Category: Tech news

 Amazon is about to round out its Prime subscription service with a music streaming service, Buzzfeed reports. The service will stream old and new-ish music to Prime subs and will launch in June or July. Read More

 Elvis Costello once sang of watching detectives, an act that, to most of us, has been difficult. Now with the always-on, always-recording wearable NewViewWear camera, however, you can see them “shoot, shoot, shoot” and them “red dogs under illegal legs” no matter how they try to hide. Read More

 In the conflict between advocates of consumer privacy and those promoting the benefits of wide-reaching data collection, it’s not often we hear about the former getting a win. Yet it appears that’s exactly what happened in San Francisco last night. Philz Coffee, the Bay Area coffee shop mainstay, announced that it would no longer collect the information of customers and passersby… Read More

 This afternoon, Microsoft and Salesforce announced a broad partnership that will bring their respective software and service products closer together. Salesforce will support Windows, Windows 8.1, build “interoperability Salesforce and Office 365,” Microsoft’s subscription-based productivity suite, and integrate OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online, And Outlook in… Read More

 Christopher Fry, Twitter’s Senior Vice President of Engineering (read: the man responsible for fighting off the fail whale), has stepped down from his position. The news comes by way of documents filed with the SEC.
Alex Roetter — a founding member of Google’s adsense team and Twitter’s current VP of Engineering — will be stepping up to Fry’s role. (If… Read More

 It looks like something from the Borg (read, cool), but it’s actually a cast for healing bones. The Osteoid, created by Turkish student Deniz Karasahin, incorporates 3D printing and ultrasonic tech to make healing a broken bone more bearable. The idea of ultrasonic healing vibrations to heal bones (and other wounds) has been around for a while. But the problem was doctors couldn’t… Read More

 For all five of us who still prefer managing our own news-reading experience through a dedicated RSS reader application, there’s good news out today: One of the best news readers on the market, Reeder 2, has finally returned to the Mac. The Mac application had been unavailable for nearly a year, following the shutdown of Google Reader, because it was built on top of the search… Read More

 That HBO show about Silicon Valley is actually good, so good I binge-watched all 7 episodes last Friday. The last two episodes take place at TechCrunch Disrupt, replete with my former colleague Jason Kincaid as a host and a guest appearance by our founder Michael Arrington. Because there’s so much TechCrunch in the show, we thought it might be cool to host a viewing of the finale… Read More

 Drones distract, drones deliver and drones do battle. But what else can drones do? That was the question facing entrepreneur Christian Sanz when he began building his own drones a few years back, and after exploring various possibilities, including delivery and also simply drawing together audiences of curious spectators, Sanz found a big need drones are perfect for that wasn’t being… Read More

 Back in May of 2012, SpaceX proved that they could launch a spacecraft filled with cargo, have it dock with the International Space Station, and return it to earth safely. Tonight, they’re unveiling the spacecraft that’ll help them take the next logical (if daunting) step: sending up a handful of astronauts. Called “Dragon V2″ (or sometimes “DragonRider”,… Read More

 In an interview yesterday, former NSA contractor and now infamous leaker Edward Snowden indicated that the NSA had record of his internal complaints regarding government policy. Today the United States government released an email from Snowden asking several questions. Read More

 Qeexo, an offshoot of Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction lab, has raised $2.3 million led by Sierra Ventures. The technology allows smartphones to tell the difference between the tip of a finger and a knuckle when tapping or swiping, a feature that you probably didn’t know you wanted but now, that you think about it, sounds pretty cool. They are also announcing the… Read More

 Lyft has had it up to here with Uber reps requesting rides from its drivers only to offer them cash and phones to switch to Uber. So yesterday Lyft went on the offensive, parking a giant driver recruitment billboard outside Uber’s San Francisco Driver’s office. It says “Be More Than A Number”, urging Uber pilots to join Lyft’s merry band rather than be some… Read More

 Unity 3D, the increasingly popular WYSIWYG—ish engine for building video games, does a lot of things really well. Helping you build in-game user interfaces? That’s not one of them. At least, not yet. Unity has been promising to overhaul its UI creation system for months now, but has yet to actually ship it. When Unity officially announced that version 5.0 of the engine was in… Read More

 A bill introduced late yesterday in the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives would “limit” the Federal Communications Commission’s ability to regulate the Internet under Title II, according to its progenitor, Rep. Bob Latta.
Title II, of course, refers to part of the Communications Act. If the FCC did push for such a regulatory structure, it would have more… Read More