Inside the first Code Conference: tech’s heavyweights go off-script – The Verge

I love America, and I want to buy T-Mobile

2014-05-29T11:00:13-04:00

"The American dream, the entrepreneurship, the passion, all those things, the hope that I got, I'd like to pay back. It is a bet in my heart that I have to pay back," Masayoshi Son said before an audience gathered at the US Chamber of Commerce in March. "I think America deserves the No. 1 position… because America is the best role model."

You could almost hear America the Beautiful playing in the background while bald eagles majestically landed on Son's shoulders, tears of patriotic pride running down their feathered faces.

Just months into his ownership of America's third-largest wireless company, Sprint, Son had to be feeling good about …

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Apple’s Eddy Cue touts ‘best product pipeline’ in 25 years coming this year

2014-05-29T00:22:51-04:00

Apple's iCloud and iTunes chief Eddy Cue says the products the company plans to show off later this year are the best he's seen in 25 years.

"Later this year, we've got the best product pipeline that I've seen in my 25 years at Apple," Cue said at the Code Conference, which is taking place this week in California. Cue appeared on stage with Jimmy Iovine, who cofounded Beats and is joining Apple as part of its purchase of the music software and hardware company.

You'll have to wait though

The interview is the first for both Cue and Iovine since the two companies announced the purchase earlier today. Cue was originally set to appear alongside …

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Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine thinks Apple’s earbuds are bad

2014-05-29T00:07:55-04:00

Beats co-founder Jimmy Iovine isn't a fan of Apple's iconic white earbuds. On stage at Code Conference minutes ago, Iovine had harsh words for the pack-ins, saying that Apple - the company he will soon work for - makes them simply "to make sure the machine [iPhone] works." But he wasn't done there. "You listen to Apocalypse Now, and the helicopter sounds like a mosquito," he added. Iovine thinks Beats has done better than Apple (and every other headphone manufacturer) in this department. "We turned an entire generation on to audio," he proudly proclaimed. Putting sound quality aside, Beats' sales numbers and the prevalence of red headphone c …

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Uber will eventually replace all its drivers with self-driving cars

2014-05-28T15:52:52-04:00

Uber will eventually replace the people who drive its cars with cars that drive themselves, CEO Travis Kalanick said today at the Code Conference. A day after Google unveiled the prototype for its own driverless vehicle, Kalanick was visibly excited at the prospect of developing a fleet of driverless vehicles, which he said would make car ownership rare. "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car - you're paying for the other dude in the car," Kalanick said. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basic …

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Sergey Brin says he’s ‘kind of a weirdo’ and shouldn’t have worked on Google+

2014-05-28T00:21:59-04:00

Google co-founder Sergey Brin said today that it was "probably a mistake" for him to have worked on Google+ because he's "not a very social person." Speaking at Recode's Code Conference, Brin - who also called himself "kind of a weirdo" - acknowledged that he used Google+ to post pictures of his kids to his family, but suggested that any previous professional focus on the social network was misguided. "It was probably a mistake," he said, "for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with."

Brin, who co-founded Google with Larry Page in 1998, said his attention is now on his company's semi-secret skunkworks group …

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Google made a self-driving car, and it doesn’t have a steering wheel

2014-05-27T22:04:09-04:00

Google today announced its own design for self-driving cars, which will drive people around without a steering wheel or pedals. It's the latest project from Google X, the company's skunkworks group headed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Two people, no drivers

The company has already shown off its own self-driving technology, which retrofits existing vehicles made by Toyota and Lexus. However this new version, which was announced by Brin at the Recode conference, is a new design that fits two people, and is driven entirely by computer using a variety of on-board computers and sensors.

Google says the program is currently in a prototype pha …

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Skype shown automatically translating multilingual voice calls

2014-05-27T21:05:56-04:00

Microsoft's Skype will eventually be able to translate voice calls between people. In an on-stage demo at the Code conference today, Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella showed off Skype Translator, an upcoming version of the service that is capable of translating voice conversation in "near real-time" using technology developed by the company's Skype and Translator teams. With it, you can talk in your native language to another user who speaks a different language, and Microsoft will translate it to the other person.

"Ever since we started to speak, we wanted to cross the language boundary," Nadella said before showing off a development version o …

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Microsoft’s Nadella: Xbox isn’t going anywhere

2014-05-27T20:57:11-04:00

Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella says he has no plans to sell off the company's Xbox business, despite longtime urging from investors. Speaking at the Code Conference, taking place this week in Rancho Palos Verdes in California, Nadella said flat out that Xbox would be sticking around.

"I have no intent to do anything different with Xbox than we are doing today," Nadella told interviewers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg.

Software is 'the most malleable resource'

The same goes for Microsoft's Bing business, Nadella said, adding that while some people might look at Bing only as a website, it's been deeply integrated with a number of Microsoft pro …

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