and highlighted in Airbnb’s own platform.

Source: CNET

Over one billion YouTube videos are auto-captioned

After bringing automated captions to YouTube back in 2009, the service has been working on improving the accuracy of the feature. And now according to YouTube’s product manager Liat Kaver, there are now over a billion videos that have auto captions on them, thus giving access to those with hearing impairments as well as those who don’t speak the language spoken on the videos. Since the launch, Kaver says they have achieved a 50 percent leap in accuracy when it comes to the English captions thanks to the improvements of the service’s machine learning algorithms and expanding its training data. You can see the difference in the photo above between the old service (left) and the current model (right).

Going forward, Kaver, who writes about her own hearing disability in this announcement, says they plan to improve accuracy for 10 supported languages. They’re calling on creators to help and review the accuracy of these machine-generated captions to help improve the technology quicker.

HTC reportedly looking to create a new kind of mobile VR headset

A recent story from CNET claims HTC might be looking to develop a new virtual reality headset. According to the smartphone maker’s Chief Financial Officer Chialin Chang, the new headset might be built to work with its new flagship, the U Ultra. Chang wouldn’t say anything else about this device or possible release date. But it might be wise for HTC to develop a mobile-based VR as that has been picking up more quickly than PC-based systems. According to VentureBeat, Samsung has shipped over five million Gear VR units.

Chang says HTC intends to fill the gap between products like the Gear VR and PC-based systems like its own Vive system. HTC released its own statement following the interview with something that doesn’t quite seem like there will be a product coming anytime soon. “In a recent interview, Chialin Chang was referencing the idea that there are different ways to approach VR that span the full spectrum from truly mobile 360 to immersive room-scale like the Vive, and everything in between. As HTC, we’re better prepared than most companies to reach that full spectrum.”

Apple's WWDC 2017 will take place in San Jose on June 5-9

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Apple's yearly World Wide Developer's Conference (WWDC) will move to San Jose on June 5 to 9 of this year. WWDC had been held at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco for decades, and while many speculated that the Apple Campus 2 would be finished in time to host this year's dev and engineer pow-wow, it seems the mothership isn't ready to accept the thousands of participants yet.

Instead, WWDC 2017 will take place at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, closer to the companys headquarters. WWDC 2017 will give developers access to more than 1,000 Apple engineers with opportunities to meet and engage with them throughout the conference.

Click to read more ...