PepsiCo is buying SodaStream for $3.2 billion. The Israeli company sells devices for making carbonated water at home, sugary syrup optional. While soft-drink sales decline, SodaStream — which uses the razors-and-blades model — has projected 23 percent revenue growth this year. In the first six months, it sold 1.8 million sparkling water maker starter kits and almost 18 million carbon-dioxide refill capsules. [Thomas Mulier / Bloomberg]
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Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey continued his media tour, including a conversation with CNN’s Brian Stelter that aired yesterday. Dorsey said, “We’re ready to question everything” about how Twitter works — the service, which has proven itself increasingly essential to the spread of news and information over the past several years, has also been hijacked by spammers, trolls and jerks — but that “it would be dangerous for a company like ours … to be arbiters of truth.” [Brian Stelter / CNNMoney]
“You think this is an option. It is not,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk tweeted in response to an open letter from Arianna Huffington urging him to change the “wildly outdated, anti-scientific and horribly inefficient way” he works. Musk had another high-profile, high-stress week, culminating in a lengthy interview with the New York Times; Tesla shares sank 9 percent on Friday. Have we broken Elon? [Crystal Chui and Alex Longley / Bloomberg]
Aiming directly at the TiVo/DVR market, Amazon is developing a digital video recorder that works around cable providers to record live TV. Users will be able to record live TV and stream the video to a smartphone so it can be watched later. That functionality is similar to offerings from TiVo and Dish Network’s Slingbox … but is it relevant today? [Mark Gurman and Spencer Soper / Bloomberg]
Here’s an inside look at how TripAdvisor became the world’s biggest travel site. Now it is struggling with the same kinds of problems vexing other tech giants like Facebook, Google and Twitter. In this new “reputation economy,” a shadow industry of fake reviews has emerged, TripAdvisor has been snarled in debates over free speech as it struggles to defend legitimate reviewers against business owners who are lawyering up over bad reviews. [Linda Kinstler / The Guardian]
After 50 years of guiding the growth of the internet, the United States has ceded leadership in cyberspace to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping outlined his plans to turn China into a “cyber-superpower,” and if he succeeds, the internet will be less global and less open, and Beijing will reap the economic, diplomatic, national security and intelligence benefits that once flowed to Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, here’s a look at Google’s internal debate about getting back into China after pulling out of the country in 2010. [Adam Segal / Foreign Affairs]
Wall Street is erasing its longstanding line between jocks and nerds. The old hierarchy where traders made money and won glory while subordinate engineers wrote code and stayed out of sight is on its way out as coding goes from a “nice-to-have” skill set to a “must-have.” And trading floors are becoming surprisingly quiet, with much less shouting and much more thinking. [Liz Hoffman and Telis Demos / The Wall Street Journal]
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