Category: Tech news

 The free alcohol may not flow so abundantly at SXSW 2015. Event organizers have asked the city of Austin to cut down on the amount of permits it hands out to unofficial meet-ups, sessions and parties that run in tandem with the main festival. It cites overcrowding and too much free booze from parallel events as safety issues. What started as a small music festival with 700 attendees back in… Read More

 A Swiss company called Sintratec is planning to release the world’s first sintering 3D printer for the desktop. Sintering, which is the process of building a 3D object by shooting lasers at a layer of nylon powder, is one of the best ways to make high resolution objects that are completely solid. The company is planning to launch the product on Indiegogo soon and will charge $4,000 for… Read More

As we detailed this morning, Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has resigned from the company after what Y Combinator President Sam Altman called a “disagreement with the board” about the location of Reddit’s new office. If that reasoning sounds a bit strange to you… you’re not alone. Folks around the Internet are asking why someone would up and leave an exec role over what… Read More

 Hot off of their Haxlr8r demo day presentation last week, hardware startup Prynt was nice enough to drop by TechCrunch HQ to show off the latest prototypes of their smartphones cases, which contain built-in printers so you can instantly get a copy of that selfie with your best friends. Read More

 With Advanced Warfare, Activision is taking the extremely successful Call of Duty mostly to places it’s already been, which is to say this is a game about war, shooting, explosions and guns. But it’s also taking a stab at some realistic futurism with the ‘Exo’ suits your character gets to wear, which augment your ability to navigate your environment and deal damage to… Read More

 Rising nearly 6 percent in regular trading, TubeMogul spiked 16 percent in after-hours trading after reporting better-than-expected revenue, profit and guidance. Read More

 The re/code mobile conference took place a couple of weeks ago, and among the speakers discussing the trends in tech were YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, Instagram’s Kevin Systorm, Kim Kardashian West and… “Wait, what? Kim Kardashian is a tech expert now? Seriously???” Read More

 The United States Senate could vote on the USA FREEDOM Act as soon as next week, pushing the surveillance reform bill ahead this year. That would buck prior conventional wisdom that the Act was not a legislative priority, likely ending up shelved until the next Congress. There is still some fight in this Congress after all. Read More

 If there’s one constant in life, it’s change, and the fourth quarter of 2014 has brought quite a bit of change for Reddit, the massively popular aggregation site that could. So here’s some more news: Reddit CEO Yishan Wong has resigned, COO Ellen Pao has become interim CEO and co-founder Alexis Ohanian has returned to the company he founded in 2005 to fill the full-time… Read More

 Back in 2012, Google launched an API that allowed developers to use the Google Wallet service to sell digital goods — things like music, or levels in a web game, or subscriptions to online magazines. If you’re using that API, it’s time to find a replacement. Google has just announced that they’re killing it off in the first quarter of next year. According to a notice… Read More

 Amazon today announced its fastest EC2 instances for compute yet. The new so-called c4 instances will feature a 2.9 GHz Haswell processor (with bursts up to 3.5 GHz with Turbo boost) with up to 36 virtual CPUs and up to 60 GiB of RAM. Read More

 Kanvas, a photo-editing app that lets users add text, stickers, drawings and music to images as well as stitch together photos, GIFs and videos, is now bringing its set of creative tools to a new application for iOS users: Kanvas Keyboard. As you may guess by its name, the new app is an iOS 8-compatible keyboard app that lets you quickly add text to your photos or colored backgrounds, draw… Read More

 Amazon Web Services announced a new service today called Lambda, a stateless event-driven compute service for dynamic applications that doesn’t require provisioning of any compute infrastructure. As AWS’s CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, this will enable programmers to reduce their overall development effort. You simply write the code and define the event triggers, and it will run… Read More

 BlackBerry is rolling out a number of new enterprise-focused features and partnerships today, which is a sign that CEO John Chen is on the right track when it comes to effecting a workable turnaround for the beleaguered Canadian tech firm. Part of that is a new feature for BBM which should prove popular with enterprise users of the mobile messaging solution: BBM Meetings. The Meetings feature… Read More

 Google Analytics is getting a powerful new feature, the company announced today: the ability to track iOS app installs. The new reporting function, which allows customers to better measure marketing campaigns related to acquiring mobile app users, now works with those who advertise via Google AdWords as well as third-party mobile ad networks including akri, AdMob, AppLovin, Millennial… Read More