events

Well that was quick.

After just 2 minutes, tickets for Apple's upcoming annual developers conference in San Francisco are gone.

The show took 2 whole hours to sell out last year. Apple caught many developers by surprise last April when it began selling tickets immediately upon announcing the conference at 5:30 a.m. PT. This time around the company gave developers a little more than a day of advance notice. The event will be held June 10-14 at Moscone West Center.

Apple's WWDC, or "dub-dub" as it's often referred to casually, is a mecca … Read more

Call them what you will -- task managers, organizers, or personal assistants -- but software designed to help busy people stay a step ahead of the competition (or disaster) is practically as old as computing, itself. It sometimes seems like we've tried them all, yet few have been "keepers." So we were intrigued by Dextronet's Swift To-Do List since other picky users seemed to like it. It's shareware, so it needs to offer a lot of features and performance to stand out from the freeware crowd -- and it does. But you can try it … Read more

One man's junk is another man's treasure, but as you're about to learn, what Goodwill perceived as junk was actually a very valuable piece of video game history.

Kotaku tells the tale of a North Carolina woman who, upon visiting Goodwill, happened to come across a nearly sealed copy of the 1987 NES video game Stadium Events. She bought the game for $7.99 and walked out of the thrift store with something worth thousands more.… Read more

Twitter today invited developers to a platform-focused event at its headquarters early next week, where it plans to show off new features.

The event -- which begins at 6:30 p.m. next Tuesday and is scheduled to run until 9 p.m. -- is not open to the press, the company said.

The company offered no other details as to what will be in store, though noted that it would focus on "mobile oriented" things.

"We've been working on some exciting new features for the Twitter Platform, and we'd like to share those with … Read more

"Well, yes, maybe we do lack a little taste. Maybe. OK, if you really insist. But doesn't everyone like jokes about drunken women? Doesn't everyone like a booth babe or two, swimsuit or no swimsuit? No? Oh. Really?"

This might have been the inner monologue in certain areas of Samsung's vast collective cranium, after again falling foul of accusations of, well, giving a bad show.

You might not yet have forgotten (and my colleague Molly Wood certainly hasn't) Samsung's touchingly misguided attempt to launch the very fine Galaxy S4 on a New York … Read more

Though the Kyocera Event has only 3G data and is nearly identical to the Kyocera Hydro, save for not being waterproof like the Hydro, it still has enough tricks up its sleeve to be considered a reliable and decent handset.

True, the biggest incentive to buy it is that bargain price tag. At $79.99, it's one of the two best Android smartphones (the other being the Kyocera Rise) in its price range. But it doesn't hurt that it has a respectable rear-facing camera and runs Android 4.0 as well.

Design The Kyocera Event is compact, and … Read more

The little blond boy from the latest, oddly bland commercials tap-danced.

There was a mother-in-law joke.

There were actors being forced to spout lines of the same quality as reality show producers foist on overly-lipsticked, neophyte administrative associates.

Somewhere, Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd were weeping into a banana daiquiri.

Samsung's live event to launch its Galaxy S4 was bathed in all the taste of budget-free vaudeville.

As my colleague Molly Wood fulminated, the depiction of women as Stepfordian drunks was quite spectacularly myopic, ancient, and slightly tawdry.

The general level of humor had a sell-by date of September … Read more

Editor's note: It's official. Microsoft has announced the future of Xbox (and the next console) will be revealed at an event in Redmond, Washington on May 21.

Press events are a tricky beast. No one ever said they were easy to pull off. But with Sony casting the first stone in the next-generation console gaming war, Microsoft can learn a lot from what worked and what didn't.

When the lights went up, Sony execs were shaking hands and congratulating each other. But the packed house at … Read more