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Welcome to the Auction Para of Park Street and Russell Street in “Calcutta”. On a Sunday morning, auction sessions are on in almost all the auction houses. In one of the posh houses, the auctioneer is calling out the price to the crowd consisting of the crème la crème of the city. On display are some antique furniture, dining tables from Lazarus and Co, Belgium glass chandeliers, Osler glass chandeliers, and other priceless articles. The fortunate buyer would be securing himself an authentic collectible.

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Xiaomi, the Chinese brand, has always surprised the market with its smartphones with some outstanding features at affordable price. Now the market awaits the launch of Note 7 under new ‘Redmi by Xiaomi’ branding in India. It has already been launched in China last week under the same brand name.

It is quite different from its predecessors when it comes to design. The new model sports a waterdrop notch instead of the standard wide on previous Redmi Note models. Instead of the metal body like in any other model, it has a glass body with 2.5D curved back and available in gradient colors like Twilight Gold, Fantasy Blue, and Bright Black.

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In yet another user data breach, Facebook has recently revealed that a bug might have exposed the photos of up to 6.8 million users during a 12-day period in September. Third-party apps might have had access to photos which users had not given access permission to. To this, Facebook explained in a blog post that, “When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline”.

To make matters worse, these are the photos which were uploaded but not posted. To know more, in all, 6.8 million users and 1500 apps developed by 876 developers might have been affected by the bug. Only those apps with access to the photos API and those whom users gave authorized access to were affected.

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It seems that Google Assistant is assigned to another task now. Google Assistant would now predict users when the flights would likely to be delayed, thus informing users even before airlines confirm the delays.

This new feature of flight delay prediction for Google Assistant comes ahead of this year’s holiday season when flights are more likely to be delayed.

So here users might as well ask Google Assistant, “Hey Google, is my flight on time?” or ask questions about a specific flight, such as “What’s the status of the American Airlines flight from Philadelphia to Denver?”

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In yet another user data breach, Facebook has recently revealed that a bug might have exposed the photos of up to 6.8 million users during a 12-day period in September. Third-party apps might have had access to photos which users had not given access permission to. To this, Facebook explained in a blog post that, “When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline”.

To make matters worse, these are the photos which were uploaded but not posted. To know more, in all, 6.8 million users and 1500 apps developed by 876 developers might have been affected by the bug. Only those apps with access to the photos API and those whom users gave authorized access to were affected.

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Google recently rolled out a new feature in its Maps where commuters in Delhi would be able to see auto rickshaws under the “public transport” mode in Maps.

Here, Google added that by selecting the mode, commuters would be able to view suggested routes for the ride as well as the estimated auto-rickshaw fares, thus making it easier for them to plan their trips.

The new feature can be found within the “public transport” and “cab” modes in Google Maps and is based on the expected trip route and the official fare model shared by the Delhi Traffic Police.

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Facebook is redesigning its “Life Events” feature with useful updates which would help users spruce up the posts marking the important moments that they want to remember and share. To look back, Facebook had introduced its “Life Events” feature as a way to help users share and celebrate the most important milestones with friends and family.

To this, David Harris, Product Manager at Facebook, added in his blog post that, “Just as they are in real life, life events on Facebook are distinguished from other everyday moments. To ensure these moments stand out, even more, we’re redesigning this feature to give you more ways to commemorate your life events and help your friends see these important milestones”.

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Another lucrative prepaid plan hits the Indian telecom sector! This one is from Vodafone which has launched its prepaid plan of ₹169 and of course, this launch is specially designed to compete with the Jio plan of ₹149.

To know more, this ₹169 prepaid plan by Vodafone offers unlimited local and national calling, unlimited national roaming, 100 daily SMS and a validity of 28 days. The plan also offers 1GB daily high-speed 3G / 4G data, which means users can download up to 28GB through the validity.

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WhatsApp has introduced its latest feature, i.e. picture in picture mode for all its Android users, and this would allow users to view the videos within the chat window without opening third party pages or apps.

Regarding this new mode, WhatsApp has introduced this picture-in-picture mode with the latest version of its Android app. While this update has been available on iOS since early in the year, PiP mode was initially introduced in the platform’s Android beta in October.

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With this, WhatsApp would now soon going to launch some other new features for its users in its latest version to make it more user-friendly. Now, get your eyes glued to the next section and have a look at the 5 upcoming WhatsApp features. However, it also needs to be noted that these features have not been officially launched yet.

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It seems that Instagram is again up for some update in its feature to enhance the user experience. This time, Instagram Direct, the feature that allows users to communicate with other Instagram users, has been upgraded with the ability to send voice messages. This is quite a new addition which works similar to a walkie-talkie as it sends voice message the moment users would release the microphone button. This sounds similar to how users can send a voice message using other Facebook products, including Messenger and WhatsApp. Also, the new voice messaging support on Instagram reminds slightly of the audio messaging feature available natively on Apple’s iMessage.

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Google has thought of a really nice initiative to mitigate the issue of gender biases in its translation service. For this, Google has started rolling out its latest feature that provides feminine and masculine translations for some gender-neutral words on the Google Translate website. The feature is currently available only for few languages, although Google also has plans to bring it to more languages soon. This refers to the fact that users can now translate single words from English to languages like French, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. As of now, translations for short phrases and sentences that mention a person in a gender-neutral way is available for the English and Turkish language pair.

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In lieu of the latest updates, Google has also updated its messaging platform Hangouts with a feature known as ‘Smart Reply’. The tech giant further added that this feature is meant to ‘save’ time of the ‘users’. Google further in its blog that, “We’re bringing Smart Reply to Hangouts Chat so you can respond to teammates quickly and move projects forward more efficiently, in less time. This launch is part of our ongoing effort to bring intelligent, assistive writing tools to all of G Suite”.

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How many of us are part of a WhatsApp group we strongly dislike? Well I am sure all of use definitely face this issue where we are just made group member and we can’t really do anything about it.

Well, not anymore! WhatsApp users might get relief from being added to groups without their consent in future. As per reports, the government has requested the popular instant messaging platform to introduce a feature which would be seeking user’s consent before adding them to any of the groups.

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JioSaavn app was recently announced by Reliance Jio , which was just a day after it was spotted on the App Store. The app is practically the result of Reliance Industries acquisition of Saavn in March 2018, when it had initially acquired a majority stake in the company. The app’s launch is in fact a re-branding, but for now, things are a bit mixed up.

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Paytm has taken off in the app-chat genre with founder Vijay Shekhar Shatma citing high costs for scaling. Sharma added that the Inbox feature would now mainly focus on content, with the usage of games, news and videos. This comes as Paytm is competing with Whatsapp which had entered payments this year.

On this, Sharma recently tweeted that, “We took off chat from Paytm App after it became pretty popular but code base wasn’t going to scale without ton of cost.”

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Facebook now turns ‘dark’ for WhatsApp. So, now, using WhatsApp at night would get easier on the eyes if Facebook owned messaging platform implements the ‘Dark mode’. To look back, the rumors for such a mode have been afloat for quite some time now. So, finally, the news has been finally confirmed by WABetaInfo that the feature is under development and might soon arrive to all WhatsApp users.