One of the last members of the original Siri team has left Apple for General Electric, said two people with knowledge of the move.

Darren Haas, 41 years old, quit a few weeks after another former Siri team member, Steve D’Aurora, decamped for GE.

For media companies trying to gain or maintain a spot on Snapchat’s digital magazine section, Discover, the company has made one thing clear: Access doesn’t come cheap.

For example, Snapchat requires some firms with channels on Discover, such as Vox Media and Tastemade, to pay Snapchat a guaranteed minimum amount of money over a specific time period, said several people with ...

There’s a new hot contract up for grabs in the cloud market: Uber.

When Mic internally tested a Facebook’s Messenger “bot” to send out news articles last month, employees didn’t tap and chat with it much. So the Millennial-focused site changed course and will soon release a Messenger bot that sends people photos for a daily caption contest. An early test sent out a picture of Barack Obama reaching out to Beyonce.

Mic’s initial ...

Instagram’s efforts to become a hub for user-generated and professional videos have hit a snag: its lack of a fence.

Instagram doesn’t have so-called “geofencing” capability, allowing it to cordon off the videos posted on the app for viewing only by users in particular countries. That is stopping some sports broadcasters like ESPN, Fox Sports and Sky Sports from posting ...

As this week’s Newfront digital video ad presentations in New York highlight, most news sites have been building up video production in the past couple of years. It’s a way to tap the $70 billion in TV ad dollars some think could switch to digital in the coming years. But as sites are discovering, video is also hugely expensive to produce, making it a risky gamble.

The best example ...

Uber has hired its first vice president of growth marketing, Kellyn Kenny, signaling that it may be stepping up its marketing war against Lyft.

Ms. Kenny, whose appointment was confirmed by the company, was most recently a top “brand strategist” at Capital One, the credit card and financial services firm. Prior to that, she worked on marketing for Microsoft’s retail stores, ...

Reddit’s ad business is beginning to take off, though not as quickly as some at the company had hoped.

The online news aggregator and discussion forum recently projected internally that it would boost revenue to more than $20 million this year, from single-digit millions last year, according to one person with direct knowledge of the company’s business and two people briefed about ...

WhatsApp is planning later this year to offer banks, airlines and other businesses the ability to send one-way messages to customers, people familiar with the plans said. It will be WhatsApp’s first official move to lure businesses onto the messaging app.

WhatsApp has said it would soon start testing business accounts, but it’s now becoming clear how limited the initial service will ...

Facebook’s own apps may be banned in China, but the company has a powerful tool to forge closer ties with large Chinese app publishers: its mobile ad network.

Apps such as China’s Baidu, Cheetah Mobile and APUS have quietly joined the largest sellers in Facebook’s network. Those apps—which range from mobile games like Piano Tiles to tools that help save battery ...

Sundar Pichai has a new plan to stop Google employees from jumping ship to start companies: Create a startup incubator within Google.

The former second-in-command at Reddit who was pushed out of the online news aggregator last year has launched a competing site of his own, with a focus on “healthy, positive communities.”

Dan McComas, who was known to be critical of Reddit’s inflammatory discussion groups related to topics like race or overweight people, is beta testing the new site on an invitation-only ...

Political infighting within Apple’s engineering ranks is holding back the company’s efforts to fix technical problems that have plagued iCloud and iTunes, say people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Two engineering teams working on new internal cloud-computing infrastructure to power Apple’s Web services are in open conflict, the people say. Already, the infighting has ...

Mesosphere, a cloud infrastructure startup popular with developers, will start offering its flagship product for free, according to people briefed about the move. It marks a major shift in the company's business model and offers more proof of the challenges of building a business around open-source software.

Mesosphere will give away the source code for its “Data Center Operating ...

Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs is nearing a big decision point in one of the company’s most ambitious projects: the possible construction of a futuristic district.

Sidewalk chief Dan Doctoroff and his team plan to discuss the secret project, codenamed “Project Sidewalk”, with Alphabet CEO Larry Page in the coming weeks. If Mr. Page gives the green light, they could solicit ...

Earlier this year, The Huffington Post got a polite but pointed request from Twitter: Stop using The Huffington Post’s personalized Snapchat logo as its Twitter profile image, according to a person briefed on the situation.

In response, HuffPo reduced how often it used the logo on Twitter—which makes it easier for people to find the publication on Snapchat by scanning the ...

A member of Apple's elite industrial design team, Danny Coster, is jumping ship, joining GoPro to head up a new hardware design group there.

Verizon has hired digital media executive Chip Canter from NBCUniversal as general manager of its go90 video app, said two people familiar with the situation. Mr. Canter, who started at Verizon in recent weeks, will serve under Verizon’s head of consumer product Brian Angiolet.

He comes to the company at a critical time for the video app and Verizon’s video streaming ambitions. ...

Less than a year ago, leaders at Facebook convened to address a serious problem: people using the social network were posting fewer things about their personal lives for their friends to see, according to confidential company data about several types of content sharing that happen on Facebook, which was viewed by The Information.

Thus began an effort to deal with this long-term threat to ...

At its developer conference in May, Google is expected to talk a lot about its plans for tailoring Android smartphones to virtual reality. But make no mistake: for Google, VR isn’t the ultimate prize—augmented reality is.

Google leaders including CEO Sundar Pichai and Clay Bavor, who heads a newly formed VR unit at Google, have privately said that augmented, or “mixed,” ...