As murmurs about Facebook’s plans to offer payment services grow louder, the company has also been setting its sights in a different direction: lending.

Facebook has been in talks with peer-to-peer lending services, including Lending Club and Prosper, about integrating a way for Facebook users to get loans into the social network, according to three sources familiar with the talks. The ...

After Hewlett-Packard’s big split, the fate of the $51.6-billion-a-year Hewlett-Packard Enterprise will hinge on whether it can make its mark in an emerging battleground in the cloud computing wars: the growing business of private cloud computing.

The best-known clouds today are the massive pools of servers owned and rented out by Amazon, Microsoft and Google. Those are what’s ...

Naval Ravikant, a serial founder and investor, once sued Benchmark and August Capital for misleading employees about the value of Epinions, a company he co-founded. Since then he’s been poking venture capital firms in the eye another way: He’s making it easier for investors outside the typical VC orbit to invest in Silicon Valley companies.

As CEO of AngelList, the Silicon Valley ...

This week’s job cuts at Time Warner’s Turner cable networks division raises the question of whether digital competition is beginning to have the same impact on TV as it’s had on print.

The short answer, most likely, is not yet. Despite clouds on the horizon for both TV advertising and the pay TV market, television remains an immensely lucrative business. Still, the cuts are a ...

Cable television made over-the-air TV redundant. Now, at least one major wireless provider, Verizon Wireless is planning a new kind of over-the-air TV service that runs over cellular networks, with the potential to challenge cable’s hold on the TV industry.

The word “potential,” though, is crucial. Verizon has dropped the broadest of hints about its plans, including ...

As Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, took the stage last Monday to unveil the revamped version of its ad-buying platform Atlas, she announced what is widely considered the first credible threat to Google’s display ad dominance.

But something was missing: major publishers that Facebook ultimately wants to list their ad space through the service—and on this ...

For centuries, technology has been making it easier to make more goods more cheaply, driving up ownership and consumption of everything from TVs to toys. But we’re entering a different era. Technologies that enable us to summon everything from a car to hiking equipment on demand are making access to goods, not the production of them, more efficient. And more efficient access will pose a ...

Ebay and PayPal finally announced their breakup this week, and so the online payments juggernaut will have the chance to chart its own destiny.

And when it does next year, I have some advice: Do something most people in Silicon Valley think is crazy. Become a bank.

Getting an official bank charter (or procuring one by buying a small bank) would mean that PayPal could conduct official banking ...

Before Apple pushed out its iOS 8 update, developers at fitness app RunKeeper faced a tough choice. Unless they changed their app, people would be asked if the app could track their location even when they weren't using it—which could prompt them to opt out.

“It sounds like a confusing and almost nefarious thing,” says Max Freiert, the company’s director of product. ...

Twitter is preparing a push to mend fences with app developers, with the hopes of embedding itself into more mobile apps and collecting deeper data on mobile users.

The company plans to unveil a new app development platform called “Twitter Fabric” that contains tools for developers to help people sign up for their apps more easily, sell ads on them, uncover technical glitches and ...

When Apple rolled out its iTunes movie store in 2006, the online video landscape looked far different than it does today. Netflix was still a DVD-by-mail service in a fierce battle with Blockbuster. Amazon was years away from linking its nascent video product with a Prime membership.

Much has changed in digital video since then—except for Apple. A variety of companies have embraced ...

Currencies are based on consensus.  For a currency to have value, a consensus must form around what it is, who has it and what it is worth relative to other things in the world.

This is the case with currencies like the Dollar or Euro, where the consensus emerges from government fiat, or gold, silver or platinum, where the consensus is rooted in chemistry and tradition. Even ...

Every week, someone in Silicon Valley writes an essay (or rant) questioning the sanity of investors who are pouring money into tech companies at higher and higher valuations.

I have a different question: What about the sanity of entrepreneurs who are raising more money at ever higher valuations?

Sure, a juicy valuation is hard to turn down; all founders want to minimize dilution for ...

Google for years has tweaked its search engine to promote other revenue-generating Google Web services in the search results, much to the dismay of some rival Web companies. Now, there is new evidence Google is following the same playbook with its Android mobile operating system, which has become a key vehicle to distribute its revenue-generating mobile apps on phones.

Confidential documents ...