Apple and Oculus dominated tech headlines this week with announcements from WWDC and the Rift press event. We also saw news about Dick Costolo’s resignation from his CEO title at Twitter, a new messaging app popular with teens, and more. These are the stories you won’t want to miss from this week (6/5-6/11).
1. Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, and we summed up everything you need to know about WWDC ’15. Announcements included the new OS X El Capitan, iOS 9, split screen iPad apps, the open sourcing of Swift, watchOS 2, and Apple Music.
2. Speaking of Apple Music, Josh Constine broke down its strengths and weaknesses. Will Apple’s new service be the Spotify killer, or Ping 2.0?
3. Oculus gave the world the first look at its Rift consumer virtual reality headset which will ship with a wireless Xbox One controller. We got a close up look at the final hardware. Oculus also gave us a taste of what their input devices will look like by previewing the Oculus Touch handheld motion-tracking haptic controllers.
4. ADP is suing HR startup Zenefits and its founder Parker Conrad for defamation. The dispute seems to have started when ADP cut off Zenefits small business clients using the ADP RUN payroll system from sharing data with Zenefits.
5. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo stepped down, and Jack Dorsey has been named the interim CEO.
6. Sarah Buhr introduced us to a new messaging app called Jott that is currently blowing up amongst the teenage population.
7. Natasha Lomas wrote about a new study that asserts that a large majority of web users are not happy, and feel powerless to stop their data being harvested and used by marketers.
8. Guest writer Sean Gallagher wrote about 4 skills that are highly valued in today’s job market in “Software Is Eating The Job Market.”
9. Columnist Jon Evans writes about the mistakes he made and what he learned during his time managing developers.
10. President Barack Obama signed the USA FREEDOM Act into law, which will temporarily restore the nation’s phone bulk metadata collection program.
11. In an attempt to uphold its policy against harassing users, Reddit banned 5 offensive subreddits. Trolls responded accordingly.
12. A new study found that VCs spend an average of 3 minutes and 44 seconds viewing pitch decks, and that companies needed an average of 40 investor meetings and took a little over 12 weeks to close a round.