92-year-old Viacom owner Sumner Redstone on Friday removed Philippe Dauman, Viacom CEO and former Redstone protege, from the board of the trust that will control Viacom once Redstone dies. Viacom executives, in turn, "asserted that [Redstone] had been manipulated by his daughter," Shari. Now, Sumner is preparing to name two allies of Shari's to the trust's board, and has issued a statement condemning the actions of the company he controls.
[Emily Steel | The New York Times]
In a blog post that got passed around by many Silicon Valley bigwigs this weekend, Tumblr co-founder Marco Arment argues that Apple risks the same fate as BlackBerry creator RIM. The reason is that if Amazon, Facebook and Google are right — and artificially intelligent-powered voice search becomes a big deal — then Apple will be way behind the curve.
[Marco Arment]
On the new Recode Decode podcast, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon tells Kara Swisher that he believes in a minimum wage hike and immigration reform. He also goes into detail on why IPOs have slowed to a crawl, and why tech swallowing jobs doesn't mean that we have to get in tech's way.
[Eric Johnson | Recode]
Amazon's AWS revolutionized the tech world by making startups easy and cheap to get going. Facebook is going to do the same for new media companies, upending the existing order, argues former Chartbeat CEO Tony Haile, in his ongoing Recode series.
[Tony Haile | Recode]
The case against VR: This year consumers will have a bunch of different virtual reality headsets to choose from, but a limited amount of stuff to watch or play on them. That's why giants like Facebook and Google are now spending serious money to build products that can capture VR content.
[Christopher Mims | The Wall Street Journal]
