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Re/wind: Drugstores Deny Apple Pay, Google’s Leadership Shuffle and More
CVS and Rite Aid reject Apple Pay, Google’s top circle changes a bit and more.
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We hope your week was great. Here are some of the news you might have missed, courtesy of the Re/code team:
- Apple Pay came out this week, giving easily-amused iPhone 6 users a reason to go out and buy stuff. Here’s our review of it! It’s pretty good (so far). But, Apple’s otherwise fine week went awry with the announcement that CVS and Rite Aid would not be accepting Apple Pay, because they (and “a consortium of retailers”) were working to develop a competitor to Apple Pay.
- Interesting news from Google: CEO Larry Page will be taking a step back, as Google exec Sundar Pichai takes on more responsibility as the company’s new “product czar.” For more on what Pichai might be up to, check out his talks at our D: All Things Digital conferences from 2012 and 2013. Speaking of new Google products, you might have heard about its new email app Inbox. If you want to learn more about it, senior reviewers Lauren Goode and Bonnie Cha chatted about their first impressions. Oh, and major eSports commentator Ryan Wyatt left Major League Gaming to join up with YouTube’s gaming division, and Google exec Alan Eustace broke the world record for highest parachute jump by falling 135,908 feet in the sky.
- We are finally back to the future. The hoverboard is here. Check out our review of Arx Pax’s new board, complete with pictures, videos, GIFs and futuristic tricks.
- Spotify is cutting its prices for your relatives by a lot, giving family members of Spotify Premium users a 50 percent discount on any additional Premium subscriptions. And Apple wants to go even cheaper.
- The space for anonymous sharing apps is getting crowded. There’s Whisper, Secret, YikYak and now Facebook’s entry: Rooms. Rooms looks like it’s trying to recapture that early 2000s LiveJournal magic, but there’s no way of telling right now if it will succeed.
- Hey, remember Ello? That ad-free social network that got all the buzz about a months go? No? Anyway, they just raised $5.5 million in funding and are doubling down on the whole “responsible Subaru-driving neighbor with a compost bin” shtick.
- Uber for flowers. Uber for laundry money. Uber for dignity. Uber for kids? Why not. Shuddle employs people with childcare backgrounds to drive kids from school to soccer practice and so on. It just raised $2.6 million from Accel Partners.
- Amazon’s third quarter didn’t go so well, which means people might finally stop throwing money at its stock. This is partly because the Amazon Fire smartphone hasn’t really been selling. At all. And because it’s not selling, this means Amazon will have to take a $170 million writedown. As T-Mobile CEO John Legere put it, “oops.”
- With lots of job cuts and a costly Nokia integration, Microsoft didn’t have such a great September earnings report. Still, its earnings beat analyst expectations. And the company’s rebranding of Nokia as Microsoft’s smartphone division is moving ahead at full steam.
- For people ticked off by the proposed Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, here are five reasons you shouldn’t feel too worried. Happy Sunday!
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
