Michael Liedtke

Tennis star Serena Williams has 39 Grand Slam titles, four Olympic medals, major endorsement deals and her own line of clothing and accessories. Now she is embarking on a new mission: She says wants to help tech companies diversify their workforces and solve one of the industry’s most vexing problems. Williams, 35, will get her chance as she joins a Silicon Valley boardroom for the first time. Online poll-taking service SurveyMonkey announced Williams’ appointment to its board on Wednesday, along with Intuit CEO Brad Smith. “I feel like diversity is something I speak to,” Williams said in an interview...

Uber is vowing to head down a new road and become a more humane company following a wave of ugly developments, including allegations of rampant sexual harassment and a video of a profanity-laced confrontation between the ride-hailing company’s CEO and a disgruntled driver. The pledge came in a contrite conference call held Tuesday with some of the reporters who have been covering the incidents that have painted an unflattering portrait of the company, threatening to trigger a backlash among the riders and drivers who have propelled its rapid rise. Even as it acknowledges past mistakes, Uber says the fallout...

Google’s search engine highlighted an inaccurate story claiming that President-elect Donald Trump won the popular vote in last week’s election, the latest example of bogus information spread by the internet’s gatekeepers. The incorrect results were shown Monday in a two-day-old story posted on the pro-Trump “70 News” site. A link to the site appeared at or near the top of Google’s influential rankings of relevant news stories for searches on the final election results. Google acknowledged the problem, although as of mid-afternoon Monday, the link to “70 News” remained prominent in its results. Although Google rarely removes content from its search results, the company is taking steps...

Marissa Mayer’s nearly four-year attempt to turn around Yahoo needs a turnaround itself, repeating a pattern of futility that has hobbled one of the Internet’s best-known companies for the past decade. Like her predecessors as Yahoo CEO, Mayer has been unable to snap the company out of a financial funk despite spending billions on acquisitions and new projects. Yahoo’s stock has sunk by 35 percent so far this year as investors’ frustration with the follies have mounted, spurring calls for her replacement. “This is like an ’emperor has no clothes’ situation,” says Eric Jackson, a Yahoo shareholder and managing director of the New York hedge...

[Amazon’s Echo, a digital assistant that can be set up in a home or office to listen for various requests, such as for a song, a sports score, the weather, or even a book to be read aloud, is shown, Wednesday, July 29, 2015 in New York. The $180 cylindrical device is the latest advance in voice-recognition technology that’s enabling machines to record snippets of conversation that are analyzed and stored by companies promising to make their customers’ lives better. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)] By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, AP Technology Writer SAN FRANCISCO — Like a lot of teenagers, Aanya Nigam...