Christopher Mims

The stereotype of customer service is that it’s a race to the bottom—call centers in India, computers, or worse. But when you’re a hip eyeglasses brand with headquarters in Manhattan, you can convince graduates of places like Harvard and Yale to answer your phones, as well as former employees of Goldman Sachs, said David Gilboa, one of the founders of Warby Parker.

Facebook doesn’t break down its revenue according to the wealth of the countries in which it does business, but a funny thing happens when you do: It becomes apparent that Facebook’s push into emerging markets is paying dividends much more quickly than anyone realized.

CyPhy makes nightmarish contraptions for its military clients: flying drones that can be easily operated on the battlefield, and which never need to be recharged because they’re tethered to a power supply. The periodically dormant company (at least publicly) is about to get a fresh infusion of cash.

Demonstrating a feat that was until recently thought to be impossible, researchers in Geneva, Singapore, Cambridge and Waterloo, Ontario have “unconditionally guaranteed” the security and sanctity of a message transmitted between two points on earth. Their work (pdf) could lead to impenetrable communications networks for financial trading, online voting, or an endless variety of other tasks currently carried out on the internet.

“We hold that unrequited teenage love is not a crime, and is not elevated to a crime by the disapproval, and even annoyance, of the object of the erstwhile lover’s affections, or by that of her father.”

Apple has just revealed in a filing with the SEC that the company will spend $10.5 billion on stuff—also known as “capital expenditures”—in 2014. For Apple, that stuff includes “manufacturing process equipment, corporate facilities and infrastructure,” but does not include the company’s myriad retail stores, which are popping up all over.

Facebook just beat the pants off of analyst’s expectations for the company’s revenue and profit, leading to a 10% jump in the company’s share price after markets closed. The world’s most-used site after Google brought home $0.25 per share when analysts expected just $0.19 per share. Revenue came in at $2.02 billion; analysts expected $1.91 billion.

Outsized valuations for tech companies are back with a vengeance. If you thought Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram (which at the time had 16 employees) was an eyebrow-raiser, you might be shocked to hear that companies like Pinterest and Snapchat are now estimated to be worth four times as much.

Catherine Rampell at the New York Times wonders whether her iPhone, which became much less usable after she upgraded to iOS7, is being deliberately sabotaged by Apple, to encourage her to buy a new iPhone. This is a bit like asking whether or not Apple cares about design. Planned obsolescence has been part of how Apple, and just about every other PC maker, has operated since time immemorial.

Finally, something truly new in smartphones.

“We think it’s going to be an iPad Christmas,” said Tim Cook on today’s call with analysts following Apple’s earnings announcement. In the long run, Apple needs it to be so; this quarter, the company sold fewer iPads than predicted (14.1 million versus 14.5 million), and overall, Apple is seeing its iPad sales go, according to Henry Blodget, “down the tubes.”

Apple’s earnings for the last quarter of its fiscal year are out, and the company has disappointed Wall Street once again by doing better than most analysts predicted.

Quartz has confirmed with the Barack Obama campaign staffer whose email inbox was splashed across the Twitter account of the Syrian Electronic Army that her Gmail account, and those of “lots” of other staffers, was compromised over the weekend.

The Syrian Electronic Army, a pro-regime collective of hackers, has done it again, only this time the target they’ve compromised is an organization with close ties to the president of the United States.

The internet, with its capacity to connect people from afar, has just met its touch-based analog. It’s called Bond, and though it’s still at the crowd-funding stage, it’s so simple it just might work. Bond is a small, white rectangle, and when you touch it, it causes its companion Bond to vibrate, wherever it is in the world.

A chain of evidence unearthed by Daniel Terdiman of CNET suggests that a massive, four-story structure floating on a barge off Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay is owned by Google and may be a floating data center.

For new moms in the US, spending time on a smartphone is practically a full-time job. A new survey sponsored by AOL found that moms with young children are spending 37 hours a week using apps and browsing the web on their phone, compared to 31 hours a week for millennials, the next heaviest users.

Like Facebook, Amazon is building a city within a city, a glistening, utopian corporate campus in an area of Seattle known as South Lake Union that was once just dingy warehouses. And thanks to an item in Amazon’s latest quarterly report, we now know how much the company spent on the project on property and construction (which has barely begun) in the past 12 months alone: $1.4 billion.

Advertisements are coming to Instagram, as we predicted. To get users accustomed to the idea, the most innocuous “ad” ever (pictured above) will appear in every user’s feed at some point next week, the company just announced.

They called it the “Great Mancession.” As the post-2008 economic decline put more men out of work than women in the US, marketers began to notice a trend: Men in opposite-sex couples were taking over what had traditionally been women’s roles. In focus group after focus group, Julie Murphy, an account planner at Midan Marketing, heard from under- and unemployed men who were buying and preparing most of the food in their households. Robbed of their economic potency, men were transforming themselves from chest-waxing metrosexuals into helpmates.

Every successful company gets that way by sacrificing something it doesn’t think is important. At Wal-Mart, it’s wages; at Amazon, profits.

In 1984, the original Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of memory and cost $2,495, or about $5,616 in today’s dollars. Today, Apple revealed more details about the tube-shaped Mac Pro, its most powerful computer, which has 10,000 times as much memory as the original Mac.

Nokia just unveiled two new 6-inch Windows-based smartphones (really, “phablets”) and a 10-inch tablet. They’re very pretty and the phones are arguably the most usable phablets out there, in terms of their hardware and design. They include a bevy of new features, including awesome cameras, multiple microphones, and a “beamer” app that can display the contents of the phone in a web browser on a PC.

The early attempts to preview what roads will be like in the future, once self-driving cars of the sort Google is working on dominate, are pretty exciting.