11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss This Week

This week, Taylor Swift went head to head with Apple, anti-Uber protests took place in France, and Amazon Echo went up for pre-order. These are the stories to catch you up on everything that happened this week in tech.

1. Docker, CoreOS, Google, Microsoft and Amazon and other tech giants announced they are now working on a new standard for software containers with the help of the Linux Foundation. The idea here is that developers should be able to package their apps in a container and be confident that it will run in any runtime.

2. Taylor Swift went back and forth with Apple this week regarding her choice to put her latest album “1989” on Apple Music. After initially pledging to keep her album off the streaming service due to her philosophical stance on artist royalties, Apple reformed its policy stating that it would compensate artists during customers’ 3 month free trial. Swift then confirmed she would let Apple stream her album. 

Taylor Swift Apple Music3. Lucas Matney reported that the NSA and its British counterpart the GCHQ have reverse-engineered popular consumer anti-virus software in order to track users, according to the latest round of Snowden docs unearthed by The Intercept.

4. The Amazon Echo connected speaker went up for pre-order across the US. Darrell Etherington wrote that the device proves the viability of voice-based home computing.

amazon-echo

5. Verizon completed its $4.4B acquisition of AOL.

6. French anti-Uber protests took place in and outside of Paris on Thursday, during which taxi drivers burned cars and attacked Uber drivers.

taxi uber strike paris

7. James Altucher argued why Snoop Dogg should be Twitter’s next CEO.

8. Guest writer Noah Benesch argued that entrepreneurs are choosing to embrace the lie of probable success, and are ignoring the daunting statistics about what it actually takes to succeed.

9. Facebook set an all-time high, closing at $88.86 per share, valuing the company at just under $250 billion. The company also announced that Messenger no longer requires a Facebook account.

10. Guest writer and CEO of Box Aaron Levie writes that the age of analog is over, putting many businesses in the unavoidable position of having to redefine the very products they’ve built their companies around, in “Enterprise Software’s Trillion Dollar Opportunity.”

11. Reddit turned 10 years old this week, and to celebrate, it released a treasure trove of stats. We looked back through 10 years of viral moments that happened on Reddit.