In late August, roughly 100 government regulators filed into a closed-door, blinds-drawn meeting on the first floor of a commercial office building in DC. Behind a faux-wood folding table sat three lawyers and an entrepreneur. The quartet help run something of an oxymoron: a non-profit corporation that organizes a top-down, businesslike pitch for a decentralized currency that nobody runs.

For ...

Software engineers are high-value, high-priced hires for young technology companies. Many upstarts, therefore, struggle with how many software engineers they should hire and how quickly.

Startups are known for having a high percentage of software engineers—and scrambling to compete for the high-caliber ones. The percentage often declines over time ...

Activist investors have been taking on big names like Apple and Yahoo. But some prominent agitators are turning their attention to smaller fare.

Daniel Loeb has built a sizable stake in Tibco Software, a Palo Alto-based company that makes a range of products, including software that lets retailers target shoppers. He and others eyeing Tibco see a mid-size company at the heart of a big ...

Google is upping the ante in the race to deliver Internet to the developing world. In the process, it is vying with Facebook, Microsoft and others to strike partnerships with local telecom companies to try to bring new populations and revenue online.

In a previously undisclosed move, Google has discussed plans to launch a wireless Internet service in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, as soon as ...

The IPO market is signaling that the technology boom has more runway.

Nest Labs’s decision to sell to Google rather than build its business alone should be a cautionary tale for the technology industry’s flood of hardware hopefuls.

Of course, the $3.2 billion acquisition price is a generous amount for the three-year-old startup, which makes thermostats and smoke detectors that can be controlled through mobile phones. A deal this size is likely ...

Google’s $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest Labs ends one curious chapter for the smart thermostat maker. But it starts what’s likely to be a more wild ride.

Since December, rumors have been flying around Silicon Valley that Nest was up for sale. Apple was frequently bandied about as an acquirer, likely because Nest co-founders Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers were key executives ...

Investors want to fund startups with big ideas, the potential for astronomical returns and, now more than ever, good relationships with Washington D.C.

Technology companies have intersected with regulators in the past. But most high-profile run-ins dealt with antitrust and privacy concerns, issues that rarely affect smaller companies.

Now, venture capital firms and strategic investors are ...

A tiny startup that streams live TV on the Web may soon have its day before the U.S. Supreme Court. And the world’s largest technology companies are paying attention.

Silicon Valley is lining up to support the controversial startup, Aereo, in part because technology companies want to possibly launch Aereo-like services themselves. These companies also fear that a ruling against ...

New data-crunching startups are turning recruiting software engineers into something akin to the Major League Baseball draft.

Just as wealthy teams look for an edge by tracking data on players across the globe, technology companies are going to great lengths to identify top talent by tapping large databases of engineers. Some relatively new startups analyze programmers to assess their ...

Technology companies are racing to hire more mobile engineers–and training their own when they come up short.

Top engineers are relatively scarce in the technology industry. But mobile programming experts have become particularly difficult to recruit, companies say, just as consumers are gravitating to mobile services. These programmers have experience building iPhone apps in Objective-C ...

Profitability became the holy grail for tech investors after the last dotcom collapse, when people got burned for piling into companies that didn’t make a dime, and in some cases didn’t even generate revenue.

Analysts proclaimed the sector in the midst of a healthy recovery in the mid-2000s partly because people favored the stocks of companies that actually made money.

There’s been a parade of new smart TVs, toys and washing machines at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. But this year’s most anticipated gadget is still MIA.

That’s Apple’s iWatch. When Apple plans to start selling the device remains unclear. But a look behind the scenes shows a few apparent setbacks for the project. None are necessarily ...

Technology companies are taking sides in a big legal debate taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court: Can software be patented?

Behind closed doors, Microsoft recently considered unconventional tactics to shrink the competitive gap between its Windows Phone software and Google’s Android, which powers the vast majority of smartphones in the world.

In one scenario, a smartphone buyer would be able to walk into a wireless carrier store, find a phone they like and only then choose whether they want Windows Phone or ...

If it turns out that Bitcoin is a flash in the pan and the value of the cryptocurrency collapses, what would that look like? Who would get back some of the money they invested in Bitcoin and who would be left with nothing? What are the most likely events that would send the price spiraling downward?

We posed these questions to academics and Bitcoin buyers, many of whom firmly believe that ...

2013 lasted just 27 days at The Information, which we launched in December. But what a 27 days it was. We broke exclusive news about robots, phones and set-top boxes and told you why the developments mattered. We profiled under-the-radar investors, startup therapists and coaches rarely written about. We probed trends in startup financing and dug up exclusive ...

For years, Android handset makers have been trying to reduce their dependence on Google’s mobile software. So far, they get a failing grade.

After years of leaning on Android to power almost all their smartphones, manufacturers such as Samsung Electronics, Sony and HTC are dipping their toes into alternatives from Microsoft, Mozilla and others. The phone makers’ fear is that being ...