This week, announcements from Google’s annual I/O developer conference dominated tech headlines. But Oracle and Google are back in court, Apple unveiled a new redesigned store in SF and we learned that Amazon may start selling its own groceries soon. These are the stories you don’t want to miss.
1.TechCrunch live blogged the Google I/O keynote from the Shoreline Amphitheater event. But in case you don’t have time to read through our play-by-play coverage, we rounded up the major announcements. Highlights included the unveiling of smart home speaker Google Home, two new apps called Allo and Duo, Android Instant Apps, Android VR’s Daydream platform and headset concept and updates from Firebase.
2. Apple announced a bombshell $1 billion investment into China’s largest ride-hailing app, Didi Chuxing (formerly Didi Kuaidi).
3. Oracle and Google continue to fight it out in a retrial over $9 billion that Oracle claims Google owes it for using its Java code in Android’s mobile platform. It all started back in 2010, when Oracle first sued Google over the company’s use of 37 Java APIs in its Android OS. This time, the two companies are arguing over whether Google’s coding falls under fair use. “When Sun established Java, they established it as an open source thing,” Alphabet CEO Larry Page said in a testimonial. “We didn’t pay for the free and open things.”
4. A report from The Wall Street Journal claimed that Amazon will soon roll out its own private-label brands of common household items like coffee, diapers and other perishable groceries.
5. Governor Doug Ducey of Arizona signed SB 1350, a law that prohibits cities from banning the listing and use of short-term rentals like Airbnb and HomeAway.
6. Another big investor bought up about $1 billion in Apple shares: Warren Buffett. The Berkshire Hathaway holding company disclosed in a regulatory filing that it owns around 9.81 million shares of Apple — worth around $1.07 billion at the end of the quarter — as Apple shares have taken a huge dive in the past year.
7. Uber had a few updates. The company announced it is testing self-driving cars in Pittsburgh, and debuted Trip Tracker, a feature that lets riders view family members’ rides in real time.
8. A LinkedIn hack from back in 2012 is still causing problems for its users; 117 million LinkedIn emails and passwords were posted online in the most recent data dump from the hack.
9. Coding school 42 announced plans to educate 10,000 Silicon Valley students for free.
10. Lora Kolodny wrote about Dedrone, a company that just raised $10 million for a system that monitors the skies and tells people when drones have entered their airspace.
11. Leaked screenshots followed Instagram’s former announcement that analytics are coming to the platform in the form of audience demographics, post impressions, reach and more.
12. Brian Heater reviewed the Withings Go activity tracker, concluding that the device shows promise, but is mostly a non-starter.
13. Crunch Network contributor Basel Farag argued that coding is not the new literacy in “Please don’t learn to code.”