Walmart is trying to catch up with Amazon in speedy shipping. New data show the Bentonville, Arkansas–based retailer has a long way to go.In January 2017, Walmart pledged to offer free two-day shipping on more than 2 million products—including everything from coffee to diapers. A … | Continue reading
Apple is in the process of acquiring a well-known but struggling self-driving shuttle firm, Drive.ai, for its engineering talent in order boost Apple’s own development of a self-driving vehicle system, according to two people briefed about the situation. The planned deal, describ … | Continue reading
Facebook plans to cede control of its forthcoming cryptocurrency to outside backers, a move meant to encourage trust in the digital payment system and reassure financial regulators, The Information has learned.In recent months, the social network has courted dozens of financial i … | Continue reading
Johny Srouji, the Apple executive in charge of building chips for the company’s devices, was fed up with Intel.It was early 2017 and Apple was preparing a new line of iPhones to be released the next year, but the Intel modem for the devices, known as the 7560, wasn’t working prop … | Continue reading
Cisco Systems held preliminary discussions recently with HashiCorp about an acquisition of the startup whose software manages applications running across multiple cloud providers, according to three people with direct knowledge of the talks. The talks, which took place over a mon … | Continue reading
Eight years ago, a group of Irish entrepreneurs led by an ambitious leader, Eoghan McCabe, relocated their software startup, Intercom, from Dublin to San Francisco, aiming to make a splash on tech’s biggest stage. They succeeded, raising more than $240 million in funding from ped … | Continue reading
Eight years ago, a group of Irish entrepreneurs led by an ambitious leader, Eoghan McCabe, relocated their software startup, Intercom, from Dublin to San Francisco, aiming to make a splash on tech’s biggest stage. They succeeded, raising more than $240 million in funding from ped … | Continue reading
Google has struggled for years to build an online shopping business that can seriously compete with Amazon. Now, as Google’s prized advertising business faces a growing threat from Amazon, the search giant is planning new steps to bolster its shopping presence. Google is testing … | Continue reading
After shaking up the mobile industry over a decade ago, Apple is looking for a new act. With the iPhone growth machine sputtering, it is beefing up teams devoted to healthcare and internet services, including a foray into video streaming expected this year.The chart accompanying … | Continue reading
In the decade since its founding, Uber has raised $14 billion in equity funding, one of the biggest sums in private tech history. And Uber's investors are likely to see equally history-making returns from its IPO.Uber is expected to go public next week at a valuation of more than … | Continue reading
Apple has cut its spending on Amazon Web Services dramatically over the past year, to around $370 million in 2018 from $775 million in 2017, according to a person with direct knowledge of the figures. The reduction is partly due to Apple’s decision to operate more of its own clou … | Continue reading
Amazon is testing a new program that allows merchants on its marketplace who are victimized by cheap, patent-violating knockoffs to get them removed in a few months for just a few thousand dollars or less—much faster and cheaper than a typical legal process.The new program, which … | Continue reading
A joint venture between Qualcomm and the government of a rural Chinese province to make server chips will wind down by the end of the month, according to 10 employees at the venture.Executives at Huaxintong Semiconductor, or HXT, which was formed in 2016 with the Guizhou provinci … | Continue reading
An index of diversity in the venture capital industry. | Continue reading
Finance is fundamentally an exercise in pricing risk, and pricing risk is in large part a function of the cost of information.Given this reality, it is somewhat surprising that in the last few decades the internet has not more fundamentally revolutionized how individuals and busi … | Continue reading
Tired of bad traffic and have money to spare? A growing cadre of venture capital–backed startups are launching services to ferry people on short-distance trips by small planes and helicopters. Companies including Blade, Skyryse and BlackBird believe there is a growing market for … | Continue reading
The message to a roomful of corporate attorneys representing a who’s who of tech companies was clear: The once-sleepy U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco has awoken. New U.S. Attorney David Anderson, who recently took over the office responsible for federal criminal prosecuti … | Continue reading
“Car tried to turn left into oncoming traffic, driver had to avoid collision,” wrote a customer of Waymo, the unit of Alphabet, in early March after taking a ride in one of the company’s experimental self-driving taxis in suburban Phoenix. The customer was referring to the human … | Continue reading
Happy Wednesday. Last week’s piece on legislation that Rep. Darren Soto’s office is developing, which would exempt two classes of crypto assets from being securities, drew a lot of feedback. Some applauded the effort, but others reserved judgment for later. Joe Grundfest, a forme … | Continue reading
Payments startup Stripe has raised an additional $100 million from Tiger Global Management, boosting the firm’s valuation to more than $22 billion, according to a person close to the company.The fundraising is a follow-on round to a $245 million round led by Tiger Global last yea … | Continue reading
First, Amazon asked homeowners to let delivery drivers drop packages inside their homes while they were gone. Now it has a plan to get them to shop more by locking up orders outside their houses—and tossing in free Alexa devices.Amazon has been quietly working with apartment buil … | Continue reading
Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving car unit was the first to launch a commercial robo-taxi service, picking up and dropping off paying passengers. And its technology is considered by people in the industry to be more advanced. But it has a smaller workforce than either of its two best … | Continue reading
A startup building an advanced artificial intelligence-enabled security camera, called Lighthouse, is shutting down. Founded in 2015, Lighthouse had raised $20 million, including from Android creator Andy Rubin’s group, Playground Global, according to PitchBook. The company was n … | Continue reading
Below is Robbie Miller’s March 13 email to Eric Meyhofer, Jon Thomason and several others, including two in-house lawyers. | Continue reading
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wants advice, he occasionally turns to a kindred figure: Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist. Recently, Mr. Gates suggested to Mr. Zuckerberg that Facebook consider hiring someone with a profile like that of Brad S … | Continue reading
Five days before an Uber self-driving car prototype killed a pedestrian in Arizona last March, a manager in Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit warned the group’s top executives that the software powering the company’s prototype robotaxis was dangerous. He also warned that the human b … | Continue reading
Last year, when Uber was grappling with a series of controversies that led to the ouster of founder Travis Kalanick, the president of China’s ride-hailing behemoth Didi Chuxing, Jean Liu, was being touted as an executive role model. What a difference a year makes. Even as a new C … | Continue reading
Apple has quietly acquired a startup, Silk Labs, that specializes in making artificial intelligence software lightweight enough to fit onto consumer hardware like cameras, another sign of its growing ambitions around AI and smart home devices. The acquisition, which hasn’t been r … | Continue reading
Companies that manage open-source software have a message for cloud computing providers like Amazon: pay up, share your code or stop using our technology for free. The tension stems from the fact that cloud providers like Amazon Web Services are increasingly relying on open-sourc … | Continue reading
Google's cloud computing chief Diane Greene is leaving the company amid growing tensions with other senior Google executives and after the company failed to make meaningful progress in one of its most important new businesses. Although Google has struggled to gain market share fr … | Continue reading
Google's cloud computing chief Diane Greene is leaving the company amid growing tensions with other senior Google executives and after the company failed to make meaningful progress in one of its most important new businesses. Although Google has struggled to gain market share fr … | Continue reading
As Elon Musk works to prove that he can make Tesla profitable and his Autopilot feature safe, it’s worth understanding the difference in how Tesla is developing self-driving car technology versus other companies.These differences relate in part to a potential advantage that Tesla … | Continue reading
Apple is planning to launch its upcoming TV subscription service in more than 100 countries, three people familiar with the company’s plans told The Information. That would quickly make Apple a competitor with both Amazon and Netflix, both of whose video services are widely avail … | Continue reading
Uber’s next experiment has been hiding in Chicago. Calling itself “Pronto,” an “on-demand restaurant and hospitality staffing startup,” Uber has been advertising on LinkedIn for Windy City applicants for a new business that matches part-time workers with various businesses, accor … | Continue reading
Five years ago, Apple was forced to temporarily close what was then its only retail store in Shenzhen, China, after it was besieged by lines of hundreds of customers waiting to swap broken iPhones for new devices, according to two former Apple employees who were briefed about the … | Continue reading
Microsoft’s efforts to build a futuristic computer based on quantum mechanics are getting a boost from former engineers of the chipmaker Qualcomm.Over the past few months, Microsoft has aggressively hired chip engineers from a struggling Qualcomm division devoted to building chip … | Continue reading
In its early days, Amazon developed a reputation for shunning profits as it built market share in its retail business. More recently, Amazon critics have painted an image of the retailer as willing to indefinitely bleed red ink to drive rivals out of business. That perception sho … | Continue reading
Facebook most likely will name Adam Mosseri as the new leader of Instagram, following the announcement on Monday night that the photo-sharing service’s two founders are leaving the company, according to people familiar with the matter. The departure of the two founders, Instagram … | Continue reading
Airbnb has another top job to fill: engineering leader. Mike Curtis, the company’s vice president of engineering for more than five years, will step down this year, he told the company earlier this month. The company will search for a chief technology officer as his replacement, … | Continue reading
For the past year, venture firm Social Capital has been decimated by high-level departures and investor complaints about the firm’s founder, Chamath Palihapitiya, and his unpredictable and unilateral decision making.Now, in an exclusive interview in which Mr. Palihapitiya questio … | Continue reading
When Google unveiled its plan to form an Alphabet holding company in 2015, it was pitched as a way to ensure Google’s blue-sky bets in areas like self-driving cars and health care could flourish under independent leadership. One business that hoped to capitalize on the new arrang … | Continue reading
Executives at Google Cloud have said they are willing to meet large customers “where they are”—marketing-speak for their openness to extending Google cloud services into the private data centers of customers. As an example, Google in July announced a version of its Kubernetes sof … | Continue reading
Any thinking person should realize that we face major challenges when it comes to the future of free speech and the internet. Disinformation and coordinated manipulation are a real, serious and unrelenting reality. Rightly and wrongly the claims of bias abound, and the broad lack … | Continue reading
It is easy for Apple employees to tell when they have lost the attention of Eddy Cue, the leader of the company’s sprawling internet initiatives—from its music and video businesses to its maps service.During meetings, Mr. Cue is sometimes known to fall silent, shut his eyes and t … | Continue reading
China’s internet giant Alibaba is putting on hold its plans to expand its cloud business in the U.S., people familiar with the matter said, after its initial efforts to take on Amazon Web Services and other big players didn’t live up to its expectations. The company also feared t … | Continue reading
CHANDLER, Ariz.—Alphabet’s Waymo unit is a worldwide leader in autonomous vehicle development for suburban environments. It has said it would launch a driverless robo-taxi service to suburban Phoenix residents this year. Yet its self-driving minivan prototypes have trouble crossi … | Continue reading
CHANDLER, Ariz.—Alphabet’s Waymo unit is a worldwide leader in autonomous vehicle development for suburban environments. It has said it would launch a driverless robo-taxi service to suburban Phoenix residents this year. Yet its self-driving minivan prototypes have trouble crossi … | Continue reading
CHANDLER, Ariz.—Alphabet’s Waymo unit is a worldwide leader in autonomous vehicle development for suburban environments. It has said it would launch a driverless robo-taxi service to suburban Phoenix residents this year. Yet its self-driving minivan prototypes have trouble crossi … | Continue reading