Technology

Re/wind: More Dell-EMC Drama, an Amazon Competitor Beefs Up and More

The headlines we were thankful for.

Nov 29, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

Justin Sullivan / Getty

The biggest-ever tech merger continued to teeter on the brink, beleaguered Amazon competitor Jet.com managed to raised several hundred more millions of dollars and Amazon got in hot water for some subway ads. All in all, a pretty eventful Thanksgiving week. Here are the details on what went down:

Shareholders in EMC and its subsidiary VMware want some significant changes made to the $67 billion deal for EMC’s merger with Dell. Because VMware’s stock price has fallen 30 percent since the deal was announced, its investors want stronger assurances that the merger won’t further hurt VMware’s value.
Jet.com, the wannabe Amazon competitor started by Diapers.com dude Marc Lore, added another $350 million in a new round of funding, with another $150 million in the works. The backers include Google Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Alibaba. Jet got off to a rocky start after it launched earlier this year, as it was forced to radically change its business model because its paid membership model wasn’t lucrative enough.
We kicked off a new Re/code feature this past week, a walkup to Google’s next earnings report with a special focus on a different division of Alphabet every Monday. Re/code’s Mark Bergen started with Nest, discussing how the smart home technology unit, while suffering some growing pains, remains integral to Alphabet’s long-term vision of managing all the Internet-connected stuff in the home.
On this week’s episode of the “Re/code Decode” podcast, Kara Swisher sat down with actor B.J. Novak and his business partner Dev Flaherty, who have launched a list-making app called The List App. The three discuss celebrities, celebrities who make lists, lists that are funny and lists of things they all enjoy. Later on, The Verge’s Lauren Goode talks about the iPad Pro and whether it’s worth buying one.
Here are four Black Friday e-commerce lessons: People are buying more stuff on Thanksgiving Day online, they’re doing it from their smartphones, phones have a conversion rate problem and retailers both large and small have trouble managing customer volume.
Indian digital commerce startup Snapdeal is in hot water with customers because of comments made by one of its paid spokespeople, Bollywood star (and Muslim) Aamir Khan. Khan said that he and his wife have considered leaving the country because of political apathy regarding recent attacks on the minority Muslim population in the country.
Snapchat pushed out an update with a new feature that’s aimed at stealing some of Twitter’s thunder, adding more user-generated content to its Live Stories feature — basically, a way for them to host even more content during live sporting events or breaking news.
HP reported its first set of earnings numbers since breaking into two companies. Corporate consulting and computing-focused HP Enterprise did fine. The printer and hardware maker HP Inc. did not do well at all.
Amazon put up a bunch of ads on a New York City subway with Nazi and imperial Japanese symbols to call attention to its new TV show, “The Man in the High Castle.” The MTA pulled down the ads, and the whole thing was really quite strange.