Technology

  Bloomberg Twitter Inc. is holding informal talks with several potential buyers after receiving interest from Salesforce.com Inc., people familiar with the situation said. Twitter’s board met several weeks ago after hearing from Salesforce, said the people, who asked not to be named because the information isn’t public. Twitter then hired Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Allen & Co. to ...

Bloomberg Google’s cloud services will be used to test blockchain technologies for banks, an area where IBM, Microsoft and Amazon have been courting clients for the past year. Royal Bank of Scotland Group has employed Google servers in a trial of a new blockchain application for clearing and settlement, the consulting firm GFT said Friday in a statement. The company’s ...

  Bloomberg Apple Inc. is pressing ahead with the development of an Echo-like smart-home device based on the Siri voice assistant, according to people familiar with the matter. Started more than two years ago, the project has exited the research and development lab and is now in prototype testing, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing unannounced ...

  Bloomberg As Tesla founder Elon Musk promises to change the world, starting with giant battery factory in the Nevada desert, investors from Toronto to Tokyo are quietly developing the next-generation technologies that may actually get him there. Batteries, especially the lithium-ion variety used in mobile phones and electric cars, are likely to dominate the $44 billion or more spent ...

  Bloomberg For the world’s top tech fund, Facebook Inc. is finally cheap enough to buy. DNB Nordic Technology, the best performing tech fund over the past 10 years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, started buying Facebook shares in July. “For the first time, we think the stock doesn’t look that expensive in relation to the figures they deliver,” ...

  Bloomberg As it firms up plans to upend the auto industry, Apple Inc. is looking toward British carmaker McLaren and San Francisco-based startup Lit Motors for help. Both would give Apple some of the know-how needed to compete head to head against or forge a meaningful partnership with automakers. Yet the two companies exist on opposite ends of the ...

  Bloomberg A teardown of the latest generation iPhone 7 shows that in terms of material costs, the new handset is not a rip off. According to the customary IHS teardown that follows the launch of any digital object of desire, if the cost of the latest iPhone were based purely on its materials plus the labor required to put ...

  Bloomberg Google unleashed its digital assistant for the first time, arriving late to the intensifying race among the largest technology companies to create a more personal and lucrative way for computers to interact with humans. The Google Assistant uses artificial intelligence tools, such as voice recognition and natural-language processing, to answer questions and satisfy other requests delivered verbally and ...

  Bloomberg Instead of hiring a professional photographer for an important marketing job last year, Massimo Portincaso gave the job to computer software. Portincaso, the head of marketing at the Boston Consulting Group, was tasked with overhauling his company’s website. It was a straight-forward assignment, giving the site a fresh look highlighting the business’s capabilities. When the time came to ...

  Relaxnews Spotify CEO Daniel Ek, took to Twitter to announce that the world’s leading music streaming site has topped 40 million paid subscribers — a new record. Spotify now counts more than twice as many paid users as its main rival, Apple Music, which has already signed up 17 million subscribers in just over a year. This new record ...