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Las Vegas hosts the annual Consumer Electronic Show this week, which means you’ll be seeing a flood of gadget annoucements about smart assistants, electric cars and giant TVs. Here’s a smart preview from The Verge, along with an annual warning: The biggest companies in tech — Apple, Amazon, Google, etc. — generally don’t show off their most important stuff at CES. And much of the stuff that does gets announced at CES never amounts to much — some of it doesn’t even ship.
Bookstores in major U.S. cities quickly sold out of their first shipment of Michael Wolff’s gossipy political tell-all, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which jumped its publication date by four days and shot to the top of the Amazon and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists. Here’s what it takes to become a No. 1 bestseller on Amazon. Hedge-fund billionaire and Democrat megadonor Tom Steyer bought 535 copies of the book and said he’ll donate one to every member of Congress. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at the “joyously nasty” Wolff, and some thoughts on the flattery and bluffing that got him such up-close access to the Trump crew — he didn’t play by the unspoken rules of traditional “access journalism,” for starters. [Ali Montag / CNBC]
Oprah 2020? ”She would absolutely do it,” says Oprah Winfrey’s partner Stedman Graham. “I don’t — I don’t” have plans to run, Winfrey says herself. Here’s last night’s Golden Globes speech that reignited the chatter, in video and text formats.
Originally created as a parody knockoff of bitcoin, a virtual coin called dogecoin has hit $1 billion in market cap, and its price has risen 400 percent in the past month. Dogecoin, which was named after an internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog, hasn’t been updated in two years. It’s a good time for some speculations and predictions from a cryptocurrency expert. And some dogecoin videos. [Saheli Roy Chouddhury / CNBC]
Border agents’ searches of travelers’ electronic devices skyrocketed last year, as the government stepped up its hunt for national security threats and smugglers. The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency searched the cellphones and other devices of 30,200 travelers, most of whom were leaving the country; that’s up from 19,501 in 2016. The agency also unveiled a new policy for searching and seizing electronic devices. [Alicia A. Caldwell and Laura Meckler / The Wall Street Journal]
Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure will join Uber’s board, which is set to grow to 17 directors. Claure — who was once on the short list of candidates to be Uber’s CEO — will take one of two director slots that SoftBank is getting as part of its successful tender offer; the other will go to Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision fund, which led that multi-billion dollar deal. [Kara Swisher / Recode]
Amazon revealed more of its master plan for its line of voice-controlled Echo speakers — it’s all about the Alexa OS. The company is partnering with high-end headphone maker Bose on creating new tools to help software developers add the voice technology to headphones, wearable devices and smartwatches. [Jason Del Rey / Recode]
Top stories from Recode
Even in the age of Trump, people are getting less of their news from television.
Local TV is still more popular than network and cable TV.
America’s love-hate relationship with social media — quantified.
It’s complicated.
B.J. Novak’s list-making startup is back with a new social media app.
It’s called Kiyo, it’s kind of like Pinterest and it launches on the App Store today
How to fix your company’s culture, according to former Netflix exec Patty McCord.
On the latest Recode Decode, McCord talks about the famous “Netflix culture deck,” which was downloaded more than 14 million times online.
This is cool
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
