Eric Johnson

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AllThingsD Week in Review: WhatsApp vs. Bullshit Metrics and Apple’s Tearjerker Ad

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Creative Commons image via toolmantim

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

  1. The chest-beating of “bullshit metrics” over the past few weeks by its mobile messaging competitors seems to have frazzled the folks at WhatsApp, which this week very pointedly announced that it had 400 million active users.
  2. Facebook has been working on its video ad product for more than a year, and now it’s almost here: Here’s what one of the autoplaying ads will look like.
  3. Tristan Walker had a lot of startup ideas as entrepreneur-in-residence at Andreessen Horowitz, but the one he decided to pursue was his most authentic: Walker & Company Brands, a next-generation Procter & Gamble making health and beauty simple for people of color.
  4. Our own Walt Mossberg has been reviewing consumer technology products for the Wall Street Journal and AllThingsD for the past 22 years. Now, as team ATD prepares for a new adventure next year, Walt looked back at the top 12 most influential products he reviewed in the past two decades.
  5. In a bid to sell even more of its Kindle Fire HDX tablets, Amazon is trying something new: Starting this week, it began letting buyers pay off the tablets on an installment plan.
  6. It’s sweeter than a candy cane doused in eggnog, but Apple’s new Christmasy ad for the iPhone and Apple TV went viral this week.
  7. We’re in the midst of yet another videogame console war, but Sony and Microsoft have very different ideas of what a console should be. Bonnie Cha writes that, at least for gamers, the PlayStation 4 “makes the right play.”
  8. A Chinese ban on Chinese yuan deposits in a bitcoin exchange there sent the price of the virtual currency tumbling. But it’s not a death knell to the bitcoin ecosystem because if China wanted to ban bitcoin, it would ban bitcoin.
  9. Foursquare, the iconic social location service, has raised $35 million in a Series D round.
  10. Calxeda, the Austin-based startup that sought to spearhead server chips based on the ARM architecture found in mobile devices, has shut down. “They just ran out of runway,” one source said.

To stay on top of the latest, please follow AllThingsD’s writers on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

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