Apple has cut its spending on Amazon Web Services dramatically over the past year, to around $370 million in 2018 from $775 million in 2017, according to a person with direct knowledge of the figures. The reduction is partly due to Apple’s decision to operate more of its own cloud services, in keeping with the company’s broader philosophy of controlling the technology behind its ...

Intel has laid off several dozen employees in a Silicon Valley research lab focused on autonomous vehicles as it seeks to reduce overlapping efforts inside the company, The Information has learned.

Despite the layoffs, which were confirmed by Intel, the company isn’t backing away from its work on autonomous vehicles. It has begun centralizing more of its activities in the field in ...

Amazon is testing a new program that allows merchants on its marketplace who are victimized by cheap, patent-violating knockoffs to get them removed in a few months for just a few thousand dollars or less—much faster and cheaper than a typical legal process.

The new program, which Amazon has been testing since at least the fall, connects a seller that believes its patent has been ...

A new breed of real-estate focused startups is attracting a sudden flood of venture money.

The group includes Sonder, a travel rental firm which is finalizing a deal to raise more than $200 million from investors such as Fidelity Investments, according to people familiar with the matter. Just days ago Lyric, a short-term rentals manager, announced it had raised $160 million in equity and debt ...

Terry Gou, the billionaire founder of Taiwanese electronics giant Foxconn Technology, lost both his first wife and brother to cancer. The deaths galvanized him to invest in a radiosurgery startup founded by the American neurosurgeon who helped treat his brother.  

Now the startup, Zap Surgical Systems, which recently came out of stealth mode, is seeking $80 million from outside investors ...

Airbnb software engineers were struggling a couple of years ago to keep up with the number of technical glitches that were piling up with the site. At one point, employees halted all work on new features for a week to try to fix bugs in the code. To toast the effort, CEO Brian Chesky drank a cup of liquefied bugs—one for every problem solved—that was brought into the office by a ...

When employees at Lyft log into their computer to look up information about a Lyft customer or driver nowadays, a warning message flashes on their screen with a reminder that their actions are logged and could be audited. Introducing the warning is just one of a series of changes Lyft has made over the past year to better protect customer privacy after someone claiming to be an employee said ...

PAX Labs, the maker of a popular line of devices for vaping cannabis, is close to raising over $400 million in a financing round that values the company at around $1.3 billion, according to two people familiar with the deal.

Initially, the San Francisco-based company had sought to raise $150 million in capital, according to a presentation for investors viewed by The Information, but PAX ...

The cryptocurrency company ConsenSys is trying to raise $200 million from outside investors, according to several people with knowledge of the plans, as the startup looks to chart a new course just months after a widely publicized restructuring that included layoffs of around 13% of its staff.

The pitch might be an uphill battle for the company, which so far has prioritized experimentation over ...

Chinese online retail giant JD.com is working on a substantial round of layoffs that could slash the workforce of some teams by half, according to people briefed on the matter.

In total, JD.com could cut up to 8% of its 150,000-plus workforce, or more than 12,000 jobs, according to investors in the Nasdaq-listed company. While it isn’t clear how the layoffs will be distributed, the cuts ...

In the spring of 2015, Tom Staggs, who had just become Disney’s chief operating officer, held a strategy discussion with his top TV executives about the future of television. Mr. Staggs issued warnings about Disney’s licensing of TV shows to Netflix, worrying that the entertainment giant was selling Netflix “the bullets” to fire at Disney’s hugely profitable cable ...

Uber, which is expected to follow its smaller U.S. rival Lyft to the public market in the next month or so, could get a valuation of $110 billion based on where Lyft is now trading. But valuing Uber will be tougher than figuring out Lyft. Uber is a bigger, more global company with a fast-growing hot-food delivery business and a costly self-driving car development effort.

Even Uber’s ...

Lyft threatened Morgan Stanley with legal action earlier this week, demanding in a letter the investment bank stop marketing a short-selling product that the ride-hailing firm believed was disrupting trading in its stock, according to four people familiar with the situation.

To grow fast in China, apparently, you’ve also got to get big.

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, the viral short video app that has taken the world’s teenagers by storm, has gone on a massive hiring spree in the past year. Its headcount has roughly doubled to 40,000—more than Facebook, which had 35,600 at Dec. 31—as it has diversified beyond its early ...

A joint venture between Qualcomm and the government of a rural Chinese province to make server chips appears to have stalled. And with it, a symbol of China’s push to boost its homegrown industries could instead spotlight the perils of letting bureaucrats pick technology winners.

Chinese government officials showcased Huaxintong Semiconductor, or HXT, as a shining example of how the ...

Huawei’s fight against Samsung and Apple is about to get even fiercer. The Chinese tech giant wants to more than triple its consumer electronics sales to $150 billion in four years, according to an internal speech last week by its founder.   

As Huawei’s other big business of selling infrastructure for wireless networks world-wide is under attack from the U.S. government, ...

Shopify may be the most important e-commerce company the average shopper has never heard of, powering the websites of many e-commerce services and brands like Red Bull, Budweiser and Allbirds. Now Microsoft is considering trying to grab some of the market, a top Microsoft executive says.

Microsoft, which already provides cloud computing services to retailers like Gap and Walmart, sees an ...

For a look at how Amazon could develop its ad business, it’s worth paying attention to what China’s Alibaba is doing.

Alibaba is China’s biggest digital advertising platform, thanks to search ads it sells to merchants promoting their items on its Taobao marketplace. Now, Alibaba is testing new types of ads that are designed to appear among recommended items in Taobao’s ...