Facebook beat Wall Street estimates and then some this week, and Airbnb beat San Francisco city ballot initiative Proposition F. Here are the headlines that powered Re/code this week:
Re/wind: Facebook’s Daily Billion, Airbnb Beats Proposition F and More
Also, Square took one for the team with its IPO pricing.
Facebook
- Facebook earned 57 cents of profit per share, beating Wall Street estimates of 52 cents per share on the growing strength of its mobile revenue. The social network also says that one billion people use it every day, and it revised what actually counts as an “active user” on the site. In more worrisome news for YouTube, Facebook videos get watched eight billion times a day and the service launched a feature letting you share music with friends. Also, Facebook hired away some Microsoft engineers to work on VR stuff.
- On Tuesday, San Francisco voters defeated a measure — Proposition F — that would have more tightly regulated short-term home rental services like Airbnb. The company spent $8 million to defeat the ballot initiative; activists will likely try similar efforts in cities across the globe in the coming months and years. That’s why Airbnb is building its own “political movement” worldwide to fight them off.
- You might have heard about Facebook Messenger’s new “smart” assistant, M. Though there’s a bunch of artificial intelligence technology powering the service, it’s mostly run by humans. For now.
- Square took one for the team this week for all planning-to-IPO startups. The company priced its stock between $11 and $13 a share, which means its current valuation is a lot less than what its last investors paid for.
- Twitter changed “favorites” to “likes” this past week, and the service’s power users did not take kindly to the change, even if something like it was largely anticipated.
- The head of Google’s drone program says the company wants to start delivering stuff to consumers by 2017. The company also acquired the mobile video editing startup Fly Labs, to strengthen the features of its Google Photos app.
- Two former Google executives got new jobs this week. Former finance VP Jason Wheeler is taking over as Tesla’s CFO, and mobile ad search product manager Surojit Chatterjee is joining the Indian e-commerce startup Flipkart.
- If you’ve ever wanted to order a hot guy to show up and wait on you hand and foot, there’s an app for that. It’s called ManServants. Using the service is kind of weird, but the dudes who do it seem to enjoy themselves a whole lot. And the people who order them seem pretty happy, too.
- On this week’s episode of the “Re/code Decode” podcast, Sequoia Capital’s Michael Moritz talks with Kara Swisher about what the New York Times got wrong about Amazon, Manchester United and the proliferation of “subprime unicorn” startups.
- Old media companies are desperately trying to figure out how they can stanch the bleeding of pay TV subscribers to streaming services like Netflix, whose CEO says they’re pretty much screwed anyway.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
