Walking into the crowded hotel conference room, Andrew Batey looked like any other tech guy attending ETHDenver, an annual cryptocurrency conference. A venture capital investor based in Florida, Mr. Batey wore a black sweatshirt emblazoned with the logos of more than a dozen crypto companies, with names like LunarCrush and bitSmiley. He had arrived in…
Pinterest recently agreed to pay $34.7 million to settle a lawsuit from an early adviser who claimed she had co-created the platform without compensation. Christine Martinez, 44, who was a friend of Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra, two of Pinterest’s three co-founders, sued the company in 2021 for breach of implied contract, idea theft, unjust…
A Virginia man has been charged with second degree murder after fatally shooting a teenager who was filming a prank for TikTok known as “ding dong ditch” with two friends around 3 a.m. on Saturday, according to court records and local authorities. The Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office responded to a reportof a resident firing shots during…
On a frigid day in early January, as she worked in her office in the Boston suburb of Billerica, Mass., Siyu Huang received a two-word text message. “Spinning wheels,” it said. Attached was a short video clip showing a car on rollers in an indoor testing center. To the untrained eye there was nothing remarkable…
In September 2006, Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, described what made his social network special. “Facebook is about real connections to actual friends,” he wrote in a company post. Two decades later, that description is at the center of a landmark antitrust trial against Mr. Zuckerberg’s social networking empire, now called Meta, and…
Several weeks after a federal appeals court said Apple would have to loosen its grip on its App Store, Tim Cook, the company’s chief executive, and his top lieutenants debated what to do. For more than a decade, Apple had required apps to use the App Store payment system and collected a 30 percent commission…
In recent days, iPhone apps have been changing. The Kindle app now lets people buy books directly from its site. Spotify is offering users free trials. And Patreon, a subscription service, is letting people pay creators more money. The changes are an early look at how a recent court ruling could transform the shopping experience…
For the past three weeks, the Justice Department and Google have questioned more than two dozen witnesses to try to sway a federal judge’s decision over how to address the company’s illegal monopoly in internet search. On Friday, that hearing in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia is expected to conclude. To…
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up, xAI, is in talks to raise new financing that could value it at as much as $120 billion, up from $80 billion little more than a month ago, two people with knowledge of the discussions said. The talks are in the early stages, and xAI’s valuation could rise or fall…
OpenAI said late Wednesday that it hired Fidji Simo, the chief executive of Instacart, to take on a new role running the artificial intelligence company’s business and operations teams. In a blog post, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said he would remain in charge as the head of the company. But Ms. Simo’s appointment as…
