Daily Tech Snippet: Monday, 5th December 2016

I had drifted into a routine of waking up later and later, and putting this together had fallen by the wayside as a result, but I'm trying to reset that habit now:-)

• Meitu of China, Built on the Selfie, Could Be Worth $5.23 Billion in I.P.O.: For users of Meitu’s signature app, a beautiful touch-up at the press of a button is free. But Meitu is hoping that investors in the company, which wants to “make the world a more beautiful place,” will value it somewhere between $4.6 billion and $5.23 billion. Meitu plans to offer shares at between 8.5 Hong Kong dollars and 9.6 Hong Kong dollars, raising $629 million to $710 million. The company is known for its eponymous selfie app, which allows users to digitally alter their photos, as well as its livestreaming app, Meipai. It also makes smartphones, designed to improve selfie-taking, which are endorsed by the Chinese actress Angelababy. The share listing will offer a rare gauge of whether global investors agree with the sky-high valuations often found in China’s tech start-up scene. Venture capitalists and private investors have leapt into the field, which has given rise to successful app- and gadget-makers amid an e-commerce and financial technology boom.

• There’s a powerful new way to dig up dead websites: It can be hard to find sites that have disappeared from the Internet. But the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine is on the verge of rolling out a feature that will make tracking down dead websites much easier, according to Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. The Wayback Machine has been helping people see past Internet sites over the past 15 years, but searchers always needed to know the URL of a website to find the archived copies. Soon, however, you'll be able to use keyword searches to find old websites -- in fact, you can already test it out through a public beta.The new search feature is not quite like Google, where all the text on each page on a website is indexed to help with searches. The Wayback Machine feature lets you search for an archived website's main page, although it does not have the capacity to enable searches for specific web pages on that site. But once you're there, you're able to navigate around the old websites.

• Psst.. Sony Has a Hit That's as Big as Pokemon Go in Japan: Nintendo Co. might have scored a hit with the explosive debut of Pokemon Go this year. On its home turf, however, Sony Corp. has quietly dispatched its rival with a popular mobile game called Fate/Grand Order. The game, based on an anime TV series called Fate, allows players to travel back in time and team up with historical figures like Julius Caesar, Leonardo da Vinci and Joan of Arc to rescue humanity from looming disaster. While the basic version is free to play, people can pay for tokens that make it easier to add characters and speed up gameplay. Fate/Grand Order has been at or near the top of Japan's app revenue rankings all year and has been downloaded more than 7 million times since its July 2015 debut. It has made more money than Pokemon Go among Android users 104 out of 133 days this year, and 51 days on iOS devices, in the same period, according to researcher App Annie. The game's success is a sign of how important Sony's gaming and entertainment businesses are as the company struggles with razor-thin margins and competition in televisions, cameras and other hardware. The company plans to expand its mobile games effort with more titles in more markets in the coming months.

• Microsoft’s AI will describe images in Word and PowerPoint for blind users: Artificial intelligence may be making small and steady advances in general-purpose situations like digital assistants. But it’s the more subtle AI accessibility features that have a more substantial impact today, especially for users with disabilities. For instance, an upcoming feature for Office apps like Microsoft Word and PowerPoint will automatically suggest image and slide deck captions, called alt-text, using AI algorithms. That way, when those files are presented to blind users, computer tools designed to translate the information onscreen into audio have text descriptions to work with.Microsoft is accomplishing this feat with its Computer Vision Cognitive Service, which uses neural networks trained with deep learning techniques to better understand and describe the contents of images. “We will offer you automatic suggestions for alt-text when you insert a photographic image that can be recognized with high confidence,” writes the Office 365 team in a blog post. “Through machine learning, this service will keep improving as more people use it, saving you significant time to make media-rich presentations accessible.” Facebook too announced a similar feature for photo captions back in April, and much of the tech industry is using these AI techniques to both improve accessibility and better parse images and videos for valuable data. The feature will be available in Office and PowerPoint on PC starting next year for Office 365 subscribers.