Conflict of Interest 3.0: the winner of TechCrunch's vaunted Disrupt Battlefield startup competition is financially backed by TechCrunch's pugnacious founder, Michael Arrington—it is a matter of pure coincidence that Arrington judged the competition. How much longer are we going to take this seriously?

Not content to simply invest money in tech companies, First Round Capital—which backs big names like Warby Parker and StumbleUpon—is going to write about them, too. The next step here is just have company execs writing their own articles—oh, wait.