Tech Roundup: Airbnb's HotelTonight Acquisition, Google TensorFlow Privacy & More

[A recurring feature on the latest in Science & Technology.]

• Music streaming service Spotify hits one million subscribers in India within a week of its launch, as it faces stiff competition from the likes of Apple Music, Amazon, and Google Play, alongside local services like JioSaavan and Gaana, which has 80 million subscribers, about half of the country's active music streaming market.
• Google takes a leaf out of Instagram and Pinterest; brings shoppable ads on Google Images that lets retailers tag brands and products on an image-based ads that will appear in Image search results.
• Microsoft rolls out updated design for Skype for desktop web but restricts support to just Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome browsers, leaving Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera, saying the service requires "calling and real-time media" features that are "implemented differently across various browsers," leading it to "prioritise bringing Skype to [the] web on Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome based on customer value."
• Google releases a new app targeting India called Bolo, a language learning app that uses Google's speech recognition and text-to-speech capabilities to help kids learn English and Hindi; announces TensorFlow Privacy, an open-sourced privacy-focussed machine learning framework that employs differential privacy (a statistical technique that balances accuracy of predictions and users' personal information by introducing noise, aka a privacy budget for randomisation) to training data.

Google appears to be a testing a new Material Design themed AMP pages

• Photo sharing service Flickr, which was acquired by SmugMug from Yahoo! last April, to introduce a new login system that doesn't require a Yahoo! ID.
• Apple reportedly buys patent portfolio of AI-based security camera company Lighthouse, which closed up late last year, as the company's smart home ambitions slowly take shape.
• Google reportedly working on next generation Google Glass connected smart glasses after reviving it in 2017 with Google Glass Enterprise Edition; to feature USB-C port, 32MP camera, built-in LTE, Snapdragon 710 processor and 3GB RAM.
• Amazon rolls out a new Song ID feature in Alexa that's exclusive to Amazon Music which allows the virtual assistant to announce the name and artist of songs before they are played.
• Microsoft begins to integrate its two enterprise chat/social network platforms Yammer and Teams; lets users add a Yammer tab to their Teams channel to follow specific topic feeds, or share conversations in Yammer without heaving to leave Teams.
• Online lodging service provider Airbnb acquires last-minute hotel booking app HotelTonight for an undisclosed sum as it continues to expand its rental offerings.
• Google brings Gmail's Confidential Mode to G Suite enterprise users; allows senders set expiry dates on certain emails, require verification on the recipient's end before being able to open the message, and restrict them from forwarding or printing the content.