Business

Colleen Taylor is based in San Francisco where she is a reporter for TechCrunch TV. Previously she worked for GigaOM, where she reported on startups and Silicon Valley. Earlier, Colleen reported for Mergermarket, an online newswire and subsidiary of the Financial Times focused on M&A. Before that, she was a contributing editor for Electronic News, the semiconductor industry trade newsletter. Colleen... ? Learn More When it comes to mergers and acquisitions in the technology industry, deal quantity has given way to quality — or, at least, to deal size. According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers‘ latest US technology M&A Insights report for the second quarter of 2012, M&A deal transaction volume decreased by 15 percent from the first quarter of 2012, from 65 deals in Q1 to 55 deals in Q2. But the value of cumulative transactions actually increased by eight percent quarter over quarter, to $31.8 billion. On a year-over-year basis, the deal transaction slowdown is even more apparen...

Ryan has spent more than five years covering business, technology, and telecom-related subjects for a variety of publications based in New York and San Francisco. Ryan currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. ? Learn More Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos frequently uses the e-commerce site’s front page as a place to announce changes in service or major new initiatives. As one of the most-trafficked sites on the web, it’s the perfect place to make a big splash. And today, he is using that space to announce its new Career Choice Program, which will provide tuition help for fulfillment center employees who seek careers in well-paying, in-demand areas like computer-aided design or medical lab technologies. Amazon already touts its ability to pay fulfillment center employees about 30 percent more than retail store employees. But now it’s trying to help them find better-paying jobs. Through the Career Choice Program, Amazon has agreed to pay tuition for employees in its fulfillment centers, as lon...

Ingrid is a reporter for TechCrunch, joining February 2012, based out of London. She comes from paidContent.org, where she was a staff writer, and has in the past also written freelance regularly for other publications such as the Financial Times. Ingrid covers mobile, digital media, advertising and the spaces where these intersect. When it comes to work, she feels most... ? Learn More As Amazon gears up for its quarterly earnings later this week, the company today has announced an expansion that points to its big ambitions in digital media, and an increasing focus on how that growth will come from outside the U.S.. Amazon is opening a new R&D hub in London focused on developing services and APIs for TVs, games consoles, smartphones and PCs, with the aim to roll those out across the company’s global footprint. That is a major development for a company that has been somewhat slow to roll out its newest services beyond its U.S.-homebase. Amazon says that the eight-floor, 47,000-squ...