A Look Back as Re/coders Saturated the Airwaves This Week

Re/code co-founder Kara Swisher took part in her very first Internet meme Monday on the CNBC set, where she responded to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s #ALSicebucketchallenge by dumping ice water on her head. “Sheryl Sandberg is just not as nice as she seems,” Kara joked, adding, “I have officially become NBC’s dancing monkey.”

Before she ruined her NBC-approved coif, Kara talked about Rupert Murdoch’s Twitter rant last weekend when he suggested Google’s privacy policies are far worse for Americans than what the National Security Agency has done by snooping on everyone. A bit hypocritical, Kara noted, considering Murdoch’s News Corp. has had a few problems of its own with phone hacking.

“He’s going to do what he wants to do and say what he wants to say and I don’t think he cares at this point,” she said.

Later in the week, Kara also talked about Salesforce.com’s “growth at all costs” mentality and what that means for investors as well as how stock-based compensation is table stakes in Silicon Valley. “That’s the way you have to do business,” she said.

Amazon’s move into Shanghai’s free-trade zone will be a test for the online retailing giant to compete with Chinese companies like Alibaba, Kara said, since “Amazon is not Amazon there.”

“You have to be in the Chinese market and it’s been difficult for U.S. companies,” she said.

On Friday, the reported delay of Apple’s iPhone, due to some possible last minute design changes that left suppliers in the lurch isn’t such a big deal, Kara said. “These stories happen every time Apple has a product, that there’s delays, there’s issues,” she said, citing Apple’s perfectionist tendencies. “I think there will be a lot of demand for these phones.”

Re/code’s other fearless leader, Walt Mossberg, weighed in on a new app called Humin, which is supposed to make it easier to find people in your contact list (on the iPhone). “It’s a great idea,” he said. Sadly (for Humin developers), Walt doesn’t think the app is there yet. “They’re on the right track and there’s a chance they’ll get there,” he said.

CNBC* also dug up Walt’s original 2001 review of Google to help mark the ten-year anniversary of Google’s IPO. “What is the most useful site on the world wide web? Well the answer might vary widely, depending on whom you ask. But I’d like to propose a candidate: Google, which is simply the best search site I’ve ever used,” Walt wrote years ago, when people still used the phrase “world wide web.”

Meanwhile, “the strength in PC’s is picking back up,” Re/code’s Arik Hesseldahl said Wednesday after Hewlett-Packard reported better-than-last-year numbers that were mostly what analysts were expecting.

On ye olde wireless, Re/code‘s Ina Fried talked about what to expect as we kick off the unofficial start of smartphone launch season when new models are unveiled, with the crew at NPR’s Here and Now. Samsung, Motorola and Microsoft have events soon, as does a little company in Cupertino that you might have heard of a few times.

And Re/code’s new social media guy Kurt Wagner joined the fine folks at American Public Media’s Marketplace to talk about recent changes instituted by Twitter which will add popular tweets from people you’re not following into your feed.

*NBCUniversal is an investor in Revere Digital, Re/code’s parent company, and the two have a content sharing agreement.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.