A new consolidation wave in retail is brewing: a rollup of some of the two million merchants that sell on Amazon’s platform.

Small private equity firms and other investors have begun circling small businesses that sell on Amazon, looking to buy up and combine the most attractive, several brokers told The Information. Most investors are focused on merchants with at least a half-million ...

Mutual funds that invest in private tech companies are surprisingly good at predicting what a tech company will be worth when it goes public, an analysis of recent IPOs shows. The finding undercuts criticism leveled at mutual funds by tech executives, who have said the estimates bear little relation to the value of their companies.

A review of 18 tech companies that went public in the last ...

Salesforce COO Keith Block is as effusive as any sales executive when discussing Salesforce’s “amazing” culture or the potential of digital technology to reinvent businesses. But when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence, Mr. Block is much more restrained. AI has significant promise, he says, but Salesforce is still in learning mode.

In an interview with The ...

Lyft thought it had the perfect match last year to explore how its ride-hailing service could help commuters. The company spent months working on an ambitious project with the largest public transit agency in Los Angeles, which would use a $1.3 million federal grant to test subsidizing shared Lyft Line trips to and from public transit stations.

But the partnership, aimed at getting more people ...

More than 40% of subscribers say they would be willing to pay for access to Google, if it meant that the company would no longer rely on users’ personal information to sell advertising, results of The Information’s latest survey show.

Subscribers showed far less interest in paying for other services, including YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. Around 17% of survey respondents said ...

In some ways, it was a fabulous week for women. An overwhelmingly female team of journalists at the New York Times were jointly awarded a Pulitzer Prize for exposing serial harassers like Harvey Weinstein. A team at the Washington Post, again dominated by women, won another Pulitzer for their investigation into Roy Moore.

But it was also a very crummy week for women. In the same paper that ...

Uber’s agreement last week to acquire Jump, an electric bike-sharing service, brought new legitimacy to a business that had been viewed by some as a novelty. But the high-profile deal also has exposed concerns about whether motorized bikes and scooters can live up to heightened expectations. Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who is still a board member, privately has told people the deal, ...

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 arrangement was the London-based artificial intelligence startup DeepMind, which Google had acquired a year earlier. ...

Intel’s long-failing foray into wearables and augmented reality is officially dead.

The chip giant’s new devices group will shut down, according to people familiar with the situation. The division, formed in 2013, made fitness trackers and smart glasses. Despite an investment of several hundred million dollars by Intel, including through acquisitions of other companies, the group ...

Venture capitalist Bob Ackerman doesn’t want to compete for funding deals. Instead, the founder of VC firm AllegisCyber is taking a new approach. He looks for gaps in the cybersecurity market and creates companies to fill them.

Mr. Ackerman co-founded a company two years ago called DataTribe, which looks for problems it believes aren’t being solved in cybersecurity or data science. ...

Online-only video networks like Cheddar and TYT Network have raised tens of millions of dollars in venture capital money on the premise that online video viewing will skyrocket. Now comes the hard part: figuring out how to make money.

Both startups have been generating revenue from advertising—Cheddar reported $11 million in sponsorship revenue last year—as well as from areas like ...

Security giant McAfee has held talks to acquire security startup Endgame, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. A deal would help McAfee expand its technology to protect computers and other devices on corporate networks from cybersecurity threats.

The talks were taking place as recently as two weeks ago, said one of the people familiar with the discussions, though it ...

Netflix, one of Amazon Web Services’ biggest customers, is expanding its use of Google Cloud, AWS’s biggest rival, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. The move, which hasn’t previously been reported, could portend a shift in the balance of power in the cloud computing market.

Netflix is using Google Cloud for several functions, including the service’s ...

Uber became the giant of ride hailing in part by capturing markets around the world. But now Didi Chuxing of China is challenging that dominance, pumping money into a variety of Uber rivals or directly entering markets ranging from Brazil to sub-Saharan Africa.

The Information put together a graphic mapping the countries in which Uber and Didi operate, where Uber has substantial equity stakes ...

As Amazon and Apple race to get consumers to buy smart devices that do everything from unlock a door to turn on lights, the companies are pursuing a second line of attack: installing the devices in homes while they are under construction. On this front, Amazon appears to have an edge.

A division of Shea Homes that builds retirement communities in Northern California, for instance, is installing ...

Data privacy took center stage at this week’s Facebook hearings. But as lawmakers grilled Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on what data it tracks and what data it “sells,” another important question emerged.

Zuckerberg said in very clear terms that he was responsible for the content on Facebook. The days of pretending to be a “dumb pipe” are over. Good. Now we have ...

GoPro’s stock has hurtled downhill this year, not unlike one of the thrill-seeking mountain bikers who put on its wearable cameras before taking the plunge. Shares are down 36% in 2018, cutting its market capitalization to roughly $700 million. GoPro investors now have to hope the company will get acquired to see any lift in the price.

In a sale, GoPro could conceivably fetch $1 billion, ...