Smart observers have stopped thinking about Chinese tech firms as copycats. Microsoft executive Qi Lu, who oversees Microsoft Office and Skype, recently said he thinks WeChat-maker Tencent is the best product company in the world, not just China.

And it won’t be long before Chinese firms’ back-end services are as advanced as those of their American counterparts. Chinese Internet ...

Next year will mark the 15th anniversary of the AOL-Time Warner merger, a deal infamous for destroying shareholder value.

But 15 years is also a long time and enough for many of the lessons from the debacle to be overwhelmed by a genuine belief that this time will be different. And as it becomes more likely that some tech company will shack up with some media company, my bet is that Yahoo will ...

After years of keeping their heads firmly planted in the sand, in 2015, media executives are likely to respond more forcefully to the growth of the digital streaming market, fueled by new data clarifying just how big that market is.

Until now, a lack of precise information on how viewership habits are changing has forced TV executives to dance in the dark somewhat, crossing their fingers as ...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to develop a consumer business in China. In 2015, we’ll learn more about how he might do so.

For political reasons, the core Facebook service has been blocked by the Chinese government for the past six years or so, and that doesn’t seem likely to end in the near term.

But current and former Facebook employees and others who have advised the ...

For years, open-source software was a backwater in venture investing because of the belief that it’s hard to make money from free code. Red Hat, the North Carolina-based firm that sells support contracts to companies like IBM for server software, is an oft-cited success story. Yet its entire $12.8 billion market capitalization pales in comparison to even a single year’s profits at ...

It is common to talk about the ways that technology is disrupting governments, and everything else for that matter. But there is one timely topic that illustrates how technology could help governments more efficiently capture value for themselves.

Specifically, taxi medallions, which give their owners the right to operate taxicabs.

Taking New York City as an example, the market price for a ...

Technology has been revolutionizing how sports teams evaluate their players and make decisions in crucial situations. But 2015 will be the year that hardware takes center stage in the battle for the wallets of NBA owners and their customers. Tech giants like Apple, Samsung and Microsoft will vie for their share of the pie.

Why the NBA? Yes, Major League Baseball’s affinity for stats has ...

A few months ago I predicted a few Next Big Things based on rumblings from industry insiders. With the new year approaching, I thought it was time for another batch.

Mobile Maps 2.0: Mobile maps have been the killer app of the smartphone era, proving why it’s useful to have a computer in your pocket. Now, I think we’re entering a second phase of customized mobile ...

Ad tech has had a rough year, with a range of public stocks getting hammered. But the emergence of more efficient business models now appears to be helping some companies stand out, creating a split in the market.

Companies that have long competed for individual contracts to help advertisers with campaigns, like Millennial Media, Tremor, YuMe and Rocket Fuel, are struggling in part because of ...

There’s a spending spree under way among the country’s wireless juggernauts for valuable spectrum.

But can the bidders—the biggest of which are thought to be AT&T and Verizon—grow revenues enough to justify these investments? The total value of winning bids has reached $44.3 billion, according to the Federal Communications Commission, far higher than initially ...

For the well-connected in Silicon Valley, there is no shortage of ways to participate in the private tech company land rush.

There’s also no shortage of prognosticating on which companies will remain standing when the funding environment turns.

Justin Fishner-Wolfson, founder of investment firm 137 Ventures, has an interesting perspective on both topics. After working at Founders Fund, ...

Google’s supremacy in mobile ads has slipped. While the online advertising giant still takes in more money from mobile ads than any other company, selling some $15 billion this year by some estimates, its share of mobile graphical and video ads is falling. Rival Facebook has pulled ahead and now captures around three times as much revenue as Google from mobile graphical and video ads in ...

It would be easy to look at investors’ early enthusiasm for the newly public big data darling Hortonworks and conclude that the opportunity to cash in on the much-hyped Hadoop software platform has arrived.

The Palo Alto-based company became the first developer of a commercial version of the open-source data-storage technology to go public when it raised $100 million on Dec. 12. The ...

Last week, I ran through all the digital photos I have taken since 2001 to help with a slideshow for a friend’s wedding. It quickly became apparent how changes in technology, specifically sharing services, have dramatically shifted the types of photos that we take, and therefore changed how we shape the memories they capture.

Since I started actively photographing friends and important ...