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 back-up drivers in the vehicles weren’t properly trained to do their jobs or were not ...

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 Smith, the president and chief legal officer at Microsoft, a lawyer who has become an influential ambassador to ...

Investors in Lime were surprised this spring that the startup already had spent much of the $70 million it had raised only a few months earlier. The company was trying to shift quickly from running a bike-share business to one focused on electric scooters, and needed to buy thousands of the vehicles, according to people familiar with the matter. It lost an average of $6 million a month the ...

Qualcomm is laying off 269 employees at its offices in Raleigh, N.C. and San Diego, mostly in its faltering data center unit, according to documents reviewed by The Information. Only around 50 employees remain in the data center unit, down from nearly 1,000 employees earlier this year, said one person with knowledge of the situation.

The layoffs follow earlier rounds of staff cutbacks in the ...

The continuing stream of revelations about Facebook’s business practices are taking a severe toll on the company’s reputation within the tech industry, The Information’s latest subscriber survey shows. Just over three-fourths of respondents said they are less inclined to work at Facebook following this year’s developments, while 69% said they are less likely to do ...

Google is secretly exploring ways to use Tencent as a proxy for Google Cloud in China, where the U.S. company doesn’t operate its own cloud-computing business, people familiar with the matter said.

If the project moves forward, corporate customers using Google Cloud’s software tools and services outside China—for tasks ranging from database management to analytics to ...

China’s ByteDance, the world’s most valuable startup worth $75 billion, is in talks to raise the equivalent of more than $1 billion for its first venture fund to invest in artificial intelligence and media content, people familiar with the matter said.   

The Beijing-based company, whose popular video app TikTok is growing in the U.S. and other overseas markets, seeks to ...

Facebook has long stressed it has never sold the personal data of its users, but a new cache of internal emails between Facebook executives reveals they considered charging developers for access to it.

The emails—released Wednesday by a British member of Parliament overseeing an international committee examining Facebook—provided a rare window into deliberations inside Facebook ...

On the 20th floor of a nondescript office building in China’s southern boomtown of Shenzhen, employees from small businesses such as electronic-component makers can often be seen in a colorful bright office checking out big TV screens displaying Google Search, Gmail and YouTube—which are otherwise blocked in China.

They are in one of more than two dozen Google Export Experience ...

A few years ago, Rethink Robotics was hailed as a revolutionary company that would change the course of industrial robots. Featured on the cover of Time magazine in 2015, the company raised $150 million in financing from backers such as Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs at a valuation that reached $291 million.

Its relatively low-cost machines were designed to work closely with people, unlike heavy ...

The Information turns five today, and I’d like to take this moment to thank you those who have been part of our community and to express some thoughts about the years ahead.

I am very proud of the impact we have had in just five short years.

When Sundar Pichai woke up November 1 to prepare for an appearance at a conference in New York, Google’s CEO, an engineer by training, had likely hoped to tout the leaps in artificial intelligence and cloud computing that Google had made in his three years as the company’s leader.  

But any hope of delivering that message disappeared quickly. That same day, Google employees ...

When historians look back at the 21st century, they will describe us as a global society deeply weakened by incomplete measurement and false precision in how we view our economy.

This challenge feels pervasive.

The U.S. economy, on paper, looks pretty good over the last few years. Yet it feels like there are huge “off balance sheet” costs not being properly measured or accounted ...

On the day before Thanksgiving, Bustle CEO Bryan Goldberg got an urgent call from his counterpart at millennial news site Mic, Chris Altchek. Mic was in dire financial straits. Months of effort to find a buyer had fallen apart. Mr. Goldberg, who was friendly with Mr. Altchek, had resisted getting involved previously because he didn’t want to participate in a bidding war. But the war was ...