The housing bust may have made John Paulson rich and famous, but the global wave of M&A activity in the wireless industry is propelling his portfolio now.

Smart investments in telecoms including Sprint, Clearwire, MetroPCS and Leap Wireless have helped part of his $6.7 billion Merger Fund beat the S&P 500. The fund, which invests in possible takeover targets, has two potential big ...

YouTube’s quest to lure more-lucrative videos and ads is struggling as a leadership change may be afoot.

Recent initiatives such as the launch of new “channels” that YouTube helped fund have had mixed results for advertisers. Prices for premium ad space on the Google video site have been flat or falling this year, according to ad agencies, as supply for video ads has ...

Forget the floating Google showrooms. When it comes to retail, Samsung Electronics is contemplating a bigger plunge.

The South Korean company's U.S. telecom unit recently hired a senior Apple store designer, Tim Gudgel, as it ponders a deeper investment in U.S. retail, according to two people close to the company. Mr. Gudgel specializes in store design and planning. Earlier in his career ...

Google is eyeing energy-use data, again.

The company has been running a trial of Internet-connected home thermostats to help consumers monitor and adjust their energy use, according to two people told about the project. The program has been referred to as EnergySense, according to a document reviewed by The Information. Google has been registering non-employees to be “Trusted ...

A disagreement erupted among the founders of TapIn.tv. Relationships among the four, all old friends, frayed. Work slowed.

The Y Combinator-backed startup knew who to call. Not Paul Graham, the celebrated thinker behind Silicon Valley’s best-known incubator, nor any of the other YC partners.

Like so many YC startups before them the feuding foursome quietly scheduled time to sit down ...

China has been viewed as a lost cause for Google ever since its services were hurt by government interference and strong domestic competitors.

But Android is proving to be a significant backdoor into China for Google's Web services. The mobile software, which Google makes available to handset makers, powers the vast majority of China’s hundreds of millions of smartphones and ...

Venture capitalists investing in Bitcoin startups are grabbing a nice slice of Bitcoin too.

Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund and others are pouring tens of millions of dollars into startups that help people buy and sell bitcoins or use the digital currency to make purchases. The investments position the firms to benefit from more people buying bitcoins. But ...

If you’ve found that Apple’s Siri voice search understands your voice a little better than she did two years ago, give some thanks to the geeks who helped her learn.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft and other tech giants are battling to acquire expertise in a once-obscure branch of artificial intelligence that’s improving speech recognition, online-ad targeting and other technologies.

Their main problem: There isn’t enough talent. Only a handful of researchers can call themselves experts in the red-hot field known as “deep learning,” a branch of machine ...

Businesses are only as good as their people, and in the technology and media industries, talent doesn’t often stay put for long.

Clashing cultures, strong personalities and strategy shifts often send big names to the exits (see former Apple executive Scott Forstall and former Microsoft executive Steve Sinofsky in the list below). Even the most senior managers get antsy and start ...

Amid all the buzz about wearable devices, something’s missing: software worth wearing.

I had never met Richard Hagberg, but that didn’t stop him from telling me I was too disorganized.