Private investors have put a lot of faith in Wish becoming the online version of dollar stores, betting on huge growth for the ecommerce site and rewarding it with a valuation of about $8.5 billion. One possible hitch in those plans is that Wish’s new customers stop shopping at the site in fewer and fewer numbers within a few months of their first visits, according to new data.

On ...

Uber has been spending between $125 million and $200 million a quarter on its self-driving car unit over the past 18 months, The Information has learned, equivalent to between 15% and 30% of the company’s quarterly losses. The previously undisclosed spending highlights the financial burden that self-driving car development has imposed on Uber and why CEO Dara Khosrowshahi is under ...

Chinese tech giant Tencent became one of the world’s biggest videogame makers thanks to its 2011 acquisition of U.S. game studio Riot Games, maker of blockbuster “League of Legends.” But relations between the two companies have often resembled a war game, forcing Tencent to cut costly deals to keep Riot happy.

New details uncovered by The Information put a spotlight on how the ...

The battle to win over viewers online may be reaching new levels of intensity. Comcast’s NBCUniversal is considering the launch of a streaming service that would pay people to watch it.

The tentative name for the service is Watch Back and it would feature episodes of TV shows and web series from NBCUniversal’s own TV networks—like NBC, USA and Bravo—as well as those from ...

The latest entrant in the overcrowded field of online news is a 37-year-old onetime investment banker from Japan, Yusuke Umeda, co-CEO of a financial data firm called Uzabase. What he lacks in name recognition, though, he makes up in ambition.

Last month Uzabase completed the purchase of Quartz, the business-oriented news site founded by the former owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, for $75 ...

A few years ago, GoPro was grappling with an exasperating problem: Unknown sellers were offering stolen GoPro cameras on Amazon.com at a discount.

While the stolen items accounted for only a small percentage of GoPro’s total sales, the discounting created a domino effect as competitors tried to match the low price. Amazon would first cut its own price, then retailers like Best Buy and ...

Airbnb’s regulatory roller-coaster ride has taken new twists as the company enters its second decade. When the home rental site sent employees updates on its talks with local governments in June, it heralded positive momentum with politicians in two of its “toughest markets,” Barcelona and Berlin. It decried a “problematic” bill passed by the Pennsylvania House ...

Amazon and Google both tout voice shopping—the ability to make purchases and check on the status of orders with verbal commands—as significant features of their smart speakers. Some forecasts call for annual voice shopping sales to reach $40 billion in just a few years.

But it appears that only a small fraction of smart speaker owners use them to shop, and the few who do try it ...

In 2015, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was under pressure. His beloved product, the food delivery service that was supposed to prove Uber could be more than a ride-hailing company, was struggling. To offer fast delivery, the company was buying a few kinds of prepared meals ahead of time and waiting for people to order them. Demand was inconsistent and difficult to forecast. Managers, led by ...

The two German automobile executives who founded Byton, a Chinese electric car startup, are confident that they can build a reliable vehicle. But they worry that manufacturing alone won’t make their company a success.

That’s why Byton also wants a piece of China’s $30 billion ride-hailing market. The company is in talks with Didi Chuxing and other ride-hailing companies about ...

Google is developing a news-aggregation app for use in China that will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, part of a plan to re-enter the world’s largest internet market in the near future, according to three people familiar with the project.

Google has been working on the app since last year and had been meeting with Chinese regulators to discuss the project, the ...

Two new names have landed on the list of executives Intel is considering to become its CEO—Anand Chandrasekher, a former Intel and Qualcomm executive, and Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s current president—a person briefed on the chip giant’s search said.

Intel is still in the early stages of its hunt for a replacement for former CEO Brian Krzanich, who unexpectedly resigned ...

Capital One Financial Corp. is in the process of moving more than 40,000 employees from Microsoft’s cloud email and productivity applications to Google’s competing products, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement. A Capital One spokeswoman confirmed the deal late Monday.

Capital One is the latest big-name customer to switch from Microsoft’s cloud productivity ...

Endeavor, the talent and sports agency formerly known as WME-IMG, wants to become the ESPN of niche sports.

The company, backed by Silver Lake Partners and SoftBank, already owns bullfighting and martial arts competitions, and runs streaming services for both. But now it is considering how to expand these efforts. Endeavor has held talks with the World Surf League about buying the rights to ...

One of China’s most prominent tech investors, Hillhouse Capital Group, is in talks to acquire Yum China, the country’s biggest fast-food operator, according to three people briefed on the matter.

Yum China, whose shares are listed on the New York Stock Exchange with a market capitalization of nearly $13 billion, operates more than 8,000 KFC and Pizza Hut restaurants across mainland ...

In the run-up to Snap’s second quarter earnings due Aug. 7, several Wall Street analysts have lowered their estimates for what the company has already warned will be a weak quarter. The after-effects of Snap’s troubled app redesign earlier this year hurt user growth, which is expected to be weak in the three months ended June 30.

But there is one bright spot in Snap’s business ...

For more than a year, the U.S. has been negotiating with China to let Hollywood film studios expand their business in China. The U.S. made some progress late last year when, The Information has learned, Chinese officials tentatively agreed to an increase in the number of major Hollywood films that could be released annually to 44 from 34. But on other more important requests, like increasing ...

Tom Gruber, one of the original Siri cofounders, has left Apple, where he was recently the head of Siri’s Advanced Development group, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. Apple’s head of search, Vipul Ved Prakash, has also left the company.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed both departures. Mr. Gruber is retiring and will be pursuing personal interests in photography ...

Airbnb’s increasing popularity with young Chinese travelers has made the country an important growth driver over the past year. Revenue from Airbnb’s China division is expected to climb by more than half to roughly $130 million this year, two people familiar with the matter said.

While that growth rate is lower than last year’s fiery 70% pace, the total would represent 4% to ...

Instagram, which recently reached a billion users, might have as many as 95 million bots posing as real accounts on its platform, according to a new study conducted for The Information by the research firm Ghost Data.

That tally is somewhat higher than in a similar study the research firm did in 2015. The increase is concerning, experts say, because bots, which are accounts controlled by ...