The online ad industry is making little progress in addressing the problem of non-viewable ads, raising new questions about the value of programmatic advertising that relies on trading and re-packaging of low-quality online ad inventory.

A study released late last month by the video advertising firm BrightRoll shows that an average of 65 percent of video ads across thousands of sites ...

I spent this week in New York for interviews, meetings and the DLD conference, where I interviewed two veteran journalists (Wired’s Steven Levy and New York Times’s John Markoff) and one disruptor disrupting them (Buzzfeed’s Jonah Peretti). And seemingly everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about the same thing: the vibrancy of the “New York Tech Scene.”

Peer-to-peer lending was nearly left for dead in 2008 when federal regulators came down hard on the two biggest players, Prosper and Lending Club. But a major shift in strategy has revived the fortunes of the two companies: all they had to do was abandon the peer-to-peer model of individuals lending to other individuals and instead become places where people get loans from hedge funds and ...

Social media powerhouses Facebook and Twitter, long considered to be on a possible collision course, showed in quick succession this week how their strategies are diverging.

Twitter, which reported better-than-expected financial results but modest user growth this week, is increasingly focused on major news events and media exposure to monetize a comparatively niche user base. Facebook, ...

A few years ago, a venture-backed ad tech company was sold for about three times the amount that investors had put into the company—but employees got a rude surprise. The VCs who held preferred stock got $6.80 per share, while employees who held common stock got about $1.40, according to documents related to the sale. One employee recounted how that added up to just a few thousand ...

Carlota Perez, a London School of Economics professor who focuses on technology and economic development, has many admirers in the tech industry. But she disagrees with the popular Silicon Valley belief that we’re at the beginning of a new golden age of prosperity driven by technological innovation, though she understands why that belief persists.

Luminaries including Marc Andreessen and Fred ...

Airbnb, the home sharing juggernaut, is running into regulatory trouble in some key markets and may soon face a day of reckoning on a crucial issue: whether to go along with efforts to make information about its customers public in order to help local authorities enforce rental laws.

The company, which recently raised a reported $450 million in new funds and is valued at $10 billion, has found ...

Google is gearing up for a major effort to spur development of premium Android smartphones and re-assert control over the Android ecosystem as it seeks to better compete with the Apple iPhone and blunt the growing power of Samsung, the leading maker of Android phones.

The expensive effort involves dumping the four-year-old Google Nexus phone brand in favor of a new program called Silver, ...

Booming demand for up-to-date, high-definition pictures of the earth’s surface has set off an unusual competitive battle among upstarts racing to deploy traditional satellites, constellations of small satellites, drones and manned aircraft to produce the best aerial images at the lowest cost.

Tech giants including Google and Facebook are circling the sector for ...

I try not to dwell too much on the inner workings of journalism in these columns. But there’s a big shift happening in the media business that no one is talking about, and I believe it has big implications for journalists and companies alike.

Companies are going on the PR offensive, disputing stories and firing off feisty comments in reaction to unflattering news. In recent months, ...

It’s almost every week now that another private company takes late-stage funding from hedge funds, mutual funds, private equity firms and lenders, even amidst a jittery stock market. On Wednesday Pure Storage announced a $225 million investment led by asset managers T. Rowe Price, Tiger Global and Wellington Management. Tiger recently led an $80 million investment in Quora. Coatue ...

HBO’s deal to license some of its prestigious back catalog to Amazon, announced Wednesday, was widely seen as a blow to Netflix. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has coveted HBO’s content for as long as his company has been in business of streaming TV shows on-demand. And it was never in the running for this particular deal.

Calling Netflix a loser however—as the stock market ...

Recent revelations about the Heartbleed bug were deja vu for security researcher Dan Kaminsky, who has spent 15 years finding flaws for companies like Cisco, Avaya and Microsoft. Back in 2008 he discovered a massive vulnerability in the DNS protocol, the mechanism that matches URLs with the right IP addresses and underpins the Internet. He worked with a team of researchers to secretly ...

An internal company survey last year asked Pinterest employees a simple question: Should the fast-growing social network make money on advertising or e-commerce?

While the results of the survey are not known, the company is now making a big push to generate revenue from advertising. It’s rolling out “promoted pins,” which allow companies to pay to have their products appear ...

At Apple, it’s the time of year when software engineers race to finalize the features that will make it into the latest version of the iPhone software. That means it’s crunch time for Kim Vorrath.

Ms. Vorrath, who has been at Apple since 1987, has hardly any public profile. But internally, she’s well-known as the occasionally short-tempered field marshall who rules on ...

After several years of development, Microsoft is finally pulling back the wraps on its plans for original, television-style programming for the Xbox console. But the latest entry in the now-crowded field of Internet companies buying TV shows is meeting resistance from Hollywood producers because its licensing terms cut off the opportunity to profit from lucrative overseas sales.

Producers say ...

In the early 1990s, a young Finnish programmer named Julf Helsingius set out to prove a point: Anonymity, he believed, was fundamental to the then-nascent Internet, and we’d better get used to it. He built an “anonymous remailer,” known as anon.penet.fi, that allowed people to send emails or post messages to Usenet groups—the social networks of the pre-Web ...

Is it time for Google to pay up for payments?

For years, we’ve been watching the Internet giant experiment with technology for people to pay online and in physical stores. The latter is through its mobile service Google Wallet. Google isn’t interested so much in payments as revenue stream, people who have worked on those efforts have told me. But instead it’s looking for ...

The third installment of our Free Agents series, which highlights notable people who are between full-time roles, features an exceptionally diverse group: the man who brought advertising to Apple; a CFO who recently left a troubled Fortune 100 tech company; an HR specialist who is surprisingly candid about her profession; and one of the rare individuals who has spent more than a decade at both ...