In the fall of 2014, a little-known Chinese entrepreneur named Zhang Yiming toured Silicon Valley, visiting the offices of Facebook, Tesla and Airbnb. One thing that struck Mr. Zhang, whose startup in Beijing was beginning to gain traction, was China’s growing influence. He met some Facebook and Twitter employees who loved Xiaomi phones, for example. He noticed how Alibaba’s U.S. ...

Prominent figures have left their jobs in tech, media and entertainment in recent months. Tensions in the upper ranks of such companies as Coinbase and Facebook led to some of the departures, while AT&T’s takeover of Time Warner prompted some other executive changes.

The Information’s latest batch of Free Agents—industry leaders who are between jobs—includes the ...

Slack’s listing got a lot of attention for its unusual structure. No underwriters, as is standard in a traditional initial public offering. No weeks on the road pitching the company to investors in hotel meeting rooms. Just let the shares float and see what happens. (As an aside, it seems like the banks were quite involved behind the scenes, but that’s another topic for another ...

In a sign of how Hulu’s programming decisions have shifted since Disney took control of the streaming service, Hulu executives have begun telling outside studios that Disney will likely have partial ownership in most shows Hulu buys, according to multiple studio executives and Hollywood agents.

In recent weeks, Hulu executives have told outside studios that in the future most of ...

Startups looking to capitalize on the growing popularity of gig work are gaining increasing attention from investors. Among them is Jyve, which is focused on the retail sector where it connects workers to stores and brands needing people for tasks such as restocking shelves and setting up displays inside grocery stores. What sets Jyve apart from its rivals is that it pays workers per job ...

The biggest venture capital shareholders in messaging firm Slack stand to make billions of dollars when the company goes public on Thursday. One of the big questions surrounding the listing is how fast the VCs, who as a group own a majority of the stock, will want to lock in those gains by selling their shares.

Unlike a conventional initial public offering, Slack is hitting the public markets ...

Uber has held recent talks to buy Seattle-based Mighty AI, a startup that helps autonomous vehicle developers train their computer vision algorithms to better identify objects on the road, said three people briefed on the discussions.

The potential deal is another sign of a looming shakeout in the self-driving car field, where companies have collectively raised billions of dollars to tackle ...

At the CES trade show in Las Vegas in January, Lime showed off a new model of its electric scooter with thicker tires, color display screens between the handlebars and stronger aluminum to help the vehicles last longer. But months later, the custom-designed scooter, called Gen 3, is having problems of its own. The screens frequently crack or malfunction, and repairing brakes and other parts ...

Inside Facebook, a group has spent the past year developing a cryptocurrency that could have far-reaching implications for the company’s business and the broader digital payments industry if successful. Now the group is finally going public with the details of its plans.

Facebook unveiled the plans early Tuesday when it published an academic whitepaper about the cryptocurrency, called ...

Snap is on the mend. After a year of turmoil, when most of the top management team departed and the stock plunged to as low as $5, things have stabilized. The revolving door of executive departures has halted, at least for the moment. A new senior team, with more women than in the past, is in place, drawn from companies as varied as Amazon, Huffington Post and McDonald’s. And the stock ...

Is it me or are a handful of narratives sucking up a lot of air in tech news at the moment? Online privacy. Deep Fakes. The streaming media wars.

All are incredibly important and worthy of substantial coverage. But I worry that the news media’s obsession with a handful of topics like these is drowning out other developments in technology that will disrupt business in the not-too-distant ...

Panel discussions at The Information’s 2019 autonomous vehicle summit covered a lot of ground. The quality of automated driving software, the challenges of building and maintaining vehicles and other hardware, the role of insurance, and company valuations that are 30% lower than they were 18 months ago were hot topics. What follows is a selection of comments and observations from the ...

The Information is hiring a senior executive to grow our event sponsorship and advertising businesses, reporting directly to our CEO.

Over the last five years, The Information has become essential reading to business professionals across industries who closely follow the technology sector. We have been honored as one of the world's most innovative media companies by Fast Company and as a ...

As companies like WarnerMedia and Apple prepare to market new video services to consumers, they are racing to develop hit shows. But as vital as good programming is, figuring out how to sign up and keep subscribers is just as important.

To do so, media companies are tapping new types of executives with experience in areas like e-commerce and data analytics. They often come from digital ...