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Re/wind: Amazon on Cloud Nine, Snapchat Discovers Others and More

Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm and Yahoo earnings, and Square’s potential IPO, led the news this week.

Re/code

It was another week of tech behemoths paying respects to the monied class out east. Amazon, Apple, Qualcomm and Yahoo all reported quarterly earnings, and some pre-IPO giants also made some news. If you took this past week of July off, here’s what you missed:

  1. The week began with a new CEO for Evernote, the company behind the productivity app enterprise. It’s Chris O’Neill, a former director of Google Canada, who recently held a vague business role at Google’s vaguer Glass project. Eh?
  2. Speaking of vague, Nokia Technologies, the outfit that remains after the phones were sold to Microsoft, has plans to unveil a new virtual reality product this week.
  3. Yahoo reported earnings on Tuesday. Profit missed expectations, but revenue clocked in at a notch above. CEO Marissa Mayer’s verdict on the results? “Good.” Re/code’s Kara Swisher’s opinion? “Meh.”
  4. Another earnings report landed on Tuesday, this one from Apple. Profit and iPhone sales soared, yet investors gave the stock their own version of “meh.” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, showed some impressive verbal acrobatics in rationalizing the absence of sales data on the Apple Watch.
  5. Qualcomm had a much thornier chat with Wall Street: The semiconductor company reported weak earnings and agreed to a board restructuring and $1.4 billion in cuts, including losing 15 percent of its headcount.
  6. Uber bested Bill de Blasio, successfully lobbying the New York City mayor to pull his proposed cap on the fleet size of the ride-hailing app.
  7. Jet, the hotly anticipated e-commerce site, went live with scrape-the-bottom prices (and a Byzantine business model) meant to sweep Amazon off its legs. On its first day, Jet claimed $1 million in sales.
  8. Meanwhile, Amazon stormed the markets on Thursday, posting $23.2 billion in quarterly revenue that nudged its market valuation past Walmart. Shareholders have Amazon’s cloud business to thank.
  9. Snapchat planned a reshuffle of the publishers on its Discover feature, nixing at least one (Warner Music) and adding BuzzFeed and Vox.
  10. And Square, the payments company, shuffled its paper for an initial public offering. Re/code’s Jason Del Rey made the compelling case that its CEO Jack Dorsey, who is simultaneously the CEO of Twitter, needs to choose only one company CEOship.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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