After five years and an investment of around $2.5 billion, Uber’s effort to build a self-driving car has produced this: a car that can’t drive more than half a mile without encountering a problem. “The car doesn’t drive well” and “struggles with simple routes and simple maneuvers … | Continue reading
Prominent state-backed newspapers in China issued more scathing editorials condemning a proposal to create a U.S.-controlled joint venture for the popular Chinese-owned app TikTok, ratcheting up pressure on its parent company ByteDance. “China has no reason to give the green li … | Continue reading
Stripe has become one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent startups, valued at $36 billion thanks to its technology powering online purchases for clients like Target and Amazon. In the background, its founders have also been building another business: venture capital.Since 2017, th … | Continue reading
For years, news publishers have been clamoring for Facebook, Google and Apple to pay for the news content that gets distributed through their services. Well, they have gotten what they wished for—sort of. And it’s troubling news. | Continue reading
Google has taken a lot of heat for violating people’s privacy. Now it could get in trouble for trying to protect it.When Google in January said it planned to follow Apple’s lead in increasing privacy protections by blocking most online advertising trackers, publishers of news and … | Continue reading
ByteDance, owner of the powerhouse social media app TikTok that is caught up in the U.S.-China trade and cybersecurity war, has been busy restructuring itself as it looks to duplicate TikTok’s success internationally with some of its newer apps, according to new data viewed by Th … | Continue reading
The shift to remote work has buoyed the valuations of several startups making productivity tools. The latest is Roam Research, which has raised $9 million at a valuation of $200 million, or about 25 times higher than the median valuation for seed rounds.Roam is tapping more than … | Continue reading
The shift to remote work has buoyed the valuations of several startups making productivity tools. The latest is Roam Research, which has raised $9 million at a valuation of $200 million, or about 25 times higher than the median valuation for seed rounds.Roam is tapping more than … | Continue reading
Investors in Magic Leap have marked down their stakes in the troubled augmented reality startup by 93%, on average, between the start of the year and the end of June, previously unreported figures show. The dizzying drop makes Magic Leap the private tech firm in which investor se … | Continue reading
Many Hollywood studios have struggled to restart production, particularly in the U.S. in the past few weeks, given the challenges of navigating social distancing rules on a film set. But Netflix has had an advantage: Over the past couple of years, it has amassed a network of stud … | Continue reading
Employees who worked on Airbnb’s marketing team in recent years have sometimes pondered a tantalizing question: What would happen to the company’s growth if it stopped spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on ads that appear high up in Google search results?The pandemic … | Continue reading
It’s a quirk of Silicon Valley that one of the most seemingly uninteresting businesses is run by one of the most interesting people.Ten years into running Stripe, its co-founder and CEO, Patrick Collison, still has a voracious appetite for just about everything related to the fut … | Continue reading
This should be Travis Kalanick’s moment.The Uber co-founder not only sold out of Uber ahead of the pandemic that has cratered that company’s ride-hailing business, but switched his money and energy to a real estate startup that leases space to restaurants for meal preparation. Th … | Continue reading
Y Combinator has won acclaim for a twice-yearly training program that produced Silicon Valley crown jewels such as Stripe and Airbnb. But for the first time since the startup accelerator’s inception in 2005, all 220 participants had to dial in remotely, threatening a valuable com … | Continue reading
In 2017, Apple rolled out a flurry of projects executives hoped would endear it to Chinese officials. It announced three new research and development centers in China and ceded control of Chinese user data to a local partner. Soon after, Apple’s newly appointed head of Greater Ch … | Continue reading
Earlier this week, while scanning Twitter in between meetings, I saw an article about a new gender discrimination suit filed against Pinterest. I made a mental note to read it later. The female in me is always disturbed by and wants to know more about these suits. But the editor … | Continue reading
Dozens of startups, as well as some public companies, are fueling a boom in artificial intelligence that is increasingly automating certain functions of businesses or their products.The Information has learned the revenue and growth figures for some of the highest-profile AI star … | Continue reading
Disney pulled off a successful misdirection today by getting investors to think less about Covid-19 and more about the invasion of the Huns.The company said during an otherwise dismal earnings report that it will release Mulan—its twice-delayed big budget release about a young wo … | Continue reading
Zhang Yiming was a hometown hero. Local media heralded his startup, ByteDance, as China’s most internationally successful internet product. It was the first Chinese tech company to challenge the likes of Facebook for global pop-culture dominance with its breakout hit app, TikTok. … | Continue reading
Four years ago, India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, set out to remake India’s mobile industry by launching a cellular phone service with rock-bottom prices that made it affordable for India’s rural poor.After Reliance Industries, his business empire spanning oil, retail and other … | Continue reading
Anthony Levandowski, the former Google self-driving car pioneer who pleaded guilty to stealing a proprietary Google document before launching a rival startup in 2016, was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison. The judge overseeing the case called it the “biggest trade secret … | Continue reading
HeadSpin, a mobile app testing company recently valued at $1.16 billion, plans to return up to $95 million in funding to investors after an internal review of financial irregularities forced it to restate its financials.The previously unreported review follows the board’s discove … | Continue reading
Imagine a New York Times where you get your music and play digital games, along with your news. That vision is a big part of what Meredith Kopit Levien, announced as the company’s new CEO Wednesday, sees as the future of the company.Even as the publication is embroiled in controv … | Continue reading
Last month, Boris Johnson, the U.K.’s prime minister, delivered a speech in the industrial town of Dudley about his plan to lead the country out of the pandemic with large-scale investment projects. The most noteworthy feature of the speech was his mantra-like repetition of “buil … | Continue reading
A small group of ByteDance’s U.S. investors is discussing with the company’s top management the possibility of joining forces to buy a majority stake in TikTok, said people familiar with the situation, as it grows more difficult for the Chinese-owned company to keep control of th … | Continue reading
For years, Google Cloud has languished in third place in the cloud computing market, with fewer marquee customers to boast of than rivals Amazon Web Services and Microsoft.Last week, though, word surfaced of a buzzy new customer for Google Cloud—TikTok, the app for sharing short … | Continue reading
Argo AI, a self-driving car company that is majority owned by Ford and Volkswagen, has cut about 100 employees from Munich-based Audi Autonomous Intelligent Driving, a 300-person firm it acquired in June, The Information has learned. The move came as a surprise to some people in … | Continue reading
Uber, owner of Uber Eats, approved an all-stock takeover of smaller restaurant-food delivery rival Postmates for around $2.65 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the situation, confirming earlier reports from Bloomberg and others. The upshot: Uber Eats will gain so … | Continue reading
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees he was reluctant to bow to the threats of a growing ad boycott, saying in private remarks that “my guess is that all these advertisers will be back on the platform soon enough.”Zuckerberg gave his thoughts on the boycott, which now incl … | Continue reading
Since Dara Khosrowshahi became CEO of Uber in 2017, he has been steadily pushing his engineering team to move jobs to India as a way of saving money. Despite some resistance from his top technology executive, Khosrowshahi made progress: about 15% of Uber’s engineering team, or ab … | Continue reading
Google is working on a major overhaul of its payment app, Google Pay, in hopes of jump-starting its use in the U.S. Google Pay plans this year to let online and brick-and-mortar merchants set up their own branded buttons inside the U.S. version of the app, potentially turning it … | Continue reading
As regulatory agencies intensify their probe of Google’s business practices, the discussion in Washington, D.C., and Silicon Valley has shifted from whether the Justice Department will sue Google for anticompetitive behavior to when it will do so.But one question remains unclear: … | Continue reading
Uber faces legal challenges in California over its handling of drivers, while its effort to acquire online restaurant food ordering pioneer Grubhub is likely to get mired in an antitrust review if the companies ever reach a deal. Meanwhile, Uber's effort to get into grocery deliv … | Continue reading
Eight years ago, Apple executives including CEO Tim Cook attended a meeting in China where they watched a video of an experimental manufacturing line for the iPad operated by robots rather than humans. Cook and the other Apple executives watched as iPad parts traveled along conve … | Continue reading
Snap CEO Evan Spiegel called for the creation of an American commission to address racial injustice and comprehensive tax reform, saying in a lengthy note to employees that he was “heartbroken and enraged” by racism in America.“Economic inequality in America has reached levels un … | Continue reading
Some of San Francisco’s most well-known tech firms have cut deep into their staffs in recent months. But much of the pain is being felt outside the Bay Area.An analysis of public filings from 20 tech firms based in the region, including Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, show that three-quar … | Continue reading
The business turmoil caused by Covid-19 is prompting companies to cut costs any way they can, from furloughing staff to begging landlords for breaks on their rent. Another tactic is finding ways to save on cloud computing expenses, which are increasingly significant for many comp … | Continue reading
SoftBank launched an internal investigation of one of its top executives, looking at possible ties to money laundering and drug cartels, Bloomberg reported. According to the report, SoftBank hired a Swiss firm to do background checks of Chief Operating Officer Marcelo Claure, w … | Continue reading
Tim McLaughlin cheered alongside doctors and nurses at an Oakland, Calif., children’s hospital one evening in late April as his 3-year-old son rang a bell to celebrate major progress with his cancer treatment. The next day, McLaughlin opened his email to find scooter startup Lime … | Continue reading
Clubhouse is raising money from Andreessen Horowitz in a deal that values the buzzy app at $100 million, according to people familiar with the matter. Alpha Exploration, the company responsible for the audio social network, is raising roughly $12 million in the Series A round, … | Continue reading
When Google announces its latest Pixel smartphone in the coming weeks, it will be without some key architects of its previous model, which drew rare internal criticism from the company’s head of hardware, Rick Osterloh, The Information has learned.The mastermind behind Google’s P … | Continue reading
Ann Miura-Ko is no stranger to investing during a crisis. She got her start in venture capital as an analyst on September 10, 2001. She co-founded her seed-stage fund, Floodgate, in 2008 just as Bear Stearns was collapsing.The current shock set off by the global coronavirus pande … | Continue reading
In late April, Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi called a meeting of the executives in charge of the ride-hailing firm’s nearly 4,000-person engineering department to tell them they needed to plan to cut headcount by 20%.Some of the engineering leaders responded that they and other mana … | Continue reading
Before the coronavirus outbreak, Brex had become the poster child of Silicon Valley largesse. By offering fellow startups high-limit charge cards, its 24-year-old founders had attracted illustrious investors like Kleiner Perkins, rocketing Brex to a $2.6 billion valuation. Flush … | Continue reading
Zoox, one of the most ambitious self-driving car developers that was valued at $2.7 billion in 2018, is contemplating a sale.The startup, which has raised $1 billion in equity, has hired Qatalyst Partners to help it find a buyer, said two people familiar with the situation. At th … | Continue reading
Magic Leap is in talks to secure funding from a health care company, according to emails CEO Rony Abovitz sent to staff. The capital could save the highly valued startup from making further cuts to its already diminished workforce.Abovitz said last week that Magic Leap signed a t … | Continue reading
Magic Leap is in talks to secure funding from a health care company, according to emails CEO Rony Abovitz sent to staff. The capital could save the highly valued startup from making further cuts to its already diminished workforce.Abovitz said last week that Magic Leap signed a t … | Continue reading
Airbnb is planning to lay off 1,900 employees, or roughly a quarter of its total work force, CEO Brian Chesky told employees Tuesday, as the coronavirus pandemic takes a brutal toll on the travel business.Revenue this year is expected to be less than half what it was in 2019, Che … | Continue reading