Growth is falling short of internal targets at Didi Chuxing, the world’s biggest ride-hailing company. That has added urgency to its efforts to generate new revenue by diversifying into car insurance, maintenance, car sales and consumer loans.

Didi, valued at $56 billion last December, has scaled back this year’s internal targets for year-on-year growth in rides in China to ...

Between 2007 and 2010, I lived in New York and worked on a startup called drop.io, whose goal was to make it easy to privately share files and content across platforms. Given what I was working on in that period, I spent a lot of time talking about privacy.

Jon Hamilton, a longtime construction worker, got a job last year leading a small crew building a custom home near San Antonio, Texas. His employer, Katerra, was one of the most well-funded startups in Silicon Valley. The tech-oriented construction company has raised more than $1 billion from major investors including SoftBank, Foxconn and DFJ.

But Mr. Hamilton could soon tell something was ...

China tech IPOs, of companies such as Xiaomi and Pinduoduo, have struggled this year. That puts the spotlight on the next big U.S. public offering from China, which is likely to be Tencent Music Entertainment Group, China’s answer to Spotify. Its valuation has soared on private tech markets lately, suggesting that investors anticipate its IPO could prove as successful as Spotify’s ...

A few years ago, when Snap was a fast-growing, hot commodity venerated by venture capitalists, some would occasionally ask whether it would end up like Twitter—a niche platform with dedicated users but without the broad scale of, say, Facebook.

Private investors have put a lot of faith in Wish becoming the online version of dollar stores, betting on huge growth for the ecommerce site and rewarding it with a valuation of about $8.5 billion. One possible hitch in those plans is that Wish’s new customers stop shopping at the site in fewer and fewer numbers within a few months of their first visits, according to new data.

On ...

I’m back in New York after a trip to San Francisco, where I attended the launch party for both this newsletter and Sam Lessin’s first picture book, “B Is for Bitcoin.” I’ll be keeping a copy on my desk as a trusty reference, replete with information on all the ABCs I need to know, from absolute algorithms to zero-knowledge proofs.

Thanks to everyone who came to the ...

Uber has been spending between $125 million and $200 million a quarter on its self-driving car unit over the past 18 months, The Information has learned, equivalent to between 15% and 30% of the company’s quarterly losses. The previously undisclosed spending highlights the financial burden that self-driving car development has imposed on Uber and why CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is under ...

Last month at a chip conference in San Francisco, the United States Department of Defense’s investment arm for emerging technologies kicked off a plan to make $1.5 billion in grants over the next five years to university researchers and companies, part of a plan aimed at boosting advanced chip production in the U.S.

Of the $75 million in initial grants by the Defense Advanced Research ...

As the old guard of enterprise software such as Microsoft and Oracle reinvented themselves for the cloud market in recent years, SAP took its time. Companies used its software for handling sensitive areas like supply chain management and finance, which made them reluctant to put it into the public cloud. But the German firm, the third largest enterprise software firm with a market ...

The introduction of autonomous features on cars has at its core a laudable goal: saving lives. But so far, there is a lack of independent data to judge whether the technology is working.

The federal agency charged with reducing injuries and fatalities on the road has taken steps to try to change that, encouraging states to include information on automated-driving technology in traffic-collision ...

Chinese tech giant Tencent became one of the world’s biggest videogame makers thanks to its 2011 acquisition of U.S. game studio Riot Games, maker of blockbuster “League of Legends.” But relations between the two companies have often resembled a war game, forcing Tencent to cut costly deals to keep Riot happy.

New details uncovered by The Information put a spotlight on how the ...

MoviePass’ effort to make a Netflix-like subscription service out of movie theater tickets has bled the company of cash in recent months. But while its future may be in doubt, the movie-ticket subscription concept it pioneered looks like it is here to stay.

Several theater chains, including AMC and Cinemark, in recent months have introduced subscriptions that give you access to multiple ...

In the U.S., Netflix and Amazon are locked in a heated battle for customers. In India, they have more than 40 other rivals to contend with. Companies ranging from Sony-owned Liv to local firms like Reliance Entertainment’s BigFlix are competing for online viewers. And that number is likely to grow, according to Datta Dave, the American-born co-founder of Tulsea, an Indian talent agency ...

Greetings!

I am thrilled to announce the first round of speakers for our fourth San Francisco Subscriber Summit. For those of you new to our community, this is our biggest event of the year in which I interview newsmakers we think our subscribers need to know better. We also host unique breakout sessions with entrepreneurs, investors and tech executives. I spend most of the year preparing for ...

The battle to win over viewers online may be reaching new levels of intensity. Comcast’s NBCUniversal is considering the launch of a streaming service that would pay people to watch it.

The tentative name for the service is Watch Back and it would feature episodes of TV shows and web series from NBCUniversal’s own TV networks—like NBC, USA and Bravo—as well as those from ...

The latest entrant in the overcrowded field of online news is a 37-year-old onetime investment banker from Japan, Yusuke Umeda, co-CEO of a financial data firm called Uzabase. What he lacks in name recognition, though, he makes up in ambition.

Last month Uzabase completed the purchase of Quartz, the business-oriented news site founded by the former owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, for $75 ...

Elon Musk stunned investors on Tuesday by tweeting that he might take Tesla private, using SpaceX, his private space flight company, as a model for how to treat shareholders. If he succeeds, he may set a precedent for other public company CEOs who want the benefits of public ownership without the hindrance of public scrutiny.

It’s not well understood just how much SpaceX has created a new ...