Google Tells You How Much Your Next Travel Will Cost and Other Tech Updates

Another one of our tech update mashups! We have a lot of technology updates to keep you reading for the whole day.

Google Tells You How Much Your Next Travel Will Cost

If you’ve ever gone to Google recently and tried to search for a place to plan your next trip, you’d have found out that Google has been secretly updating their Travel section.

Destinations on Google, launched in November of 2015, now shows possible get-away locations for your next travel trip. The newly-upgraded feature allows a user to enter where to visit and for how many days. A user can also select the destination based on interests like trekking, sailing, etc. Destinations also shows ‘Suggested Itineraries’ that show possible trip itineraries for the location. For example, selecting Greece would show a list of cities and what areas-of-interest to look for in a particular city.

One particularly interesting feature is how Google shows the trip cost that includes things like airfare and hotel booking costs. Over 200 cities are indexed in Google’s database which includes Google Flights and Google Hotels.

This Smart Oven Cooks Ready-To-Eat Meals in 30 Minutes

A new startup funded by Y Combinator, Tovala, made a smart oven that cooks ready-to-eat meals in less than 30 minutes. The oven features four types of heating processes – bake, steam, broil and convection heating.

Meals come prepackaged by the company. They can also be made using a crowdsourced platform for recipes. A user has to scan the barcode on a meal to initialize the heating process. Then, the oven does all the hard work and gives a ready-to-eat meal. A smartphone app provides notifications about cooking details and time left for the meal to heat properly.

The company behind the project has listed the idea on Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform to raise money for new ideas. They are giving away first releases of the products to Kickstarter backers for $199, after which they will sell the retail version for $349.

Facebook Granted Patent for Social Dictionary for Internal Slang

Facebook was just granted a patent to make an A.I. software that uses data mining to analyze internet slang used in posts, comments and other shares on its social media platform.

Titled ‘Social Glossary’, the software would analyze “Slang, terms of art, portmanteaus, syllabic abbreviations, abbreviations, acronyms, names, nicknames, repurposed words or phrases, or any other type of coined word or phrase” and build a social glossary of these terms.

Amazon to Get into VR

A recent job posting on Glassdoor indicates that Amazon is looking to hire a “Senior Software Development Manager to lead our Virtual Reality team”.