Apple Car, Oculus Rift, BuzzFeed are the talk of Code Conference
Kara Swisher, left, high-fives Hillary Rodham Clinton during the Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women in February. On Tuesday, Vox Media announced that it had acquired Re/Code, the tech business news site cofounded by Swisher and Walt Mossberg.
Re/Code stole the spotlight at its Code Conference this week by announcing it was being bought by Vox Media, but there’s been plenty of other news coming out of the second annual gathering of tech executives in Rancho Palos Verdes. Here’s a roundup from the tech news site:
- Jeff Williams, Apple’s senior vice president for operations, hinted that the world’s most valuable company may jump deeper into the automotive game. “The car is the ultimate mobile device,” Williams said in response to a question from the audience about how Apple would spend its growing pile of cash. “We’re exploring a lot of different markets.” Apple reportedly has hundreds of employees already working on an electric vehicle. Re/Code’s Dawn Chmielewski has a full report
- Oculus Chief Executive Brendan Iribe said the company’s Rift virtual reality headsets and the computers needed to power them would retail for about $1,500. Oculus, owned by Facebook, announced in May it would start selling its hardware to consumers early next year.
BuzzFeed plans to go public one day and sees its growing video content suitable for a range of platforms, including not just YouTube, but Snapchat and network TV. “We’re very focused on building out internationally, we’re very focused on building out across multiple different platforms, we’re very focused on building out our video business,” BuzzFeed Chief Executive Jonah Peretti said. “That will give us a diversification… to allow us to build a big independent company with much more predictability and things that would allow us to be a public company or an independent standalone company.”
- CBS’ president and chief executive, Les Moonves, told conference goers he liked online competitors Netflix and Amazon because they pay his network “hundreds of millions of dollars a year” for content.
- On-demand companies such as Uber and Airbnb are on the rise while growth for Twitter and Facebook is down, according to a state of the Internet report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ partner Mary Meeker.
- Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said women make up 40% of his company. “As we grow we want to make sure we’re looking wide and far for the best people from lots of different backgrounds,” he told the conference.
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