Tech Biz

Travel website owner Priceline will buy restaurant reservation website operator OpenTable for $2.6 billion, aiming to broaden its offerings in an increasingly competitive online travel industry. Priceline’s offer of $103 per share for the owner of OpenTable.com represents a premium of 46 percent to OpenTable’s Thursday close. (Click here to track OpenTable stock.) OpenTable’s shares Continue Reading →

Facebook is going to give advertisers that want to target its users even more ammunition. The social network will start letting advertisers take information about what Facebook’s users do on the site, mix it with data about the stuff they do on other websites and use it to hone their pitch. Facebook calls this “interest-based Continue Reading →

MasterCard, the world’s second-largest debit and credit card company, sees business booming from selling data to retailers, banks and governments on spending patterns found in the payments it processes, a top executive told Reuters. MasterCard, which handles payments for 2 billion cardholders and tens of millions of merchants, uses that information to generate real-time data Continue Reading →

Businesses that once relied exclusively on face-to-face, physical communication are turning to digital technology to make their services more accessible to customers. From small retail storefronts to medical professionals to technology firms that host client operations in the cloud, it’s difficult to find any business not using digital technology to communicate with their audiences. The Continue Reading →

Google on Tuesday confirmed that it has purchased Skybox Imaging, the satellite startup that we reported it was close to acquiring last month. The price is somewhat lower than we had heard it would be: $500 million rather than close to the $1 billion our sources had told us. Once the deal closes, Skybox’s employees Continue Reading →

Two years after launching its local delivery service eBay Now, eBay plans to shut it down, a VentureBeat source claims. Born out of the $75 million acquisition of Milo, eBay’s local team launched eBay Now in 2012 alongside competing same-day services like WunWun and Postmates. The race to conquer local delivery is red-hot — recent Continue Reading →

Amazon later this year plans to launch a marketplace for local services, a broad term that encompasses anything from babysitters to handymen, several people familiar with the matter said. Amazon plans to start in one market to test demand and logistics before rolling it out nationwide, mirroring its approach to its grocery delivery service, Amazon Continue Reading →

Here’s the situation: you’re interested in what’s happening in the lives of a few of your friends, but you’re reluctant to open up Facebook lest you get submerged in the usual tide of branded offers, game requests, and inane updates from people you haven’t seen for several years. Don’t worry! There are ways to check Continue Reading →

You’ve heard this before: live-tweeting can increase your social media engagement, expand your network, build brand awareness and position you as an industry authority. The list goes on. I’ve live-tweeted every conference I’ve attended for the past couple of years. I thought I followed the best practices. I would take a picture of the panel, Continue Reading →

Amazon.com will start managing subscription payments for start-ups and other companies – the latest in a series of quiet moves the e-commerce giant has made into PayPal’s turf over the past year. The service, which launches on Monday, allows the company’s more than 240 million active users to use credit card details stored on Amazon.com Continue Reading →