Douglas MacMillan

Google parent Alphabet posted surging profits as advertisers kept swarming to the search giant amid a global debate about internet privacy that threatens to affect its main revenue generator. Alphabet’s earnings also got a multibillion-dollar boost from the company’s stakes in startups including Uber but were tempered by the costliest spending spree in its 14-year history as a public company. Net profit jumped 73% to $9.4 billion in the first quarter, up from $5.4 billion in the same period in 2017, a performance that highlights the firm’s huge lead in the global market for online ads.

As tensions mount between President Donald Trump and his fiercest critics in Silicon Valley, Michael Kratsios has the thorny task of playing peacemaker. Kratsios, one of the White House’s top technology advisers, is developing a high-tech policy agenda that he says will spur innovation in emerging technologies such as drones and artificial intelligence. “We are really working on issues that policy makers have never tackled before,” said Kratsios, the US deputy chief technology officer.

Amazon has apparently agreed to acquire Twitch, a live-streaming service for videogame players, for more than $1 billion.

The acquisition would help Amazon bolster its position in the fast-growing business of online gaming and give it technology to compete with video-streaming rivals Netflix and Google's YouTube.

It didn’t take long for the consolidation buzz to begin at the Allen & Co. conference, a get-together of honchos from the media and technology worlds known as a venue for deal-making. Speculation about mergers that could remake the media landscape was already flying at the entrance to the Sun Valley, Idaho resort.

Discovery Communications CEO David Zaslav could be smack in the middle of a consolidation wave. He predicted that the two big pending marriages in pay-TV distribution -- AT&T’s proposed purchase of DirecTV and Comcast’s proposed merger with Time Warner Cable -- would hang over the discussions and might give content owners like Discovery more reason to consider mergers of their own.

“You’ll probably see some more consolidation on the content side in order to balance that scale,” Zaslav said. “There’s a lot of people asking the question, are they big enough?”

Foursquare Labs said it would begin charging some businesses for access to its database of restaurants, shops and other local venues, as it tries to make money from information it has gathered from user "check-ins" in the five years since its founding.

The New York startup is negotiating with the heaviest users of its data to pay fees or offer services in return, Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Glueck said. Deals will be reached on an ad-hoc basis with each developer and will affect under 1% of the 63,000 companies that use Foursquare's database, said Glueck, a longtime Internet executive who recently joined Foursquare.

The change in policy could jeopardize Foursquare's relationship with outside developers that rely on the service to pull the names and coordinates of local places of interest into their own apps. Popular applications including Pinterest, Twitter's Vine, and Yahoo's Flickr use this service to help users match content they post online to their geographic location. But the data fees could also help Foursquare create a new revenue stream to support its free mobile apps.