Technology

Re/wind: Inside Jack’s Return to Twitter, Code Enterprise Takes New York and More

Other stories include a closer look at Google’s hardware event, the Business Insider acquisition and more.

Oct 4, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

Kimberly White / Getty Images Entertainment

The last time Jack Dorsey was named CEO of Twitter, it didn’t go so well. But since then, he has launched a digital commerce startup that’s well on its way to IPO and acquired a reputation as a product visionary. Here’s more on that, plus the headlines from this week’s Code/Enterprise Series in New York:

Twitter’s board is expected to to make Jack Dorsey’s stint as interim CEO permanent. He’ll likely continue running Square full-time, doing double-duty at both companies as the latter prepares for its IPO. Why Dorsey? People believe he’s a much better leader than he was seven years ago (when he was last Twitter CEO), and he understands the product and where it can go next better than anyone else. Speaking of Twitter’s product, the company is pursuing a Dorsey-backed initiative to let people share stuff beyond 140 characters, and it’s partnering with a bunch of new e-commerce services to generate more buy buttons.
On Tuesday, Re/code hosted a Code/Enterprise Series event in New York, and the speakers included Goldman Sachs CIO Marty Chavez, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon and EMC President David Goulden. Chavez talked about God and Goldman, McKinnon laid out his unicorn company’s path to an IPO next summer and Goulden explained why IT behemoth EMC doesn’t need to split up. Click here for the full event coverage.
At a hardware event on Tuesday, Google unveiled its new Chromecast, Nexus phones, Android tablet and a bunch of other stuff. The company also held a self-driving car event where it said not much about the car’s business, but a lot about the safety and design of the car itself. For a rundown of the Google product news, you can head over to our sister site, The Verge.
On this week’s episode of the Re/code Decode podcast hosted by Kara Swisher, Lena Dunham and Jenni Konner, the creative leads behind HBO’s “Girls,” came on the show to talk about their new newsletter project, Lenny. The pair discussed Internet hate, becoming digital media entrepreneurs and more.
German publishing giant Axel Springer, after missing out on buying the Financial Times earlier this year, has finalized its purchase of Business Insider for about $340 million.
Two more big media deals: Medium, the publishing platform launched by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, raised $57 million in a new funding round that sets its pre-money valuation at around $400 million. More details about what the company is doing next will come at an event on Wednesday. Also, Thrillist announced it’s spinning off online retailer JackThreads as its own business, and the two entities have raised a combined $54 million.
The iPhone 6s Plus costs around $236 for Apple to produce, and it’s sold for $749. The iPhone 6s is estimated to cost about $20 less to make, and that costs about $649. Easy to see how they make a lot of money from both!
NASA announced that they’ve detected liquid water on Mars, and because scientists are a bunch of nerdy show-offs, the agency released a bunch of cool pictures and animations to show where the water’s been hiding.
It’s really expensive to operate a company in San Francisco, which is why startups like Lyft, Uber, Product Hunt and many others are either hiring cheaper staff abroad or moving lots of employees to cheaper cities.
Onstage at the Code for America Summit in Oakland this week, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky (whose startup is locked in a big political battle across the Bay in San Francisco) said that “people are hanging on to keep their homes, and that’s why they’re on Airbnb.”