Eric Johnson

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AllThingsD Week in Review: Twitter’s IPO, Hugo Barra Speaks and Apple’s 64-Bit Question

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick roundup of some of the news that powered AllThingsD this week:

  1. On Thursday, Twitter filed for its initial public offering confidentially, under a new “secret” IPO process made possible by the JOBS Act. Just one day before, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg urged the social media rival not to be afraid about going public. But it may not be all good news — Twitter’s actual growth rate seems to be below CEO Dick Costolo’s 2013 projections.
  2. At an event on its Cupertino campus on Tuesday, Apple unveiled two new iPhones, the 64-bit iPhone 5s and the cheaper (but not that cheap) 5c. The company’s share price stumbled the next morning, dropping five percent and taking about $20 billion in market value with it. Here’s AllThingsD’s blow-by-blow liveblog of the event, and here’s a photo slideshow of the highlights.
  3. One of the new features of the iPhone 5s is its fingerprint reader, which is baked into the home button and will be used to unlock the phone and make iTunes purchases. But outside developers won’t have access to the fingerprint-reading technology, at least for now.
  4. Kara Swisher sat down with ex-Android exec Hugo Barra this week for his first extended interview since leaving Google for Xiaomi. Barra said he began talking with Xiaomi more than a year ago: “At first, their questions were, ‘How do you think we should go about expanding internationally?’ And that evolved into, ‘Maybe you should come help us.'”
  5. The effects of the “One Microsoft” reorganization, announced before outgoing CEO Steve Ballmer’s planned retirement, are starting to reach Redmond. Sources close to the reorg explained who’s moving where, and why, to Ina Fried.
  6. In All Things Reviewed, Lauren Goode gets her hands on the new Samsung Galaxy Mega, but only barely. “It’s just too large for a phone,” she writes, although the 6.6-inch-tall device “didn’t seem so cumbersome” when used as a tablet.
  7. At its iPhone event, Apple claimed that the 5s is the “world’s first and only” 64-bit smartphone, but two questions emerge from that claim: How evident will the phone’s computing advancements be, since 32 bits is plenty powerful for a mobile device, and when will Apple lose that claim to uniqueness? Regarding the second question, Samsung said it also has 64-bit devices in the pipeline, although Android does not yet support that level of chip.
  8. Hewlett-Packard has been dropped from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, one of the world’s most important benchmark stock indexes.
  9. On the opposite end of the seriousness spectrum: That viral video of a “twerking fail” was a fake, orchestrated by Jimmy Kimmel, and his breakdown of the hoax itself went viral.
  10. Oh, and there is one more thing: It didn’t say anything about it at the iPhone event, but Apple also has a software overhaul for the Apple TV coming down the pipes this week, according to people familiar with the company’s plans.

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Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again. It’s especially hopeless for those whose work is easily digitized and accessed free of charge.

— Author Tim Kreider on not getting paid for one’s work