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

This week’s headlines saw both Square and First Data IPO, layoffs at Twitter, and a scathing Wall Street Journal report on Silicon Valley healthcare unicorn Theranos. On Bullish, TechCrunch hosted Melanie Araujo, who is trying to bolster diversity through design, and our TC Cribs team visited Funny Or Die’s hilarious HQ. Here are the top stories of the week.

1. In what is now the largest acquisition in tech history, Dell bought EMC for $67 billion or $33.15 a share.

2. Square filed for IPO. The financial transactions company reported in its S-1 document that during the first half of 2015, it had revenue of $560.6 million, and a loss of $77.6 million. The filing also showed that co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey (also CEO of Twitter) is the largest shareholder, owning 24.4 percent of the company.

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3. Twitter laid off 8.2 percent of the company’s global workforce. Romain Dillet wrote that the structure of the company is going to change a bit after the layoffs. Stock rose over 5 percent after the announcement, signaling that investors also felt that it was time for Twitter to slim down. Twitter also poached Omid Kordestani, Google’s chief business officer.

4. Payments processor First Data priced its IPO at $16 per share, below the expected range of $18-$20, all eyes were on the company to see how the year’s biggest IPO — raising $2.56 billion — would perform in its debut. Katie Roof talks to First Data president live at the NYSE floor.

5. The Twitter accounts of two prominent sports publications, Deadspin and SBNation, were shut down over sharing NFL-owned content via GIF and Vine. Drew Olanoff reported that it was indeed the NFL who reported these accounts.

6. Theranos, a consumer healthcare tech startup worth $9 billion, denied claims made in a scathing Wall Street Journal report that the company was struggling with results of its blood-test technology; that some results of tests were off. Later, it has reported that Theranos has dialed back its 240 blood tests to just one. This story is still developing.

7. Greg Kumparak test drove the auto-steering Tesla Model S.

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8. Josh Constine wrote a thought piece on the growing trend of social platforms trying to house publishers content on their platforms, noting that Twitter Moments doesn’t even offer outbound links to stories. He wrote that “publishers are in danger of becoming dumb content in the smart pipes Facebook and Twitter

9. Josh Constine covered Facebook’s big video push, in which the company is trying to supercharge discovery through friends via a slew of new feature tests including a dedicated Video and shopping feed.

10. We learned that Checkr — which runs background checks and vets potential hires by way of an API for the likes of Uber and Instacart— is raising a Series B of at least $30 million, at a valuation north of $250 million.

11. Chinese hacking team Pangu released the first public jailbreak for iOS 9.

12. Fixed, the app that fights parking tickets, was blocked in San Francisco, Oakland and L.A. after the cities increased the measures they were taking to block the company from accessing their parking ticket websites.

13. Sarah Buhr and Alex Wilhelm went on a date with Chef Watson, IBM’s supercomputer program that aims to provide weird and wonderful recipes beyond anything humans could come up with.

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