This past week, Re/code held the Code/Mobile conference, diving deep into AI, self-driving cars, mobile payments and lots, lots more. Elsewhere, we learned that Twitter would begin cutting jobs next week and that Dell is aggressively working to merge with EMC. Here’s the news that powered Re/code:
Re/wind: Code/Mobile, Tumult at Twitter, Dell’s Campaign to Buy EMC and More
Plus, news on a “dislike” button and the new Steve Jobs movie.
Asa Mathat
- On Wednesday and Thursday, Re/code hosted the Code/Mobile conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, Calif. Speakers included Android creator Andy Rubin, Apple Pay boss Jennifer Bailey and executives from Twitter, Facebook and many other companies. You can view full Code/Mobile coverage here and check back for forthcoming full videos and podcasts from the event.
- Jack Dorsey has officially returned to run Twitter, and there will be company-wide layoffs starting this week. We also finally got to see the long-awaited Project Lightning, a Snapchat-like live video feature called Moments, which Dorsey spent a lot of time hyping on his inaugural conference call. He also promoted Twitter’s chief counsel Vijaya Gadde to head of communications, which means she’ll be holding down two jobs (like her boss). Twitter also announced its new video ad strategy, and the exec who shepherded that project has left the company. At Code/Mobile, Twitter product chief Kevin Weil gave Dorsey two very big thumbs up.
- Earlier, EMC was considering selling off a chunk of its business to Dell. Now, Dell is offering to buy EMC outright, with an offer that is making Wall Street pretty happy. Why does Dell want to make the biggest tech deal of the past decade? Because the two companies combined would be pretty threatening to HP, a chief rival to both.
- Reports suggest that certain employees of daily fantasy sports titans FanDuel and DraftKings have been earning money by making wagers at the other company, raising concerns that they might have taken advantage of their access to betting data. The New York Attorney General has opened an inquiry, and FanDuel has already announced an investigation to be run by an outsider.
- Google’s “Instant Articles” program is here. It’s called AMP, which stands for “Accelerated Mobile Pages,” and its promised benefit to users and publishers is that pages can load in a fraction of a second.
- Stripe hired a CFO — Will Gaybrick, formerly of Stripe investor Thrive Capital — but CEO Patrick Collison insists it doesn’t mean the multibillion dollar payments company wants to go public anytime soon (as CFO hirings often indicate).
- Two women are suing Uber, saying that they were sexually assaulted by their drivers. They charge that the company doesn’t do enough to vet and train its workers.
- What’s Dick Costolo up to now that he isn’t the CEO of Twitter? He says he’s spending “a few days a week” in the writers’ room of HBO’s “Silicon Valley.”
- Facebook is testing a “dislike” button, but don’t expect it to be a thumbs-down. It’s more like Slack reactions, which are emojis corresponding with certain responses.
- The Steve Jobs of the new movie “Steve Jobs” is not the guy who Silicon Valley remembers. The fictional Steve Jobs is a much more brash personality, a caricature of both the passion and the ego that we associate with the real-life Apple leader.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
