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Amazon has suspended Roy Price, the head of its ambitious video program and the company’s point man in Hollywood. It is also considering cutting ties with projects it is working on with the Weinstein Company, which fired its CEO, Harvey Weinstein, this week. The move comes on the same day that actress Rose McGowan, who says Weinstein raped her, called out Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos via Twitter. [Peter Kafka / Recode]
Google and the country’s biggest brick-and-mortar retailers have one major problem in common: Amazon. So Google is partnering with Target, Walmart and Home Depot in what is essentially an anti-Amazon alliance, expanding a voice-shopping initiative that lets shoppers equipped with Google Home speakers order items through voice commands. Meanwhile, all the major retailers are battling for home-delivery dominance — here are some of the innovations that Amazon, Walmart, Target and others are trying to get more stuff to you faster. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Black lawmakers will visit Silicon Valley next week to urge companies like Airbnb, Facebook, Uber and Twitter to improve their hiring practices and address the spread of racist content on their platforms. The house call by Democratic Reps. Barbara Lee and G.K. Butterfield is part of a Congressional Black Caucus campaign called Tech2020, which aims to increase the representation of African American workers at all levels of the tech industry. [Tony Romm / Recode]
Female founders only received about 2 percent of U.S. venture capital money in 2016, and now two women are launching a $2 million venture capital fund that plans to only invest in other women. Led by philanthropic adviser Lindsey Taylor Wood and former Karlin Ventures investor Erin Shipley, The Helm will focus on making eight to 10 seed investments of about $200,000 in its first year. [Theodore Schleifer / Recode]
Here’s how a failed OS startup called Cyanogen pivoted into self-driving construction equipment. Cyanogen was hot in 2015, producing an open-source operating system for Android that was on track to hit half a billion handsets by 2020 until mishaps and disagreements shut it down. Resurrected a year later as Cyngn, the company is still in stealth, and now promises “innovative solutions for autonomous machines and vehicles. [Mark Harris / Recode]
Can Google catch up to Apple in hardware? On the latest Too Embarrassed to Ask podcast, Google Senior Vice President of Hardware Rick Osterloh talks with Kara Swisher and Lauren Goode about how Google plans to turn itself into a high-end hardware brand with a suite of new products, including the second iteration of high-end Pixel smartphones, and an AI-powered camera called Google Clips. The unifying theme — Google Assistant, the company’s answer to Siri, Alexa and Cortana. [Eric Johnson / Recode]
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Cheaper headsets are part of Facebook’s plan to bring virtual reality to the masses.
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This is cool
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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
