Alice Truong

One of the reasons that workers love Slack, the rapidly growing chat platform for companies, is its quirkiness. The startup, which is valued by investors at $1.2 billion, uses its loading screen to display silly, sometimes inspirational messages (“Sometimes you eat the bear and sometimes the bear, well, he eats you”). Its resident robot, Slackbot, functions as a helpful, sometimes snarky, assistant.

Once again, a troubled company is hoping a woman can help turn it around. After three years of slumping sales, Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC has named Cher Wang, currently its chairwoman, as CEO, replacing Peter Chou.

The US government almost sued Google in 2012 over its anticompetitive tactics, including allegations it boosted the search rankings of its own properties over that of competitors. Ultimately, the Federal Trade Commission decided to close its investigation after the company—which attracts 64% of all search traffic in the US, according to comScore—agreed to alter some of its practices.

Slack, the rapidly-growing enterprise communication platform, has finally rolled out a desktop app for Windows, which will delight about 30% of the company’s more than 500,000 users—who, until now, had to rely on Slack on a browser.

People might think they’re getting better at creating passwords, but often-used tricks like adding the numeral 1 (fun fact: it’s the most common number at the end of passwords) can easily be bested by malicious bots and brute-force attacks.

Last June, Facebook poached PayPal president David Marcus to oversee messaging products. The move seemed highly unusual given Marcus’s background in payments, but the pieces of the puzzle are coming together now. Facebook is adding a feature that lets friends send money to one another over Messenger.

Building a company is never easy. To do so under political turmoil following the toppling of a dictator—well, that’s a far bigger challenge than your typical Silicon Valley woes, like raising money, finding office space, or hiring engineers.

The new MacBook is an incredible feat of engineering. To build it, Apple essentially started with its sleekest laptop model to date, the MacBook Air (1.7 cm at its thickest part), and dreamed up ways to make it thinner. It removed the fan from the logic board, designed thinner yet larger keys, developed sheets of batteries that can be layered on top of each other, and replaced almost every existing port on the computer with just one minuscule USB-C port, a new industry standard.

Display advertisements on websites—the kind that stand apart from the content and invite you to click through for more information—are widely seen as ineffective and annoying. That perception is confirmed in a new study that found native ads, which blend into a website’s design and sometimes even offer related content, more engaging than traditional display ads.

Apple broke from its characteristic silence in the run-up to unveiling the Apple Watch. The Cupertino, California company has spent the last six months teasing consumers with its new smart watch, revealing just enough to whet consumers’ appetite. Today, Apple finally answered the three top questions on people’s minds.

Twitter chief financial officer Anthony Noto recently revealed that the social network is thinking about creating a new feature called the Twitter Daily Edition to curate and share the best tweets of each day.

In Silicon Valley, where there’s a constant battle for talent, companies big and small are welcoming employees with open arms—and maybe also a bottle of booze.

Afraid of being left in the dust, smartwatch companies are hoping to outshine the Apple Watch by making some news of their own. Distracting anyone’s attention from the Apple juggernaut is pretty much impossible, but rivals have certainly upped their game.

When Google first debuted its mobile wallet in 2011, the company tried to sell consumers on its vision for a future free or credit cards. Given how glued people were to their mobile devices, it seemed logical that they would ditch plastic and choose instead to pay by tapping their phones.

To convince consumers to make purchases with their phones, Apple has touted the state-of-the-art security features of its mobile payment system Apple Pay. Those include tokenization (which provides merchants with one-time use tokens instead of credit card numbers), storage of sensitive information on the device’s secure element, fingerprint verification, and encrypted data transfer.

Only a small fraction of consumers have used Apple Pay, but a new retail report suggests Apple is helping move the needle forward on mobile payments.

In preparation of the Apple Watch hitting stores next month, the Cupertino, California company is training its retail employees on the art of the upgrade.

An email address can reveal more about a person than one might think. Last week, a startup called Emailage raised $3.8 million in a series A round to build out its technology for determining risk based solely on email addresses.

A lot happens behind the scenes at Wikipedia. As the seventh-most popular site in the world, editing wars on the crowdsourced encyclopedia can ultimately shape what internet users know about certain topics. The number of revisions of Wikipedia pages can also reveal a lot about cultural trends.

Shortly after the launch of Apple Pay, a number of retailers, including Walmart, Rite Aid, and CVS, blocked Apple’s tap-to-pay technology from their stores. Instead, these retailers banded together to place bets on an in-house mobile payments system called CurrentC. That network was developed in partnership with Boston-based mobile wallet technology startup Paydiant.

The White House turns out to be a great stepping stone for a cushy career in tech.

Samsung’s not sitting idly by while Apple and Google duke it out in mobile payments. The world’s largest smartphone maker today debuted at Mobile World Congress its latest flagship phones, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, complete with fingerprint reader and a new mobile payments platform called Samsung Pay.

After 15 years in Mountain View, Google is giving its mothership a makeover. The company submitted plans today to the Mountain View City Council that reveal a slick, futuristic campus with glass walls, open space, and flexible structures that can adapt to the company’s changing needs.

Apple is all but certain to reveal more details about its upcoming smartwatch—price, ship date, launch apps—at a glitzy event on March 9. In the meanwhile, CEO Tim Cook is throwing us a bone.