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Re/wind: Twitter’s Buzzed-About Earnings Call, eBay and Paypal Board the Struggle Bus and More

Plus more net neutrality drama.

Rawpixel / Shutterstock

Hi! A bunch of stuff happened in tech this week. Here’s what the Re/code team rustled up for you:

  1. Twitter went into this week’s earnings call with a lot of concerns about its user and revenue growth. After the call (which went pretty well), there are still worries about growing the user base. But not so much about the business side. It didn’t hurt that Twitter made a number of Wall Street-pleasing moves like tightening up its internal metrics, announcing a partnership with Google and coming clean about the users it lost during Apple’s iOS 8 upgrade.
  2. On Monday, eBay and PayPal began letting employees know that their jobs would be cut as part of the upcoming split of the two companies. Among the 2,400 positions affected by the layoffs, eBay’s Innovations and New Ventures unit was hit particularly hard, and Paypal retail executive Don Kingsborough left the company under less-than-ideal circumstances.
  3. The FCC unveiled its latest net neutrality proposal, pleasing activists and entrepreneurs by recommending that Internet service providers be regulated under the same rules as copper-wire phone service. Who wasn’t pleased? The telecommunications industry and its political allies. Also, one FCC member wants an investigation of the $3 billion discount Dish Network received during the recent wireless service auction, and a bunch of state legislatures are upset with the FCC for its support of municipal broadband laws.
  4. If you’ve ever had trouble getting the work that you need done on the go, a nifty tool called Parallels Access can let you work on a home computer from your phone.
  5. We attended Silicon Valley’s annual pageantry of horrors, the TechCrunch-sponsored Crunchie Awards, a San Francisco ceremony honoring and limply skewering the tech industry’s most high-profile figures. The whole thing kind of went off the rails this year, and was delightfully cringeworthy.
  6. Embattled Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal is officially out (surprising no one), a direct casualty of last year’s headline-drawing hack. That hack, by the way, caused at least $15 million damage, though Sony’s big third quarter will likely offset a good chunk of its losses.
  7. PC users holding out for a genuine MacBook Air competitor, wait no longer — the Dell XPS 13 is here, and it’s a pretty neat computer.
  8. The new Mac OS photo-management app, Photos, looks like a major upgrade over iPhoto. Also, Cupertino now holds the rights to a curious auto technology patent, and Apple is in discussions with a bunch of different content providers about its own Web TV series.
  9. Microsoft is working on snapping up the calendar-app maker Sunrise, with a possible acquisition price of $100 million.
  10. The previously discount-allergic Verizon announced that it will cut the cost of most of its wireless data plans by $10 per month.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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