Business

Disney this week announced it would acquire Maker Studios, a provider of short-form videos, for at least $500 million -- a number that could go up if Maker meets performance targets. Maker's videos account for more than 5.5 billion monthly views on YouTube -- it has 380 million subscribers. Among it...

Apple and Comcast reportedly are discussing a streaming-TV service that will go through an Apple set-top box. Apple apparently wants the service to be treated as a managed service, meaning it will run on cabling separate from that used for public Internet access. "I seriously doubt Comcast will agre...

Although they previously came to an arrangement regarding stronger broadband service delivery, Netflix and Comcast last week sparred over the issue of Net neutrality in a public forum. Net neutrality -- or "open Internet" -- is the concept that all Internet traffic should be treated equally by Inter...

Alibaba is putting some skin in the mobile-messaging game with a $215 million investment in Tango. Mobile messaging apps are hot. Facebook recently scooped up WhatsApp for $19 billion, and Japanese e-commerce titan Rakuten recently acquired Viber for $900 million. Tango is a cross-platform app -- An...

Google and Viacom have settled a long-running copyright suit, after a federal judge twice threw out the case. "Google and Viacom today jointly announced the resolution of the Viacom vs. YouTube copyright litigation," the companies said in a brief joint statement. "This settlement reflects the growin...

Alibaba, which controls 80 percent of the e-commerce in China, is going public -- but not in its native land. Alibaba Group on Sunday announced its decision to begin the process of an initial public offering in the United States, saying the move would make it a more global company and enhance its tr...

In a move that has added fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace. One of the company's three cofounders and his wife had persistently intimidated her, an...

Carl Icahn's latest move in a campaign to compel eBay to sell its PayPal division is to take on its CEO John Donahoe. The company on Monday rejected Icahn's nominees to the eBay board -- employees Daniel Ninivaggi and Jonathan Christodoro -- on the grounds that they were unqualified. The board urged...

Surfing the Internet last year was a dangerous proposition. On average, 200 samples of malicious software were collected every minute by McAfee Labs, the company reported Monday in its threat report for the Q4 2013. All kinds of Internet nastiness increased last year -- from ransomware and suspiciou...

The drama surrounding Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, has intensified. The company on Sunday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States -- less than two weeks after taking a similar action in Tokyo, where it's headquartered. It apparently made this move to freeze a laws...

It is hard to figure out which is growing at a faster pace -- movement to the cloud or cybercrime. Cybercrime is following the data to the cloud, according to reports, to find and steal cloud data of hotel records, credit card information, and maybe even corporate secrets and the client files of law...

The consumer privacy backlash stirred up by Facebook's recent deal to purchase WhatsApp for $19 billion is now in full swing. The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy jointly filed a complaint about the deal with the FTC. Following the announcement of the agreem...

Workers at a factory in China are on strike after rejecting compensation plans offered as a result of IBM's $2.3 billion deal to sell its low-end server business to Lenovo. More than 1,000 workers brought production to a halt Monday at IBM's International Systems Technology Company server-making fa...

What is going on with Sprint Softbank? What will the company look like when it finally emerges from its cocoon? Who else will it merge with? Where will it be based? There has been quite a bit of transformational work going on. Sprint and Softbank won U.S. government approval after months of vigorous...

Zite has traded hands again, three years after CNN bought it for $20 million. Flipboard now is acquiring the service, CNN reported, initially pegging the new sale price at $60 million. It later backed away from that figure, calling it "inaccurate." The transaction is a multi-stage deal in which CNN ...