ATD Week in Review: Facebook Gets More Twittery and Kara’s Open Letter to Jeff Bezos
- Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million, saying that to chart a future for the iconic newspaper, “we will need to invent, which means we will need to experiment.” AllThingsD‘s co-executive editor Kara Swisher had more than a few thoughts about how to do that, having started her career in the Post’s mailroom: “Fusing the old-media storytelling and news-integrity values that I learned at the Post with the Internet values of speed and personality … is critical,” she wrote in an open letter to Bezos.
- With 31 billion messages sent and received every day, WhatsApp has connected hundreds of millions of users around the globe. And now for its next trick: Push-to-talk voice messaging.
- It wasn’t a great week for Samsung and the U.S. International Trade Commission: The Obama administration’s veto of a proposed import ban on multiple Apple products wiped out $1 billion of the South Korean tech giant’s market value.
- Then, on Friday, the ITC banned a slew of Samsung products, ruling that they had infringed on two Apple patents.
- Tumblr, which had raised $125 million since 2007, had $16.6 million in cash left when Yahoo bought it.
- In a move that brings it closer to its rival Twitter, Facebook has built a team around encouraging celebrities to post more public updates to the site. And that’s just the beginning of a push to bring more Twittery public discussion to your News Feed.
- CEO John Legere said T-Mobile’s message, not the arrival of the iPhone, is behind a recent surge in new customers. However, he also noted that “there’s a whole array of Apple products that we look forward to carrying.”
- While it has apparently already selected a new design, Yahoo aims to get consumers talking about a refresh of its classic purple logo by serving up 30 different logos in the month stretching from last week until Sept. 4.
- How will we interact with our computers in the future? In AllThingsD Voices, Open-Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna writes that “a Web-based desktop is the next logical progression.”
- Noting that the pay TV industry has been in decline for three consecutive quarters, analyst Craig Moffett says that “cord cutting used to be a myth. It isn’t anymore.“
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