Facebook Messenger has a new mobile payments feature and Pinterest is the latest venture-funded company to reach a $10 billion valuation. Here’s the news that powered Re/code this week:
Re/wind: Paying Friends on Facebook Messenger, Pinterest’s Monster Funding Round and More
Also, reports from inside the Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins trial.
Kurt Wagner for Re/code
- Not content with letting Venmo, Square and Snapchat pull ahead in the peer-to-peer payments sector, Facebook added a digital cash feature to its Messenger app. The company also tried to clarify what stuff isn’t kosher to post on the site, and lost its engineering director to a job in the Obama administration. And with the Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins gender discrimination trial winding up, a former employee is suing Facebook for claims including racial discrimination and sexual harassment.
- In the Ellen Pao-Kleiner Perkins case, three of the firm’s senior partners took the stand this week. First, Randy Komisar said Pao’s “politicking” undermined their work together. Next, Pao’s former boss Matt Murphy talked about how he handled her firing and why she didn’t make a great VC. Finally, Kleiner Perkins’ top recruiting exec, Juliet de Baubigny, testified that the firm is a great place for women to work. Earlier in the week, experts both praised and criticized Kleiner Perkins on gender issues, and late in the week, after some hesitation, the judge allowed Pao’s side to continue to seek punitive damages. Meanwhile, no one seems to be able to locate a group of former Kleiner Perkins employees who also supposedly claimed they experienced gender-based discrimination at the firm. We also wrote about some dangerous whispers we’ve been hearing.
- The social media giant Pinterest has raised about $367 million as part of a new round that sets the company’s value at $11 billion. The company could still raise an additional $210 million before the round closes, and it just hired Greycroft Partners’ Kamran Ansari to take charge of its acquisitions and investments strategy.
- Speaking at TED, Bill Gates talked about how we can use lessons learned from the Ebola crisis to prepare for the next epidemic and then talked with Re/code’s Ina Fried about why we should care. To hammer the point home, he even set up a mock Ebola tent hospital at TED.
- Attention chain coffee lovers: Starbucks delivery is coming soon to two test markets, Seattle and the Empire State Building, and there are plans to expand the service further down the road.
- Google’s self-driving cars chief wants the technology to hit the market within the next five years, and Nvidia announced its own self-driving car platform.
- Nintendo announced that it’s going to start working on mobile games, which is an exciting and new move for the struggling video games giant.
- There are a lot of features on your Apple products that you probably never use, because frankly who has all the time to explore the hidden recesses of their iPhone? Well, we do, actually, and here are eight nifty Apple programs you might not know about.
- Tinder has its new CEO, months after beginning its search to replace current CEO and co-founder Sean Rad. The dating app has picked former eBay and Paypal executive Chris Payne.
- T-Mobile announced its low-cost “Un-carrier” plan now extends to business clients, along with other new features for enterprise customers. The company is also going to pay off leased equipment for those who switch over to T-Mobile.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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