In the scramble to build bots that live up to the hype, messaging app Telegram has just announced a $1M giveaway to developers to try to incentivize them to build cool stuff. The messaging startup ...

The developer behind @my_ali_bot, which lets you browse products on Chinese e-commerce site MyAliExpress on Telegram, says it took him a week to build the bot, which had about 38,000 users in January.

Chat bots are one of the hottest tech topics of the year. Inspired by trends from Asia, messaging apps like Telegram and Kik have adopted bots — automated accounts from third partners like ...