| Musk's Boring Co. plows ahead, Spotify eyes the hardware game and Sony enters the AI-powered taxi hailing market (yes, one exists). All that and more in The Daily Crunch for February 20, 2018. 1. Elon Musk's Boring Co. has another key approval for Washington-New York route Remember when Elon Musk built a rocket company? An electric car company? Those seemed unlikely. The goal of building a hyperpseed underground tunnel-based means of transportation linking NYC and Washington, DC seems equally unlikely. But now it has a key provisional approval, with other steps to follow. If Musk just keeps putting one foot in front of the other, we'll have a hyper speed vacuum train in no time. 
2. Spotify readies its hardware business Spotify gets so much right about its current partner-based hardware ecosystem that I'm excited to see what it does with its first-party efforts. Or afraid. Maybe both. 3. Sony will launch its own AI-powered taxi hailing service This sounds opportune, and it'll use existing taxi companies so it doesn't even have to get over the same kind of hurdles as Uber. 4. Pebble founder lands a gig as YC partner Eric Migicovsky has been in and around Y Combinator for a long time now, but he's officially a Partner as of this past month. He basically invented the smartwatch, for better or for worse, which merits some kind of recognition. In unrelated news I stopped wearing my Apple Watch two months ago and I'm so much happier. 5. Android Pay is now Google Pay (?) This means something... I think. It'll come to me, check back in later. So long as they work I don't care what you brand them Google, and this rebrand effort might frankly be MORE confusing. 6. Snapchat adds GIF stickers The only thing we can all agree on is that everything is made better with GIF stickers. Giphy is doing eternal cosmic entity of your choosing's work. 7. Qualcomm is hoping to close its $44 billion acquisition of NXP More silicon industry consolidation is afoot, as Qualcomm has upped its offer for NXP to $44 billion from $38 billion to help close the deal. Qualcomm itself is being pursued by Broadcom, but this could give them some breathing room there. | 
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