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Recode Daily: Amazon buys itself Ring, its second-biggest acquisition after Whole Foods

Plus, Uber’s culture fixer-upper leaves before a year’s up, Pinterest gets its first-ever COO, and The Real Angry Birds of Finland.

A Ring doorbell Ring

Amazon is making its second-biggest acquisition ever — the smartphone-connected video-doorbell startup Ring. Amazon is paying between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion for Ring, which gives it another tool as it begins to deliver packages inside consumers’ homes. Its biggest acquisition is, of course, last year’s $14 billion purchase of Whole Foods. [Theodore Schleifer and Jason Del Rey]

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Uber’s culture fixer-upper, Frances Frei, is leaving the company after less than a year. Frei was hired last June as SVP of leadership and strategy, with the express goal of fixing Uber’s broken culture and putting its controversial CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick on the right path. She’s moving on to a new leadership development program for companies, aimed at women and underrepresented minorities, before returning to Harvard Business School. Meanwhile, here’s an unforeseen use case for Uber and Lyft: Sick people are increasingly using ride-hail services to get to the emergency room, putting drivers at risk and exposing them to legal liability. [Kara Swisher / Recode]

Visual search company Pinterest has hired its first-ever COO. Former Google and Square executive Francoise Brougher is a major hire for Pinterest, which appears to be close to an IPO. At Google, Brougher eventually led the global sales and operations teams for Google’s small-business advertisers; at Square, she essentially became the company’s COO, and helped solidify its business for its late-2015 IPO. [Kurt Wagner / Recode]

Former U.S. President Barack Obama isn’t happy with Facebook and Google. They’re not just incredibly profitable tech companies, he said, they are “public goods” with a responsibility to serve the public. Speaking at MIT’s Sloan Sports Conference last Friday, Obama said he wants the internet giants — he called them a duopoly — to rethink their business models and algorithms. Meanwhile, Facebook turned to Twitter to explain the recent Twitter-fueled controversy over the Trump campaign’s 2016 ad spend. [Peter Kafka / Recode]

Location, location, etc.: Ford settled on Miami as the home base for its autonomous ride-hail and delivery business. The company’s three-pronged approach includes a delivery pilot in partnership with Dominos and Postmates, testing self-driving cars around the city and setting up a dedicated fleet-management center. Meanwhile, T-Mobile and Sprint also selected several cities — including Dallas, LA and Washington, D.C. — for building out their 5G data networks; the first 5G-ready smartphones comes out next year. [Johana Bhuiyan / Recode]

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This article originally appeared on Recode.net.