Data Sheet—Monday, April 13, 2015

Good morning, readers. Now that Hillary Clinton has officially declared her presidential candidacy, you can expect gender equality to become an even louder workplace discussion. Symantec’s management might not have to follow through with its breakup plan, but Qualcomm is being pressured to think about one. Plus a pending funding round could value Spotify at around $8.4 billion. Read on for your Monday edition of Data Sheet.

TOP OF MIND

Much speculation about Amazon’s cloud numbers. The e-commerce giant’s next financials update (out on April 22, aka Earth Day) will be the first to include specifics for Amazon Web Services. Cowen analyst John Blackledge calls for revenue of $5.9 billion this year, but AWS is obviously feeling the heat from rivals Microsoft and Google—his previous forecast was $6.6 billion.

Incidentally, get ready for the quarterly tech earnings onslaught: among those up this week are Intel (April 14), AMD and ServiceNow (both April 16). IBM, Google and Microsoft are due to report next week.

For its next act, Sprint will hand-deliver new smartphones. The share-challenged carrier—in danger of falling behind T-Mobile—will do almost anything to keep subscribers. That includes sending someone to deliver and set up new phones in person. Sprint will test this concept near its Kansas City headquarters.

Fallout from Yahoo restructuring. Analytics guru Simon Khalaf, who joined through the buyout of mobile advertising specialist Flurry last summer, was named a senior vice president. He’s now in charge of most consumer services. It also means Mike Kerns, the senior vice president of the Internet company’s news and video strategy, will leave at the end of April.

Twitter exercises the power of persuasion. The competition between the Periscope and Meerkat video streaming services is so intense that both sides are scrambling to recruit high-profile supporters. TechCrunch reports that the social network is proactively asking celebrities to pick Periscope, while Meerkat is poaching from Vine.

Speed of the essence in security breach detection. How a business handles a cyberattack within the first hour of discovery plays a big role in determining how much damage will be done. “There is a ‘golden hour’ for corrective action, and the clock starts the second an attack indicator is detected,’ Intel general manager for security Chris Young told Fortune.

Why Wall Street is worried. The list of startups facilitating online loans, payments processing and mobile stock trading—Lending Club, Stripe, Robinhood—is growing quickly. Google just poached Morgan Stanley’s chief financial officer. Nasdaq is building the technology behind a bitcoin trading exchange. Big financial services have finally noticed this rising threat: Goldman Sachs even estimates up to 7% of banks’ annual profits are at risk.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Spotify worth $8.4 billion? The streaming music service is about to close a $400 million funding round that includes Goldman Sachs (a return investor), according to the WSJ. That’s more than twice Pandora’s latest valuation.

PayPal warns of possible federal lawsuit. eBay’s payments company is at odds with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau over finance charges related to its same-day lending service. It’s one of the investor risk factors cited in eBay’s filing last week about the pending breakup.

Get a charge out of this. Add battery technologies for wearables and autonomous vehicles to the list of research projects gaining momentum under Google X.

Amazon wants merchants to keep things real. Some consumers buy from specific e-commerce sites mainly because of what past customers have reported in online reviews. The e-commerce tries to police authenticity. Now it’s suing four companies it believes sell fake commentary “in bulk.”

Can touch this. A British company is prototyping virtual reality software that appeals to your sense of touch. The technology could have applications in automotive design or medical diagnostics.

Want to reach a business-to-business audience over social media? LinkedIn’s new Elevate app, tested by companies like Unilever and Adobe, aims to help companies get employees engaged in social marketing campaigns.