Facebook Watch, the company’s bid to dethrone YouTube, has had a shaky first year.

In the months after Watch’s launch last August, the number of people who visited the social network’s new section every day to watch shows produced by ABC, A&E Networks, Discovery and other smaller media companies disappointed some show creators. Ads that run in the middle of videos have ...

Movie theater stocks like AMC and Cinemark slumped last spring and haven’t recovered, thanks to a historically bad summer movie season, the rise of streaming services and even dying shopping malls, which have reduced foot traffic. Among those hit by the sell-off was Imax, the company responsible for giant screen movies.

But Imax isn’t a theater chain—it is a theater technology ...

By getting into the electronics accessories market, Matthew Vroom picked one of the most unforgiving businesses in tech, where startup failures abound. Mr. Vroom made life even harder for his company, Henge Docks, by specializing in high-quality docking stations for notebooks made by Apple, whose secrecy about new product designs has forced Henge Docks to play catch-up with its own products.

As ...

Large investors are putting their weight behind bike and scooter startups, setting up what likely will be a years-long, multibillion-dollar fight over the future of urban transportation. (See chart.)

Funding is pouring into scooters and bikes far faster than in the early days of ride hailing. Two leading U.S. scooter startups, Lime and Bird, have raised $467 million and $415 million, ...

The self-driving truck market is getting more congested. Three new startups—including one whose existence hasn’t been disclosed before—are developing autonomous truck-related software. All three were founded by entrepreneurs with ties to Uber, which has seen turmoil in its autonomous vehicle unit.

The companies are seeking to capitalize on the future transformation of a giant ...

DeepMap, founded by former Google mapping whizzes and backed by big-name Silicon Valley investors, is in talks to strengthen its ties to China with up to $60 million in fresh cash from Alibaba, Didi Chuxing and automaker BAIC Group, according to two people with direct knowledge of the fundraising.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company, which makes down-to-the-inch maps tailormade for autonomous ...

In 2013, Barry Silbert asked the board of directors at SecondMarket, a startup he founded that connected buyers and sellers of private company stock, to let him spend $3 million of the company’s cash on buying bitcoin. It had almost nothing to do with the company’s business, and not all of the board was enthusiastic. “I thought it was absolutely crazy. We argued about ...

Flash storage provider Tintri was riding high heading into its initial public offering last spring. Tintri, already a favorite of Hollywood studio Dreamworks, had just landed the biggest customer deal in its history, with Bank of New York Mellon worth “tens of millions” of dollars, according to a former Tintri employee. Tintri’s sales team believed the deal would lead to ...

While Tesla struggles to meet investors’ expectations, its young Chinese counterparts are raising money at soaring valuations on hopes that China’s electric vehicle market will zoom ahead in the coming years.

Xiaopeng Motors, backed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, is in talks to raise $600 million to $700 million from Alibaba and other investors at a valuation close to $4 billion, ...

When Netflix debuted “Stranger Things” in 2016, it was so optimistic about the 1980s-era spooky thriller that it poured $50 million into promoting the show, much of it on Facebook. Yet when it came to the reboot last year of classic sitcom “One Day at a Time,” the marketing team didn’t even create a Facebook page until the show’s second season.

Netflix plans ...

At a developer conference in May, Google CEO Sundar Pichai demonstrated how a cutting-edge, computer-generated voice assistant called Duplex could call up a restaurant or hair salon and make an appointment without the person on the other end ever realizing they were talking with a robot. The technology was as controversial as it was impressive, drawing sharp criticism from people concerned ...

Oath CEO Tim Armstrong has been exploring strategic options for the digital media division, created from the combination of Yahoo and AOL, that could include buying the business out of Verizon, say people familiar with his thinking.

There is no sign Mr. Armstrong and Verizon are currently discussing a buyout, however. Instead, executives at Verizon and Mr. Armstrong for now are focusing on ...

When Karla Gallardo and Shilpa Shah founded their women’s clothing and accessories company Cuyana, they chose not to sell their products on Amazon, one of the top apparel retailers in the U.S. Instead, they are using Instagram, as well as their own website, to drive sales. That strategy, the co-founders said, allows them to control how products are presented to customers from the moment ...

Soon after we invited five teams of journalists to join our Accelerator program last fall, I started to talk to the teams by video conference to see how I could help. I wasn’t sure what I was in for. But within a few phone calls I realized that the group we had been lucky enough to assemble was truly special.

Beniamino from Good Morning Italia had built one of Europe’s fastest ...

In late May, the creators of Bitcoin Gold—a currency that split off from Bitcoin last year—said a hacker had robbed people of as much as $18 million worth of the currency. They suspected the thief used mining hardware—computers that verify crypto transactions in exchange for currency—that was far more powerful than normal, allowing the attacker to amass enough mining ...

One of the hottest PC games in the world—“PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds,” a violent game in which 100 players fight to the death—hasn’t been approved for sale by China’s strict regulators. Yet the game is a bonafide hit in China, where more than a third of its active players reside.

Most Chinese players have gotten their hands on PUBG, as the game is ...