Continuing to resemble two entirely different companies, Facebook Inc. today reported upside earnings results that stand in stark contrast to a continuing stream of bad news on the regulatory, political and privacy fronts. The social networking giant reported a third-quarter net profit of $6.1 billion, or $2.12 a share, up 20% from a year ago. ...

Three months after revving up investors with better-than-expected earnings, Alphabet Inc. today reversed course with a third-quarter report that left investors less impressed this time. The parent of Google LLC earned a profit of $7.07 billion, or $10.12 a share, down 23% from a year ago on a 20% revenue rise, to $40.5 billion, or 22% if ...

Microsoft Corp. today won the Department of Defense’s hotly contested $10 billion, 10-year cloud computing contract, beating out frontrunner Amazon Web Services Inc. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing unit had been the presumed favorite for the plum contract, known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure or JEDI, for well over a year partly thanks to its ...

Don Valentine, the longtime founding venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital who led investments in Cisco Systems Inc., Oracle Corp., Electronic Arts Inc. and many other iconic Silicon Valley firms, died today at age 87 at his home in Woodside, California. As Sequoia itself said in a post today on its site, “Remembering Don Valentine,” he’s ...

Updated: The cloud no longer is lifting Amazon.com Inc.’s business into the sky, at least not from investors’ point of view. The retail, media and cloud giant today said revenue at its Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud computing unit continued to slow but still rose 35%, to $9 billion, in its third quarter, maintaining its ...

In case it wasn’t already apparent, Amazon Web Services Inc. is serious about mounting a full-blown public music festival in Las Vegas in early December. Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing operation this morning announced a fleshed-out roster of artists set to perform at its Intersect Music Festival, which will be held Dec. 6 and 7 at ...

Updated: Amazon Web Services Inc.’s growth has fallen to its lowest point since it began reporting separate results, up 37% from a year ago, but Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud computing unit still drove most of the second-quarter profits reported today by the retail and tech giant. Meantime, Google LLC owner Alphabet Inc. today reported better-than-expected earnings ...

Updated: Beating back weeks of negative publicity all the way into today, Facebook Inc. reported better-than-expected second quarter results on strong sales of mobile ads on its core app and Instagram.  The social networking giant has been buffeted by a seemingly endless series of bad news, challenges and gaffes — most recently the imposition early today ...

In a twist on the annual South by Southwest event that added a large tech component to its music festival, Amazon Web Services Inc. plans to hold a full-blown music festival at its annual cloud conference in December. Tweeted quietly late last week from a new Twitter account, the Intersect festival is billed as “a new festival ...

Machine learning and deep learning have produced plenty of breakthroughs in recent years, from more capable speech and image recognition to self-driving cars. But one big problem with these artificial-intelligence techniques that attempt to mimic how the brain works is that the neural networks they employ don’t have the common-sense knowledge and context that people ...