Martin Peers, writing for The Information (paywalled, alas), “Apple’s New Savings Account Makes iPhones More Valuable — for Thieves”: Whether this is smart for consumers depends on whether you’re comfortable having your life ruined if someone steals your iPhone. The Wall Street … | Continue reading
Silicon Valley Bank CEO Greg Becker on Thursday told top venture capitalists in Silicon Valley to "stay calm" amid concerns around a capital crunch that wiped nearly $10 billion off the bank's market valuation. On a call, Becker said that "calls started coming and started panic." … | Continue reading
Erin Woo, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas): Elon Musk is running into an obstacle in his relentless drive to cut costs at Twitter: some of the same vendors that Twitter is squeezing to save money are also its advertising clients. As recently as last month, Twitte … | Continue reading
Twitter's fourth quarter revenue fell about 35% year over year to $1.025 billion, a top ad executive revealed at a staff meeting Wednesday, the most detailed sign yet of how much revenue has fallen. That was 72% of Twitter's internal goalfor the quarter, according to a slide show … | Continue reading
A senior Twitter manager told employees that the company's daily revenue on Tuesday was 40% lower than the same day a year ago, underscoring the crisis facing its core ads business, according to a person with direct knowledge. In a staff meeting on Tuesday, Siddharth Rao, an engi … | Continue reading
In a move that could change how more than a billion people write documents, presentations and emails, Microsoft has discussed incorporating OpenAI's artificial intelligence in Word, PowerPoint, Outlook and other apps so customers can automatically generate text using simple promp … | Continue reading
When Elon Musk terminated four top Twitter executives, including CEO Parag Agrawal and CFO Ned Segal on Thursday, he did so "for cause," said a person familiar with the situation, in an apparent effort to avoid paying out tens of millions of dollars in severance pay and unvested … | Continue reading
OpenAI, whose text- and image-generating artificial intelligence has become a mainstream hit, is in advanced talks to raise more funding from Microsoft, which previously backed the startup with capital that includes credits to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing services to dev … | Continue reading
Y Combinator has cut the number of startups it is funding and training this summer by about half compared to its winter program, a spokesperson confirmed. The famed Silicon Valley accelerator respondedto a downturn in the economy and in venture capital funding in reducing its cla … | Continue reading
Sequoia Capital’s Chinese affiliate is about to close $9 billion in fresh capital for four new funds, higher than its original target of more than $8 billion, according to two people familiar with the fundraising. The final amount could represent the biggest pool of capital ever … | Continue reading
Apple’s iPhone recently became the top-selling smartphone in China, its second-biggest market after the U.S., for the first time in six years. But the company owes much of that success to CEO Tim Cook, who laid the foundation years ago by secretly signing an agreement, estimated … | Continue reading
Charlie Bell, senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, is leaving after more than 23 years at Amazon, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. An AWS spokesman confirmed the departure but declined to comment further. Bell oversees the development of AWS s … | Continue reading
U.S. subscriber growth at Disney’s Disney+ streaming service slowed sharply in the past few months, according to internal data reviewed by The Information, with most of the growth in the service this year coming from India and Latin America. The slowdown is sure to intensify a de … | Continue reading
Orca Security’s March funding round made the two-year-old software startup a unicorn—and gave it an unusual claim to fame. With approximately $4 million in annualized revenue when it briefed investors early this year, the cybersecurity company’s $1.2 billion valuation translated … | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, one longtime team member at The Information asked one of her colleagues on Zoom: “So, how tall are you?” She’d never met her in person. It’s one of many examples of the utter strangeness of the last year. A year ago this week, like all of you, we at The Informati … | Continue reading
A mixed-reality headset Apple is developing will be equipped with more than a dozen cameras for tracking hand movements and showing video of the real world to people wearing it, along with ultra-high-resolution 8K displays and advanced technology for eye tracking, according to a … | Continue reading
A long-simmering public dispute between Facebook and Apple has neared a boiling point. With the aid of outside legal counsel, Facebook for months has been preparingan antitrust lawsuit against Apple that would allege the iPhone-maker abused its power in the smartphone market by f … | Continue reading
A tent city in SOMA. Hundreds of people dying of infectious disease. Out-of-control crime on the streets and corruption in City Hall. Let’s talk about San Francisco…in the 1850s. Immediately after the Gold Rush, San Francisco became the home of thousands of destitute, out-of-work … | Continue reading
A tent city in SOMA. Hundreds of people dying of infectious disease. Out-of-control crime on the streets and corruption in City Hall. Let’s talk about San Francisco…in the 1850s. Immediately after the Gold Rush, San Francisco became the home of thousands of destitute, out-of-work … | Continue reading
The race to invest in social audio app Clubhouse is on again. Venture capital firms have approached the startup’s founders in recent weeks about leading its potential next round of funding at a roughly $1 billion valuation, according to four people with knowledge of the discussio … | Continue reading
The race to invest in social audio app Clubhouse is on again. Venture capital firms have approached the startup’s founders in recent weeks about leading its potential next round of funding at a roughly $1 billion valuation, according to four people with knowledge of the discussio … | Continue reading
Patreon, the online service that allows podcasters, musicians and other artists to receive direct financial support from fans, is considering a public listing as soon as this year, said a person with knowledge of discussions. The San Francisco startup has met with banks and has b … | Continue reading
Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, which once courted attention from the news media, is ramping up its own media efforts. The firm plans to expand its publication of content related to technology and business on its website through an opinion section that publish … | Continue reading
Apple—long considered the sleeping giant in the podcast space—is waking up. The company, which runs the most widely used podcasting app in the industry, is discussing launching a new subscription service that would charge people to listen to podcasts, according to people familiar … | Continue reading
Zapier isn’t a household name outside Silicon Valley, but the world’s top venture capitalists have long been trying to own a piece of the booming enterprise software firm. The problem for investors was that Zapier, whose software automates personal computing tasks, didn’t need th … | Continue reading
Facebook on Monday told employees to avoid wearing or carrying company-branded clothing and other items in public following the company’s suspension last week of President Donald Trump’s account and its more recent crackdown on content mentioning “Stop the Steal,” an online movem … | Continue reading
Cameo, a service that lets fans pay celebrities to create personalized video messages, plans to raise more venture capital in the coming months and potentially buy smaller tech startups, according to CEO Steven Galanis. The four-year-old startup, last valued at $300 million, also … | Continue reading
Seven years ago, Apple made a staggering discovery: Among the employees at a factory in China that made most of the computer ports used in its MacBooks were two 15-year-olds. Apple told the manufacturer, Suyin Electronics, that it wouldn’t get any new business until it improved e … | Continue reading
In 2014, Apple executives became alarmed when China enacted a new labor law meant to protect workers’ rights. The law required that no more than 10% of a factory’s workforce be temporary workers. Typically these employees have fewer benefits and legal protections than permanent o … | Continue reading
Sequoia Capital’s early bet on Airbnb will likely propel it to one of the greatest hauls in the history of venture capital, turning a $260 million investment made over the past 11 years into a stake that is now worth about $4.8 billion. But what hasn’t been previously reported is … | Continue reading
Want to know what the future of the tech industry, and business, will be like? The Information selected 50 companies across six sectors to be on our inaugural list of the most promising private tech startups. We believe these companies have the potential to be the most valuable b … | Continue reading
Venture firm Sequoia Capital led SpaceX’s recent $1.9 billion financing , according to people familiar with the matter. The firm, known for its stakes in companies like Instagram, YouTube and Stripe, wrote a $500 million check in the privately held aerospace business founded by … | Continue reading
Splunk, Dropbox and Brex followed similar formulas as they grew from small startups to established companies. To attract employees and customers, each set up elaborate San Francisco offices and plastered billboards for its services around the city. Dropbox three years ago leased … | Continue reading
Hired, a recruitment service for tech jobs, has started a process to sell assets, pay off creditors and wind down the company, according to people familiar with the plans and a document seen by The Information. The company’s chief financial officer, Edward Schaffer, told some sha … | Continue reading
Doubts are growing about one of the first and most high-profile efforts by Google owner Alphabet to show that it can be more than an advertising cash machine. Loon, a decadelong project to provide internet to rural areas and islands around the world using high-altitude helium bal … | Continue reading
Chris Lehane was piping mad. Laurence Tosi, Airbnb’s chief financial officer, had accused the Airbnb policy and communications chief of spending millions of dollars before Tosi had signed off on the plans, approval Lehane didn’t think he needed. Their dispute flared up near the p … | Continue reading
It now seems inevitable that the U.S. government will try to roll back some of the protections that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has provided to internet companies. The fine line it needs to walk is to reverse the slide of social media platforms into a cesspool o … | Continue reading
When Apple’s 2018 iPad Pro was undergoing production trials at the company’s largest outside manufacturer, Foxconn Technology, the Taiwanese firm gave Apple a list of how many workers it needed to develop the new product. That was standard procedure for Foxconn, whose factories a … | Continue reading
Microsoft has privately told European competition authorities that Slack’s antitrust complaint against the tech giant was motivated essentially by sour grapes. In a recent confidential filing, Microsoft told the European Commission, which oversees competition regulation, that Sla … | Continue reading
Apple paid an outside firm to lobby Congress on legislation targeting U.S. companies that do business in areas of China that may use slave labor. Congressional disclosure reports show that Fierce Government Relations lobbied for Apple on the “Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act” … | Continue reading
Airbnb has hired famed former Apple designer Jony Ive as a creative consultant ahead of its initial public offering, CEO Brian Chesky said Wednesday. The hire is the most significant in a series of moves that has shaken up Airbnb’s creative team, a key department in a company kno … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s video streaming service Quibi is shutting down, said a person familiar with the situation,bringing down the curtain on the short-form video streaming service just six months after it launched. The closure is a stunning end to Katzenberg’s hopes of creating a … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Katzenberg’s video streaming service Quibi is shutting down, said a person familiar with the situation,bringing down the curtain on the short-form video streaming service just six months after it launched. The closure is a stunning end to Katzenberg’s hopes of creating a … | Continue reading
The SEC and the Justice Department are investigating HeadSpin, the mobile app testing company, over possible financial misrepresentations, said a person familiar with the matter. Headspin in August said it would return funding to shareholders after discovering financial irregula … | Continue reading
Jeffrey Katzenberg may be nearing the end of the road with his mobile video streaming service Quibi. He recently tried to sell its catalog of programming to companies such as NBCUniversal and Facebook. Bothpassed, according to several people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, K … | Continue reading
Just 1% of the vacuum cleaners, immersion blenders and other household products listed on Amazon last year were sold by the retailer, with the rest coming from other merchants who use its platform. And yet 33% of all sales in that category were by Amazon. Those were among the fig … | Continue reading
Google’s engineering directors are grappling with a worrisome trend: internal data that indicate productivity during the coronavirus shutdowns deteriorated among engineers, particularly newly hired ones. One internal survey viewed by The Information found that in the three months … | Continue reading
Maps have suddenly become a new front in the antitrust war against Google. Credit for that goes to Mapbox, a growing rival to Google Maps that steered federal investigators to alleged abuses by the company, according to two people with direct knowledge of the situation. A congres … | Continue reading