This week, Tesla unveiled a brand-new model, Oculus Rift shipped and Snapchat saw a major upgrade. These are this week’s top tech stories you don’t want to miss.
1. The Tesla Model 3 has been unveiled. The base model starts at $35,000, and it does 0-60 in under 6 seconds. Over 150,000 people have already pre-ordered it.
2. Microsoft held its Build conference this week. The most notable announcement was that Microsoft is bringing the Bash shell to Windows. You can find everything we wrote about Build here.
3. Lucas Matney wrote a full review of the Oculus Rift. Simply put: it’s amazing, but you probably shouldn’t buy one yet. Josh Constine also wrote a feature about 5 hard questions facing Oculus Rift.
4. Connie Loizos took an in-depth look at Tony Fadell, asking if he is in Nest’s way. As Loizos explains, “Fadell couldn’t be further apart from Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai.”
5. Snapchat upgraded everything on its platform this week. With “Chat 2.0,” Snapchat has seamlessly combined video, audio, GIFs, and stickers. As Josh Constine puts it, “Snapchat serves as a phone.” You can also see us run through all the new features in this Facebook Live video.
6. Spotify is doing whatever it takes to compete with Apple Music, and this week they raised $1 billion in debt with devilish terms. If Spotify doesn’t perform well, it could cost the company a lot of money.
7. The FBI is full of shit. They just unlocked another phone. Jon Evans dove into the encryption debate with a follow-up piece “This war on math is still bullshit.”
8. Contributor Sephi Shapira wrote about the connected fridge, and how having a smart refrigerator in the household could change our buying and consumption habits.
9. Matt Joseph, a Y Combinator-backed startup founder, went on an epic tweet storm ahead of demo day about an elephant room — racism and raising money as a black founder. Post tweetstorm and demo day, he is now receiving funding for e-commerce startup Locent.
10. Remember the epic, 18-minute recording of a man’s attempt to cancel his Comcast service that went viral a couple years back? A new bill we’re dubbing ‘Ryan’s Law’ would allow you to cancel Comcast online with one click. Because let’s be real. If you sign up online, you should be able to cancel online.
11. Last week, Instagram announced it was going to be changing its algorithm. Naturally, everyone freaked out. Brands and professional Instagrammers asked followers to turn on post notifications for their pages. But the truth is, the algorithm is going to force us to compete. If posts don’t perform well, Instagram won’t show them.