Recode Daily: Hurricane Irma lands; iPhone X is coming

Hurricane Irma consumed everyone’s bandwidth over the weekend, faking right and then veering left up the northwest coast of Florida, leaving up to five million without power. Floridians used Snap Maps to document their storm preparations, and the walkie-talkie app Zello saw a surge in usage — adding a million new users a day since last Monday — serving as a source of real-time updates and access to emergency information. Here’s a firsthand account of how Zello was used to coordinate rescues by the all-volunteer “Cajun Navy.” [The New York Times]

Rumors and leaks are rampant Apple readies the Steve Jobs Theater on its brand-new Cupertino campus for tomorrow’s big event revealing new iPhones and iterations of its Apple Watch, Apple TV, AirPods and operating systems. Apple savant John Gruber vouches for some of the leaks and says Apple may go after the leaker; the usually reliable 9to5 Mac site says the new phones will be called iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus and a high-end iPhone X, and that we can expect new features including Face ID, Portrait Lighting and animated emoji — including a poop emoji based on a scan of the user’s facial features. [ArchDaily]

Twitter has built an in-app feature that lets users draft an entire tweetstorm and then send it all out as a threaded conversation. The feature is not live in the Twitter app yet, but was found within the Android version by a developer. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, known as “the father of the tweetstorm,” deleted all his tweets around this time a year ago; you can see some of his greatest hits here. Politico examines the phenomenon of the Twitter thread as a literary form peculiar to the Trump era, and nods to some noteworthy “threaders” — often stalwarts of government, media or academia. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

Here are the front-runners among the U.S. cities that have a chance of catching Amazon’s eye as it makes plans to build a second North American HQ. Check out Recode’s list of cities with more than a million people, comparing criteria including tech talent, airport travel time, office prices, housing costs and population. Amazon is on the forefront of automation, with more than 100,000 robots in action around the world, and plans to add many more. Here’s what that means for the company’s tens of thousands of human employees. [Rani Molla / Recode]

Should Amazon buy Nordstrom next? On his last visit to Recode Decode hosted by Kara Swisher, NYU professor and brand expert Scott Galloway predicted that Amazon would buy Whole Foods. That was back in May; he returns to the podcast to share some new M&A forecasts for the company. [Eric Johnson / Recode]

Top stories from Recode

Millennials mostly watch TV after it’s aired.

Older people still watch more live TV, but that’s changing.

Snapchat wants to get deeper into news, so it’s adding college newspapers to Discover.

Student papers from Berkeley, Texas A&M, Wisconsin and Syracuse are coming to Snapchat.

The U.S. Congress is going to hold two hearings on the massive Equifax data breach.

Meanwhile, New York announces its own investigation.

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Some content about content.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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