| WWDC heads south, Baidu gets smarter still and Aston Martin does plan to build a self-driving car. All that and more in the Daily Crunch for February 16, 2017. And if you're an ocean XPRIZE semi-finalist, I salute and envy you. 1. WWDC knows the way to San Jose Apple's big annual developer conference is heading to San Jose this year, a big departure from its usual location at Moscone convention center in San Francisco. Apple is not alone in moving its big developer event away from SF – all the cool tech companies are doing it. Cost is one of the factors, but it looks like other advantages might include proximity to HQ, and the ability to host more people, potentially. 
2. Baidu boosts its AI efforts with acquisition of Raven Tech Baidu works on AI a lot, and now it's picking up a startup to help with those efforts. The company, Raven Tech, basically offers a Chinese language Siri-like assistant, and while it was never a runaway success, Baidu looks like it's going to go big on assistants in general. 3. Atomico closes a $765 million fund Atómico has closed its fourth fund, with a whopping $765 committed to invest. It's a huge number for a non-Valley fund, and it'll be interesting to see what the VC does with the money, given how well it's placed bets in the past. 4. Elon Musk said something strong against Trump – but it was a mistake Followers of Elon Musk on Twitter were briefly encouraged when the Tesla CEO tweeted strong disapproval of Trump's Muslim immigration ban yesterday. But he deleted the tweets just as quickly, and then said they were accidentally posted "drafts." Conspiracy theory? Musk may have been A/B testing a more strong oppositional position to Trump – but that would just be crazy to assume. Or is it? 5. Tinder picks up Wheel, a Snapchat-story like media creation app Is Tinder the next company to turn Snapchat's appealing mechanics into a core feature? It could be, thanks to an acquisition of Wheel, a company that created a whole social network based around the creation of Snapchat-like stories. Snap had better come to terms with the fact that their features are going to be quickly commoditized. 6. Meet the ocean XPRIZE semi-finalists Ocean Discovery XPRIZE is basically about building cool underwater tech, so checking out these semi-finalists is very fun. The ocean is great. 7. Aston Martin thinks autonomy is inevitable When sports and supercar makers start talking about how much of a sure bet it is that we're moving to a self-driving future, you can bet it's going to happen. Aston Martin is very interested in autonomy, according to its CEO, but the goal for the near-term needs to be setting a solid ground on which to build, and that means focusing on cybersecurity first. | 
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