Eric Johnson

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ATD Week in Review: The Brin-Wojcicki Split and Apple’s iPhone Trade-In

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

  1. After six years of marriage, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki are living apart, and Brin has become romantically involved with another Googler. While the power couple’s prenuptial agreement means that a divorce would not directly affect Google, their split did have an indirect effect, when …
  2. … Hugo Barra, VP of product management for Android, tendered his resignation with Google to become VP of Xiaomi Global. Barra had been seeing the Googler who is now seeing Sergey Brin, and his offer from the Chinese company came before all the drama began.
  3. For its part, Xiaomi seems pleased to have snapped up such a key Android exec. “He [Barra] has a keen understanding of the product itself, what features work globally,” co-founder Bin Lin told Ina Fried. And, sure enough, it looks like one of his first jobs may be helping the Chinese phone maker expand to other countries late this year or early next year.
  4. As Microsoft prepares to restructure itself, CEO Steve Ballmer’s decision to step down within a year was “neither planned nor as smooth as portrayed,” according to sources within the company, as reported by Kara Swisher.
  5. Motorola Mobility’s new flagship phone, the Moto X, is its first since Google bought the company. And, thanks to a teardown analysis by market research firm IHS, we now know how much it costs to build: $221.
  6. John Paczkowski reported earlier this week that Apple would offer iPhone owners up to $280 in credit when they trade in their current iPhones. Apple made it official and kicked off the trade-in program at that price point on Friday.
  7. In a proposed privacy policy change sent to users on Thursday, Facebook has changed a lot — including its policy on facial recognition. If the plan is approved, users’ profile pictures will be the key to recognizing their faces on Facebook.
  8. Microsoft and Google “remain concerned with the government’s continued unwillingness” to let them publish data about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. So the two companies have banded together to sue the U.S. federal government.
  9. What, contributor Chetan Sharma asks in AllThingsD Voices, is the next act for mobile technologies? “The fourth wave (of mobile) is not a single entity or a functional block like voice, messaging or data access, but is made up of dozens of new application areas, some of which have not even been dreamt up yet.”
  10. Walt Mossberg reviewed Parallels Access, a new iPad app that can remotely control either Windows or Mac PCs: “It isn’t the only iPad app that can remotely control computers, but of the ones I’ve tested, it does the best job of treating the computer programs it accesses as if they were iPad apps, without sacrificing functionality.”

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Another gadget you don’t really need. Will not work once you get it home. New model out in 4 weeks. Battery life is too short to be of any use.

— From the fact sheet for a fake product entitled Useless Plasticbox 1.2 (an actual empty plastic box) placed in L.A.-area Best Buy stores by an artist called Plastic Jesus