TechCrunch

 With a dedicated fund of $1M, “The Venture” is striving to enable social entrepreneurs around the world to scale and gain exposure. Read More

Bots have the potential to transform politics. Read More

 Players of Pokemon Go are not only giving up their right to act like sane human beings in public, as they walk around, zombie-esque, reaching into the phones held in front of their faces, they are also likely to be waiving legal rights if they don’t take a very close look at Niantic Labs’ Terms of Service for the game. Read More

 Big Data by all accounts is supposed to help humans perform better by augmenting our limited brain power. Computers, after all, have the ability to crunch data with lightning speed, something humans just haven’t been built to do. Conventional tech wisdom states that the more data you have, the better the outcome — even if that sounds counter-intuitive. That’s the thinking… Read More

 As a founder or someone working in a startup, the main priority is always staying alive. Every ounce of your budget needs to be spent efficiently. It’s all about difficult decisions, and some of them can be messy and complex. With options coming from every angle, you need to find ways to make them as simple as possible. This is where our good friend Drake comes in. Read More

 This week on Technotopia I talked to Neeraj Bansal the co-founder of education startup Simversity. He has a deep understanding of what it takes to build an online education platform and he also notes that the only jobs worth having in the future are the ones that can’t be replaced by machine learning. Education right now, he says, is a form of data replication. But when computers and… Read More

 Chatbots seem to be climbing the proverbial peak of the tech hype curve with every passing day. Popular messaging apps have been attempting to outdo each other in terms of making their platforms open for bot development. The frenetic action notwithstanding, the moot point is whether bots actually solve any real end-user need. The answer is not as clear as the chat platforms would have us believe. Read More

 As the internet social turf wars continue to mature, the land grab is becoming much better understood. With a few companies controlling 95 percent of the social data, the internet is more closed and much more controlled than ever before. Read More

 Have you ever stopped to think about what it takes to bring an animated fish to life? How a team of people can take a spark of an idea and make it a reality so millions of pairs of eyes can stare in amazement at the big screen? I spoke with Pixar’s president and one of the tech leads on “Finding Dory” to find out more about the creative and technical journey behind the… Read More

 We all took a collective gasp when we saw the price tag of Microsoft’s acquisition of LinkedIn. Now that the dust has settled a bit, we can pause and reflect on what this means from a data, privacy and email perspective — given that all three are potential strengths, weaknesses and concerns arising from the merger of two giants. Read More

 Pokémon; Macbeth; the Illuminati. Those may not sound like they have a lot in common, but they exemplify the three whole new forms of technology-driven entertainment that have erupted in recent years. We’ll soon combine all three–and, eventually, use them to create whole new multi-faceted immersive worlds that will make today’s entertainment look like radio dramas. Read More

Coup attempt in Turkey and social media like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube gets blocked, Obama launches the Advanced Wireless Research Initiative, Lines share price jumps 50 percent on debut, Netflix launches Flixtape, NASA shows off its new Mars Rover design. All this on Crunch Report. Read More

 Pokémon Go is officially the biggest mobile game of all time — at this point, you’re either playing or you’re sick of hearing about it. If you’re in that first camp, keep reading. We are only a week in and several members of the TechCrunch team are level 20 or higher. We have put a ton of mileage into the game. Hundreds of miles in fact. And here’s what we think… Read More

 A recent Pew report found that a majority of Americans believe that most human jobs could be automated by 2065. It’s no wonder, then, that talk about technological unemployment is becoming increasingly popular, with many beginning to question whether or not they’ll still have jobs in the coming years. Read More

 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

 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

 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

 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

 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

 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