I’ve Fallen Out of Love With Technology

And when I moved to the Bay Area about six years ago as a technology journalist, I was struck by the feeling that this was the only remaining American industry not experiencing an existential crisis. Tech folks tend to be optimistic about what they do and the future in general, and that feeling was contagious.

The past versus the future was a key theme of this year’s Sohn London conference, an annual get-together for the biggest names in the global hedge-fund industry. Money managers’ investment calls ranged from shorting traditional media companies such as ProSiebenSat.1 Media SE to backing a maker of …

Three decades ago, a historian wrote six laws to explain society’s unease with the power and pervasiveness of technology. Though based on historical examples taken from the Cold War, the laws read as a cheat sheet for explaining our era of Facebook, Google, the iPhone and FOMO. You’ve probably …

Investors abruptly dumped technology and internet stocks Wednesday, a sign of vulnerability in a sector that has enjoyed a steep rise this year. The S&P 500 techsector shed 2.6%, posting its third-biggest one-day decline of the year. Facebook Inc. dropped 4%, Apple Inc. fell 2.1% and chip maker Nvidia …

While not usually a liability, one problem for technology stocks right now is that they don’t pay that much. Among sectors, the 18.5 percent effective tax rate enjoyed by the group is the third-lowest among U.S. large caps, according to S&P Global data. And that means less potential bounty should Republican …

Police also use it to request data from Alibaba for their own investigations, these people said, tapping into the trove of information the tech giant collects through its e-commerce and financial-payment networks. In one case, the police wanted to find out who had posted content related to terrorism, said a …

Earphones are seen on a tablet screen with a Spotify logo on it, in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, February 20, 2014. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/File Photo – S1BETDCCQSAB Reuters. (Reuters) – The music group of China’s Tencent Holdings Ltd and Sweden’s Spotify AB are in talks to swap stakes up to 10 …

“As always, Amazon is making it easier for companies to get started using new technologies,” said Mikhail Naumov, co-founder of DigitalGenius, a London-based customer service startup that uses AI. “Now they are making it easier for companies of all sizes to leverage powerful ML tools in their business.”.

Not long ago, tech was the coolest industry. Everybody wanted to work at Google, Facebook and Apple. But over the past year the mood has shifted. Some now believe tech is like the tobacco industry — corporations that make billions of dollars peddling a destructive addiction. Some believe it is like the …

The billionaire founders of Facebook Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Netflix Inc. and Google owner Alphabet Inc. saw $7.6 billion wiped from their fortunes Wednesday as the Nasdaq 100 suffered its worst drop in three months. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg fell the most, dropping $2.9 billion on the Bloomberg …