How to circumvent Turkey’s social media block

Turkey censorship protests Access to several social media sites was blocked for over an hour in Turkey today during a reported military coup. Although internet traffic appears to be flowing normally again, Turkey’s government frequently responds to political events by blocking certain websites or throttling traffic. 
“We saw the throttling of connections from Turkey to Twitter and Facebook just after the… Read More

How to get your photos featured on Apple’s Shot on iPhone billboards

shot-on-iphone- Been anywhere near a billboard recently? You’ve probably seen some magnificent photographs with “Shot on iPhone” plastered underneath. As a photographer, you’ve probably felt a pang of envy; why aren’t your photos up there for the world to see? I tracked down one of the photographers in the current campaign to find out how his images came to be featured in the… Read More

13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week

Costumed performers as Pikachu, the popular animation Pokemon series character, perform at the Yokohama Dance Parade in Yokohama on August 2, 2015. The dance began on August 1 and will run for 65 days throughout the city, with more than 200 dance programmes. (Photo:  KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP/Getty Images) This week’s headlines saw Pokémon Go mania, iPhone 7 leaks and the biggest tech IPO of the year so far. Here’s a quick roundup of the top tech news of the week so you can get back to hunting Charizards. 1. Pokémon Go completely took over this week, adding $9 billion to Nintendo’s value as the global rollout continued. The app topped Twitter’s daily users, and saw… Read More

Rick and Morty is coming to virtual reality

morty GOOD NEWS, EVERYONE! Er, wrong show.
W-w-w-whoa, Morty. Rick and Morty is coming to virtual reality by way of the HTC Vive.
Beyond that, there’s… not a whole lot to know, just yet, except that it’s called “Rick and Morty Simulator: Virtual Rick-ality” and is being built by Owlchemy — the same folks who made the silly but oh-so-wonderful Job Simulator for… Read More

HelloMD looks to its ‘Quora for cannabis’ as a source of growth

IMG_9118 I’m in Canada, and I’m having a conversation about weed. So far, everything’s tracking. But this isn’t just a casual convo — HelloMD is a startup focused on health, community and access to information, and they’re based in the U.S. (with people in SF and Colorado). And while the core business began as a way to use telemedicine to connect doctors with… Read More

Sales startup Immediately will shut down as team members join New Relic

immediately Immediately, a startup that built mobile sales tools, will be shutting down at the end of the month, while part of the team will move on to cloud-monitoring company New Relic. According to the official announcement, both the Immediately app (which offers a number of features, including phone logging and detecting when emails are opened) and the company’s Gong app (a “pocket… Read More

Removing the human element from autonomous commercial drones

P1030239.00_02_52_14.Still002 Since the industrial revolution, economic advancement has been achieved by increasing efficiency and reducing human labor through greater mechanical autonomy driven by technological innovation. For many, commercial drones represent the next enabler of economic benefit using robotic platforms. Read More

Legion Analytics is building bots to automate your sales pitch

robot-customer-service Legion Analytics is looking to make your sales team more productive with the help of artificial intelligence. We covered the startup last year when it was part of Y Combinator’s fellowship program and offered to help companies find sales leads. CEO Jamasen Rodriguez told me that the company’s vision has expanded — it’s not just focused on lead generation anymore, but… Read More

Getting ripped with BowFlex’s ‘smart dumbbells’

BowFlex Let’s just push past the whole inherent irony of naming a product category “smart dumbbells,” shall we? This is 2016, we’re living in the future. And really, if something isn’t connected to a smartphone, does it really exist? No. Of course it doesn’t. BowFlex has been showing off it ST560 Smart Dumbbells for a couple of years now, and, much to the chagrin of… Read More

Netflix launches Flixtape so you can make ‘mixtapes’ of your favorites movies and shows

Screen Shot 2016-07-15 at 2.39.23 PM Just in time for the weekend, Netflix today announced the launch of a new service called Flixtape, which the company describes as a way to make short playlists of your favorite Netflix titles. “It’s like a mixtape, but for Netflix,” the site explains. The new tool lets you create these lists based on a genre or theme of some sort, then share them with friends or family… Read More

Oxford study shows how tiny bacteria ‘wind farms’ could power electronics

Bacteria A team of scientists from Oxford University used a virtual prototype to demonstrate how the natural movement of bacteria could be harnessed to turn cylindrical rotors and provide a steady power source. The study, published in the journal Science Advances, showed that the chaotic swarming effect of bacteria can be organized into biologically driven power plants, similar… Read More