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Twitter gets blocked in Turkey, as its Prime Minister threatens crackdown on other social media

Mar21
by on March 21, 2014 at 2:50 am
Posted In: Around the Web

Turkey has cracked down on social media — not for the first time – after Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan blocked access to Twitter and threatened to “wipe out” the microblogging service after it was used to expose alleged government corruption. The BBC reports that its correspondent was unable to access the site from Turkey, where Twitter is estimated to have some 10 million registered users. Twitter hasn’t issued an official response, but it did offer instructions to help users send tweets using SMS: Turkish users: you can send Tweets using SMS. Avea and Vodafone text START to 2444. Turkcell text START to…

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PayPal’s food payment services Pay At Table and Order Ahead come to the UK and Australia

Mar21
by on March 21, 2014 at 1:26 am
Posted In: Around the Web, UK

PayPal has switched the Pay At Table and Order Ahead features in its iOS app on in Europe, starting with the UK, as TechCrunch reports. The services relate to the food and restaurant business, and were first announced in the US last year. They do pretty much what you’d expect by their names: Pay At Table checks users in to a location and handles payment for their meal at a restaurant…’at the table’, while Order Ahead lets customers to peruse a restaurant’s menu and order their food remotely, before coming to collect it and paying on pick-up. Popular noodle restaurant…

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Can artificial intelligence give a TED talk? The XPrize Foundation wants to find out.

Mar21
by on March 21, 2014 at 12:34 am
Posted In: Around the Web, Shareables, ted, xprize

Innovative non-profit XPrize Foundation is teaming up with TED to advance artificial intelligence, but it wants your help to make it happen. The two organizations are throwing the gauntlet down to AI enthusiasts by offering “a modern-day Turing test” to the team that delivers a TED talk with no human input whatsoever. That’s the basic premise, but XPrize and TED want fans of technology to come up with the rules for this challenge. To take part and help shape the unique opportunity, just visit the XPrize-TED website and submit your opinion. We look forward to seeing the fruits of this challenge, which…

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Publishing platform Medium launches a read-only app for iOS

Mar20
by on March 20, 2014 at 11:55 pm
Posted In: Apps, Around the Web, medium

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Medium has introduced its first mobile app for iOS today, as it had promised last week. The app is read-only and allows users to access a range of published articles by first signing in using their Twitter account — which comes as little surprise since Twitter is a major component of its Web platform and, of course, founder Ev Williams also started Twitter too. After signing in, the app — which is stunningly beautiful with a simplistic UI — ‘hand-picks’ a reading list based on the people that you follow, popular stories and any Medium collections that you are subscribed…

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Netflix CEO argues for strong net neutrality and slams ISPs for ‘extracting a toll because they can’

Mar20
by on March 20, 2014 at 9:35 pm
Posted In: Around the Web

Silicon Valley Business Leaders Attend Meeting Of President's Council On Jobs
Update: Comcast has responded to Netflix’s blog post. The statement can be read in full at the bottom of this article. Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings argued for a stronger form of net neutrality today, while blasting large Internet service providers (ISPs) for throttling its service until it pays additional fees. “Some big ISPs are extracting a toll because they can — they effectively control access to millions of consumers and are willing to sacrifice the interests of their own customers to press Netflix and others to pay,” he said in a blog post. Netflix’s founder was frank about the…

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