13 TechCrunch stories you don’t want to miss this week

This week, earnings reports continued, Elon Musk announced plans for SpaceX’s first Mars mission, we spoke with the Reverend Jesse Jackson about diversity in the tech industry and more. These are the stories everyone in tech is talking about.

1. Major tech companies continued to report earnings this week. Apple had a huge second-quarter miss, where revenue dropped for the first time in 13 years. The company’s stock plummeted and shares were down more than 8 percent in extended trading (Carl Icahn, one of Apple’s biggest activist investors, even dumped his stake and exited the company). Other key points included Facebook’s continued winning streak. The social network giant reached 1.65 billion users and beat on Q1 estimates with $5.38 billion revenue. Amazon also impressed, spiking up to more than 12 percent after beating analyst expectations on nearly all fronts. But the big takeaway from this report was that Amazon Web Services’ revenue was up to $2.57 billion – ahead of the $2.53 billion analysts were expecting and up from $1.57 YOY, a 64 percent jump. More and more, it looks like AWS is going to be a huge second line of business for the company.

2. A body was found in a conference room at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, according to several news reports. The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department is currently investigating the incident.

apple statement

3. Elon Musk revealed plans for a ‘Red Dragon’ Mars mission as early as 2018.

red dragon

4. Hundreds of Spotify credentials – emails, usernames, passwords and other details – appeared on Pastebin in what could be a possible security breach. However, Spotify said that it “has not been hacked” and its “user records are secure.”

5. Microsoft released a next-word predicting keyboard called Word Flow as an iOS app.

6. Countless VCs have said that Postmates, despite its popularity with consumers, is doomed because its unit economics don’t add up. Well, this week we obtained leaked Postmates financials that suggest the company may be doing better than everyone thought.

7. We spoke with the Reverend Jesse Jackson about diversity in the tech industry, “Diversity and inclusion in tech, Jackson said, is the civil rights issue of our time.

Screen Shot 2016-04-28 at 11.00.01 AM

8. Goldman Sachs launched GS Bank, an Internet bank with a $1 minimum deposit.

9. We reviewed the ultra-thin MacBook. It’s small, simple and beautiful: quintessentially Apple.

Apple Macbook (2016)

10. Contributor Alex Chuang called out signs of a tech slowdown, and raised the question of whether the valuations of unicorns ever made sense in the first place. He compares certain startups to tardigrades, the nearly indestructible micro-animal.

11. Google, Uber and Lyft joined forces with automakers Volvo and Ford, creating a coalition to influence lawmakers, regulators and the public. The coalition is meant to keep safety in mind but allow for rapid penetration of autonomous vehicle tech into the market.

12. Dropbox announced Project Infinite with the goal of giving business customers local access to files no matter where they live — in the cloud, on network drives or local drives.

13. We wrote about why you should tip your Uber driver. No, really.