As we reflect on the week, we give you the 11 best stories from 9/13-9/19.
1. It was announced that Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle since he founded the company in 1977, has relinquished his CEO title. He is to be replaced by a co-CEO structure consisting of Mark Hurd and Safra Catz.
2. Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has gone public, opening trading on the New York Stock Exchange at $92.70 per share, up 36 percent from the $68 share price of its initial public offering. The opening price gives the company a valuation of $237.7 billion, and TechCrunch was at the NYSE to bring you the details.
3. 17-year-old Kai Kloepfer has invented a biometric smart gun that unlocks with your fingerprint. The high school student from Boulder hopes that his prototype, which employs a user ID and fingerprint match, will help reduce gun-related accidents.
4. Sarah Buhr reported on a San Francisco startup called ManServants, a service through which you can hire attractive men to wait on you hand and foot for $125 an hour. In an effort to dig deeper into this controversial idea, Matt Burns wrote a parody of it, switching every gendered noun from male to female. He argues that a service objectifying either men or women does not bring us any closer to gender equality.
5. Microsoft confirmed that Mojang and Minecraft will join its ranks, but that it will continue to make the game available across iOS, Android and PlayStation, as well as on Xbox and PC. Josh Constine breaks down why this was ultimately an unwise decision for Microsoft.
6. Facebook recently employed a mass deletion of hundreds of drag queens’ personal profile pages on the basis that using a name other than your birth name is a violation of the company’s real-names policy. Despite meeting to speak in person with members of the drag community in San Francisco, Facebook refuses to make an exception for these users.
7. Tomorrow Group founder Tom Goodwin wrote a piece called “How The Internet Killed Profit” about how he sees the Internet as a destructive force against the foundations of business and how digitalization has skewed economic balance.
8. We got to know the new iPhones a little better. Darrell Etherington reviewed the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus, and Matthew Panzarino showed us what using these new devices is actually like in real life, as he brought the new iPhones with him on a trip to Disneyland.
9. Danny Crichton and Alex Wilhelm both interpreted the recent comments made by Benchmark venture capitalist Bill Gurley regarding the risk-driven nature of Silicon Valley and companies’ proclivities to burn up money.
10. Mike Ducker took us back in time with his story “It’s Not About Creating Another Silicon Valley, But Preventing Another Motor City” in which he discusses how to develop ecosystems that will support the job-creating entrepreneurs of the future.
11. Twitter’s CEO had a great comeback to Peter Thiel’s attack on the company’s management, suggesting that there is “probably a lot of pot-smoking going on there” telling Thiel that he’d get back to him when he finished his bag of Doritos.
In other news, Home Depot got hacked, confirming as many as 56 million payment cards were potentially exposed. Josh Constine walked us through Facebook’s new private sharing app Moments. We also compiled a gallery of the best iPhone parody videos and gave you a list of new alternative iOS keyboards that are dominating the App Store.