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President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, who learned about it by seeing it on TV news — Comey thought it was a “fairly funny prank” at first. Trump had reportedly spent the last week fuming about the FBI’s Russia investigation: “He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe.” [Josh Dawsey / Politico]
Trump hasn’t named a replacement for Comey. But tech companies and civil liberties advocates worry that whoever takes his spot may seek to expand the government’s surveillance powers. [Tony Romm / Recode]
Snap strategically rolled out a bunch of product updates, just ahead of its first-ever earnings report today. The biggest change is “limitless Snaps,” which last longer than the 10-second maximum. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]
Benchmark has hired Sarah Tavel, the first woman to be a general partner at the powerful VC shop. Tavel, who worked at rival Greylock since 2015, also worked at Bessemer Venture Partners and Pinterest. [Elizabeth Crane / Recode]
Amazon’s Echo Show will compete with an Amazon-funded startup. Amazon led a $5.6 million round in Nucleus, an Alexa-powered intercom device, a year ago. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Yelp shares cratered after the online reviews company reported disappointing revenue growth and guidance. [Anita Balakrishnan / CNBC]
On the latest episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Bruce Miller, creator of Hulu’s adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s prescient dystopian novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” talks about the new rules of making TV for the internet. [Eric Johnson / Recode]
Top stories from Recode
The U.S., Canada and Mexico are buying more job-killing robots than ever before.
First-quarter sales of industrial robots iumped 32 percent in 2017 rom the same time last year.
What S-Town’s success says about the state of podcasting.
It’s still pretty early.
Amazon’s new Echo Show proves that the smart home phenomenon is finally moving into the mainstream.
One-quarter of U.S. households now have at least one piece of smart home gear.
This is cool
Will retweet for chicken nuggets
Carter Wilkerson, a 16-year-old high school junior in Reno, Nev., is the new retweet champion, knocking Ellen DeGeneres and her famous Oscars selfie out of that spot. Wilkerson jokingly tweeted Wendy’s, asking how many retweets would earn him a year of free chicken nuggets. “18 million,” Wendy’s instantly replied. “Consider it done,” Wilkerson said, and his campaign went viral, hitting a million retweets in two days; when the tweet passed just over 3.43 million retweets, Wendy’s said it would indeed give him free chicken nuggets for a year. [Daniel Victor / The New York Times]
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
