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

11 TechCrunch Stories You Don’t Want To Miss

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This Week

Here are the top TechCrunch articles from the past week (10/4-10/10).

1. Tesla unveiled its latest “Dual Motor” car in a series of 3 models based on the company’s Model S: the 60D, 85D, and highest-end P85D. The stunning all-wheel drive car can drive and park itself. We also gave you rundown of how the company got to where it is now, with “A Brief History Of Tesla.” 

2. After 6 years or operation, Airbnb is finally legal in its home turf of San Francisco. The city’s board of supervisors voted to legalize and regulate short-term stays with a legislation process headed by David Chiu. The ruling comes in the midst of one of the city’s most dire housing crises and in one of the startup’s hottest markets. Ron Miller pointed out some of the harsh realities economy sharing startups like Airbnb face, and why they remain important in the industry landscape. Kim-Mai Cutler attended Vanity Fair’s New Establishment summit where there was a conversation on future urbanism in tech hubs. She just wishes the conversation were more interesting.

3. Hacked screenshots show that friend-to-friend payments are coming to Facebook Messenger. All Facebook has to do is turn on the feature. A payments feature would compete with apps like Venmo, PayPal, and Square Cash. Facebook hiring the former president of PayPal is now starting to make a ton of sense. In other Facebook news, Hyper-local advertising is now available to businesses on Facebook, and the social networking giant finally closed its WhatsApp acquisition. There was also some chatter about a anonymity project by Facebook. Josh Constine clarified that Facebook has built something, but it’s not just about anonymity. We’ll find out what it is soon.

4. At the Grace Hopper Celebration for women in tech, Satya Nadella put his foot in his mouth after a poorly-worded response to the question of how women should ask for a raise. The Microsoft CEO stated that not asking for a raise can be a good thing, chalking fairness in salary compensation up to “good karma.” Nadella has since tried to clarify his response via Twitter and company-wide memo.

5. Mark Suster, a 2x entrepreneur and VC at Upfront Ventures, made a case for the growing tech scene in Los Angeles. He explains that LA is the third largest tech ecosystem in the US, and the tech world should prepare itself to see big things from the emerging markets down in SoCal. On the other side of the country, Danny Crichton examined the potential of Boston as a center of innovation.

6. Christian Cantrell wrote a piece about the unseen forces that influence innovation and how it is similar to dark matter. Despite all we think we know about the nature of the universe, the overwhelming majority of the cosmos lies outside our current powers of observation, yet it profoundly affects everything. The same goes with the forces that influence innovation.

7. Bitcoin went bonkers this week and slipped under the $400 mark. Are the Wild West days returning to bicoin?

8. There was some interesting data released about Europe’s “right to be forgotten” court ruling. Although the RTBF ruling has drawn the loudest and angriest criticism from search engines, free speech advocates, and the press, the perceived risks to the freedom of the press and ‘human knowledge’ are being exaggerated.

9. Guest columnist Sam Stubblefield wrote an intriguing piece on how sound is increasingly becoming a dynamic tool for creating meaningful and connected experiences. Because architects are designing buildings with their eyes not with their ears, there is a huge missed opportunity. Sound is amazingly powerful, and we should harness it in building design.

10. Kyle Russell attended the Vanity Fair Summit, and he had the chance to see Jony Ive give his much-anticipated panel, “Genius by Design.” Ive is not flattered by Xiaomi. “When you’re doing something for the first time, you don’t know it’s gonna work, you spend 7 or 8 years working on something, and then it’s copied. I think it is really straightforward. It is theft and it is lazy. I don’t think it is ok at all.”

11. A database of some 200,000 Snapchat photos were leaked after a third-party app used to save people’s otherwise-disappearing pictures got hacked. Snapchat’s response: it’s not our fault. Dubbed the “Snappening,” this is another example of a company shifting the blame to the users and trying to distance themselves from fault.

On the Kickstarter front, we introduced you to Nope. At a time when privacy tech is all the rage, it seems like everything that is connected can be hacked. Enter Nope: a neat fix that protects your privacy from any lurking digital voyeurists by covering your webcam with a convenient swiveling shutter.

Charles Moldow argued that marketplace lending will increasingly encroach upon – and take market share from – traditional banking. This will happen across lending (consumer, real estate, SMB, purchase finance), payments, insurance, equity and beyond.

In other news, there was a global outage of Belkin routers, HTC launched a new phone (although the event was super “high fashion”), and we released the agenda for Disrupt Europe: London.