Technology

Bloomberg Slack Technologies Inc. is raising about $250 million in a funding round co-led by SoftBank Group Corp., according to people familiar with the matter, as the Japanese investment firm helps drive a new venture capital boom. Investors in the round are expected to value the San Francisco-based company, which sells software for workers to communicate with their colleagues, at ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc.’s investors are salivating over the revenue potential for the company’s chat businesses, Messenger and WhatsApp, after CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he’d like to move “a little faster” to make money from them. The company has warned that sales growth, fueled primarily by mobile advertising, will slow because it can’t keep loading ads into users’ news feeds on ...

Bloomberg China aims to make the artificial intelligence industry a “new, important” driver of economic expansion by 2020, according to a development plan issued by the State Council. Policy makers want to be global leaders, with the AI industry generating more than 400 billion yuan ($59 billion) of output per year by 2025, according to an announcement from the cabinet. ...

Bloomberg A Facebook message pops up on my phone screen. “What’s going on in your world?” It’s from a robot named Woebot, the brainchild of Stanford University psychologist Alison Darcy. Woebot seems to care about me. The app asks me for a list of my strengths, and remembers my response so it can encourage me later. It helps me set ...

Bloomberg Qualcomm Inc., the biggest maker of chips used in mobile phones, forecast steep declines in profit and licensing sales, underscoring its dependence on the royalties that one of its largest customers, Apple Inc., has stopped paying. Sales in the company’s licensing division, which collects fees for use of its mobile technology, will sink as much as 47 percent in ...

Bloomberg Microsoft Corp.’s turnaround plan got back on track in the latest quarter, buoyed by rising sales of internet-based software and services. Profit in the fiscal fourth quarter exceeded analysts’ estimates and adjusted sales rose 9 percent as demand almost doubled for Azure cloud services, which let companies store and run their applications in Microsoft data centers. A tax-rate benefit ...

Bloomberg Facebook Inc. is taking another stab at turning its Oculus Rift virtual reality headset into a mass-market phenomenon. Later this year, the company plans to unveil a cheaper, wireless device that the company is betting will popularize VR the way Apple did the smartphone. Currently VR hardware comes in two flavors: cheap headsets that turn smartphones into virtual reality ...

Bloomberg Investing in the South Korean equity market has taken an interesting turn: look past the Samsung trade. Foreigners were net sellers of Samsung Electronics Co. even as they bought more than $15 billion of stocks in the past 12 months, helping push the MSCI Korea and Kospi indexes to record highs. Instead of piling into the tech giant, they ...

Bloomberg Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. forecast quarterly revenue that trailed estimates, dashing hopes that Apple Inc.’s iPhone will help the world’s largest contract chipmaker pull out of a smartphone industry slump and avert the impact of a strong currency. The Taiwanese maker of the iPhone’s processors forecast third-quarter sales of $8.12 billion to $8.22 billion, short of the $8.6 billion ...

Bloomberg Later this year, Apple Inc. will put augmented reality software in as many as a billion mobile devices. Alphabet Inc.’s Google beat Apple by three years in releasing AR tools, but its features are on very few phones and haven’t gained wide acceptance. By contrast, Apple can easily pair its software and devices, an advantage that will help it ...