Twitter chief Jack Dorsey today apologized for what he says were technical problems causing some Twitter users to involuntarily follow the @POTUS account as it was handed over to Donald Trump. As Sarah Perez reported here yesterday, Twitter users were bewildered as to why they were forced to follow the Trump @POTUS account, and many accused Twitter of doing the new administration’s… Read More
from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/2eRLiKC Jack Dorsey apologizes for Twitter glitch forcing some users to follow Trump’s @POTUS Lora Kolodny http://ift.tt/2keo3hb
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On this week’s episode of Technotopia I talked to Bre Pettis, former CEO of Makerbot and the founder of Bre&Co. Pettis has been thinking about new manufacturing chains, the rise of the local maker, what what happens when a country falls into disrepair. Pettis is an optimistic realist. He’s been watching Venezuela with great interest and has a few pieces of advice for tech folks… 
A number of Twitter users tonight are claiming their accounts have somehow automatically followed the Twitter accounts, @POTUS, @FLOTUS and @VP – now in the hands of the Trump administration – even though they had never followed the White House accounts, had unfollowed these accounts before the transition, or had the accounts blocked. This appears to be a glitch related to… 
UK startup Lobster is gearing up to scale its user generated content licensing marketplace, as it closes a £1 million Series A. It’s expecting to have closed out the round next week, with 85 per cent of the funding committed at this point and only its decision on the last few investors outstanding. 
Travel tech startup FLYR raised $8 million in Series A funding for technology that predicts the price of airfares by applying artificial intelligence to a database of both open industry data and a proprietary collection of year’s of past prices and fluctuations. The funding round was led by a Peter Thiel fund, and according to an SEC filing, Thiel Capital Principal Phin Upham was involved… 
Originally positioned as a medium for projects to garner modest seed funding from a diverse group of supporters, crowdfunding platforms have evolved. Yes, crowdfunding has produced some inspiring success stories. However, it also has facilitated the transfer of significant sums of money to teams that ultimately proved themselves to be incompetent, leaving backers with nothing. 
Twitter just can’t seem to let go of Vine. The company announced last fall it would close the video-sharing community site and its accompanying mobile applications, which it then did just days ago. But it has also taken several steps to ensure that the content created in Vine would not be lost, by offering tools to export videos, both online and in its app. Today, in another move to… 
It’s official. As of about an hour ago Donald Trump is the 45th President of The United States of America. One question regarding the transition was how the social media handoff would occur between outgoing former President Obama and President Trump. And now about an hour in, some of these accounts are starting to switch over. The most important one is probably @POTUS on Twitter, which… 
Our microbiomes: who understands them? Scientists? The bacteria colonizing our guts? The guy who made the Mexican food we just ate? Wrong. It’s our computers. Researchers have tasked them to create a new way to analyze and understand our microbiomes electronically. The service is called “Functional Shifts’ Taxonomic Contributors” or, obviously, FishTaco. The system,… 
A new company named Sigma, founded by alumni of mobile app search engine Quixey, aims to take records and certifications currently trapped in the analog world and bring them online. To do so, the company has raised $4.35 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors. The idea originated in late 2014, during a scuba trip in Belize that Sigma cofounder and… 
I’ve found that the most valuable design tool in the 21st century is rather old-fashioned: customer feedback. Technology has produced huge breakthroughs in design. A product can be ideated, prototyped and finalized with little more than a keyboard and code. But the ingenuity of modern design often leads to product teams neglecting the basics. 
Twitter thinks it has identified your BFF. The company is currently testing a new feature that will highlight the tweets from a select, single account that Twitter thinks you’ll want to see. Yes: a single person’s tweets will get their own special spot on your timeline. The feature is similar to Twitter’s “In Case You Missed It…” which rounds up the tweets… 
New York City startup Slidejoy has been acquired by a South Korean competitor Buzzvil. Both companies offer a way for Android users to earn rewards in exchange for allowing ads on their lockscreens — in Buzzvil’s case, that’s both through its HoneyScreen consumer app and through its BuzzScreen platform for publishers. The financial terms are not being disclosed, but… 
Samsung is holding a press conference in three days to explain the defect in the Galaxy Note 7 that forced the product’s recall, but already it is being reported that wrongly-sized batteries were the primary cause of some units combusting. 
Enterprise tech startups unveiled their products and pitched investors at Alchemist Accelerator’s 14th demo day in Santa Clara, Calif. today. The companies ranged from a Stanford AI labs spinout, Eloquent Labs, to the hardware-makers like Amber Agriculture and PubInno, to lots of software-as-a-service and cybersecurity developers, more like you’d expect from an… 
While running Yardsale, a previous Y Combinator startup based around essentially making it easy to sell your old stuff, Ryan Mickle had the benefit of talking to alumni and colleagues to figure out what to use to build it. But one of the basic services he used to run it ended up costing more in the long run as the app ran into critical problems when it came to some transactions —… 
Machine learning and AI are incredible tools, but they also require a similarly incredible amount of computing power. If that requirement could be cut by a couple orders of magnitude, AI would be unfettered from its banks of parallel processors and free to inhabit practically any device — which is exactly what a breakthrough at the Allen Institute for AI makes possible. 
Snap Inc’s quest to earn enough money to IPO sees it flip-flopping after pledging not to use “creepy” ad targeting. Snap will now allow advertisers to use a Oracle’s Data Cloud (formerly Datalogix) third-party data about what users buy offline to target ads on Snapchat, according to the Wall Street Journal. Snap tells TechCrunch that this rolled out over the last few… 
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