Walt Disney Co.'s $500 million buyout of Maker Studios has been described as many things: An endorsement of the YouTube economy, an admission by a media giant that it can’t build digital properties in-house, and a seminal moment for Los Angeles’ startup scene.

What it isn’t, though, is the acquisition of a great standalone business, or a profitable one. ...

The online storage business is one of the hottest niches in Silicon Valley, with upstart Box unveiling its IPO plans this week and rivals Dropbox and Evernote boasting multibillion-dollar private market valuations.

Just don’t call it the online storage business.

The startups bristle at the label, insisting they’re “productivity” platforms or, in the case of Evernote, ...

Uber, which has purchased tens of thousands of iPhones for its drivers, has been talking to Samsung and other Android hardware manufacturers about equipping drivers with Android phones, according to people involved in the discussions.

It’s unclear whether the discussions are part of a broader strategic shift by the red-hot transportation dispatch company away from the iPhone and ...

Behind the glitzy ad campaigns and massive product development efforts that dominate the consumer smartphone business, Apple and Google are quietly squaring off in a battle for BlackBerry’s old turf.

Google is now embarking on a major effort to make its Android software more attractive to businesses and blunt Apple’s growing success among corporate buyers, according to one person involved in ...

The race for smartphone real estate among gaming apps is emerging as a major driver of mobile ad spending, helping Facebook in particular boost revenue but also raising questions as to whether the growth is sustainable.

Advertisers spent about $18 billion on mobile internet ads in 2013, according to a new report from eMarketer, and that figure is supposed to hit almost $32 ...

The years-long dance between Apple and cable operators marches on, as Comcast and Apple continue to discuss enabling the cable company's subscribers to watch TV through an Apple set-top box instead of a Comcast one, people familiar with the talks said.

While no deal has been reached, teams at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif. headquarters are working full-steam on the new device that would ...

Ebay has rebuffed demands from investor Carl Icahn that it sell or at least partially spin out its PayPal division. In doing so, the e-commerce giant has painted Mr. Icahn as a self-serving vulture who doesn’t understand or care about innovation and the technology business.

Yet the case for a PayPal spinoff is much stronger than the company acknowledges. Indeed, the experience of a ...

This week I traveled to London and learned a new language. Not Briticisms like “bollocks,” but a new lexicon of digital ad industry terms that were front and center at the Guardian newspaper’s two-day Changing Media Summit.

Old ways to measure and charge for online ads, like click-through rate and how many times an ad is loaded on a page, are certainly out of favor. Instead, ...

Jordan Shlain could be described as the house doctor of the San Francisco tech scene, treating many prominent executives and investors through his exclusive concierge medical practice, San Francisco-based Private Medical. But the ebullient 46-year-old internist, long a sought-after speaker and advisor on health policy issues, has also built a parallel career as an Internet entrepreneur ...

It’s the economy, stupid.

Anyone following today’s technology boom should keep Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign mantra in mind. Low interest rates are drastically inflating the value of companies both public and private, according to a growing chorus of investors and analysts, and an improvement in the global economy will almost certainly drive rates higher and bring ...

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba’s decision to list its shares in the U.S. doesn’t mean it’s planning a major push into the U.S. online retail business—at least not right away.

At the annual Morgan Stanley technology conference in San Francisco two weeks ago, Alibaba executive vice chairman Joe Tsai said the company had no plans to go head-to-head with Amazon.com by ...

YouTube is going younger.

Online video companies that had once hoped to build robust ad-supported entertainment services on YouTube are now scrambling to find additional revenue sources in the face of stagnant ad rates and a glut of inventory.

Subscription services, microtransactions, and new approaches to mobile video are all gaining attention as professional content producers struggle to supplement the underwhelming ...

When I told my teenage son that I was considering joining a startup news operation called The Information, his initial response was that it sounded “kind of sketch.”

I was taken aback, and asked him why he felt that way. “Well if it’s like New West,” he said, referring to the media company I founded in 2004, “it’ll be a nightmare.” And then I ...

During much of last year, Motorola’s top executives had one message for Google CEO Larry Page: If he didn’t go “all in” on Motorola, the Google-owned handset maker would barely make a dent against industry leaders Samsung Electronics and Apple.

In monthly operating meetings with Mr. Page at Motorola’s Silicon Valley office, numerous Motorola executives complained about Google’s lack of support ...

Salesforce.com’s many acquisitions and the change-the-business-world gospel preached by chief executive Marc Benioff mask a deterioration in the company's much-touted revenue growth, a worrying development for a bellwether firm whose share price has risen steadily for years.

Doubts about Salesforce’s financial performance have been percolating for some time ...

As Amazon prepares to launch its long-awaited smartphone, opportunities in non-U.S. markets loom large.

Amazon executives last spring held talks with possible hardware partners that included detailed discussions on strategies for China and European markets, according to a confidential document produced by a potential partner and two people who were involved in discussions with the Seattle ...

Microsoft’s Xbox video game business is a rare success story for the lumbering software giant—which makes it all the more surprising that the company has largely failed to profit directly from the $18 billion personal computer gaming market.

PC games like Battlefield 4, League of Legends and StarCraft 2 are played mostly on Windows PCs, and many hard-core gamers still prefer the PC ...