Kiran Upadhyay

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference happens June 8 through June 12 this year, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event is by invitation only, with tickets opening up for registration today, allowing developers to sign up for the random selection process. Registration ends on April 17, at 10 AM PT, with the lucky devs who win tickets notified by April 20 of their selection. To sign up, you need to currently be enrolled in either the iOS Developer Program, the iOS Enterprise Developer Program or the Mac Developer Program (as of April 14 at 5:30 AM PT) and you’ll be charged $1,599 US if you’re selected to attend. This is the 26th annual WWDC, and it will offer over 100 technical sessions presented by Apple engineers with information about using new and existing developer tools to maximum effect. Hands-on labs are also available to those who attend in person, and for those who don’t win a ticket in the random drawing, Apple is also live streaming select session

No one likes brands more than their friends, and there are plenty of ways to get their marketing updates. Facebook’s unique value is keeping you up to date on your real-life friends. So to “get this balance right” Facebook today announced it’s reconfiguring News Feed to show content from close friends higher up, which may push posts from business Pages further down. A few other tweaks include relaxing the limit on posts shown from a single friend to people with little content in the feed, and showing fewer stories about when a friend Liked or commented on a post so it can give more room to what you’re interested in. Combined, these updates, like several previous rounds of News Feed changes, could reduce visibility in the feed for Pages. While show more from friends might make the Facebook experience healthier in the long-run, it’s a tough pill to swallow for businesses who’ve built themselves up on Facebook referral traffic. As competition for limited attention grows, brands h

Docker, the company that kicked off the recent enthusiasm for containers two years ago, today announced that it has raised a $95 million Series D round led by Insight Venture Partners. New investors in this round include Coatue, Goldman Sachs and Northern Trust. Existing investors Benchmark, Greylock Partners, Sequoia Capital, Trinity Ventures and AME Cloud Ventures also participated. As Docker’s VP of enterprise marketing David Messina noted when I talked to him earlier this week, it’s interesting to see the support from financial services companies in this round. This somewhat atypical investment, he believes, speaks to the support Docker has from developer teams in all kinds of organizations and how these companies now look at Docker as a key platform for their teams. “When our engineers discovered and started using Docker’s open source platform, they were immediately impressed by the portability it provides applications,” Goldman Sachs global co-head of its Technology Divisi

Nokia has announced that it plans to move ahead with the purchase of Alcatel-Lucent, less than one day after confirming that the two companies were discussing a deal. Nokia will pay $16.6 billion in shares for the rival telecom equipment maker. The merger is expected to close in the first half of next year. The marriage of Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent will strengthen its position against rivals like Ericsson, Samsung, and Huawei, though the consolidation means that carriers now have fewer options when purchasing equipment. On the other hand, the synergies between Nokia and Alcatel-Lucent may allow it to cut research and development costs and deploy new services, including 5G infrastructure, more quickly. Despite concerns about antitrust concerns, the deal already has the backing of the French government. In a statement, Alcatel-Lucent CEO Michel Combes said “This transaction comes at the right time to strengthen the European technology industry. We believe our customers will b

There’s an Uber for everything nowadays, so why not an Uber for weed? Eaze, a startup that enables medical marijuana patients to order cannabis products online and have those goodies delivered to their homes, today is announcing $10 million in Series A round funding led by DCM Ventures with participation from Fresh VC, 500 Startups, Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Ventures, and other strategic investors. The new funds come on top of $1.5 million in seed funding the company had raised last year. The cash will be used to help the company expand availability of its platform into new markets beyond just the San Francisco Bay Area, where it was founded. Launched last summer, Eaze is looking to take advantage of a few different trends. The first is just an acceptance that marijuana use — whether for recreational of medicinal purposes — is here to stay, and is likely to become more pervasive as more states legalize and/or decriminalize cannabis use. The second trend is the move to make eve

Apple has acquired LinX, an Israeli camera tech company whose most recent offerings include multi-aperture camera models which can enable effects like background focus blur, parallax images and 3D picture capture. TechCrunch received the following from Apple, which is a statement the company provides in lieu of confirmation when it has, in fact, acquired a smaller company: Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans. The LinX acquisition was valued at around $20 million according to the Wall Street Journal, according to sources familiar with discussions between the two. The Israeli startup’s hardware was targeted at tablets and smartphones specifically, and could not only offer the kinds of background defocus that’s popular on low aperture lenses paired with DSLRs, but could also help achieve better low-light performance, ideal for taking pictures indoors or at night without using flash. Apple’s plans could al

It’s been a good couple of months for grocery delivery startups in India, at least for funding. PepperTap announced today that it has raised a $10 million Series A from SAIF Partners, as well as Sequoia Capital, which invested a $1.2 million seed round in the Gurgaon-based startup just last month. Other on-demand grocery startups that have recently received backing include ZopNow, which announced $10 million in new funding this week, and Grofers, which just received an additional $35 million from Tiger Global and Sequoia. (Grofers doesn’t focus exclusively on groceries, but it is one of its most important and fastest-growing verticals). Like its competitors, PepperTap is pouring its new capital into an ambitious expansion plan that will bring its services to 10 more cities by the end of this year. PepperTap launched its services in Gurgaon before expanding to Delhi and Noida last month. The new cities it plans to enter include Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, and Mumbai. While Pepp