Good morning, Data Sheet readers. LinkedIn adjusts its full-year forecast. Oracle’s Safra Catz muses about the Salesforce takeover rumor. IBM and Apple take their mobile partnership to Japan, where iPads will be distributed to elderly citizens. Read on for today’s tech-news highlights. Plus, need some time off? Why more Americans managers should remember to take vacations. Enjoy your weekend!
TOP OF MIND
First Twitter, now LinkedIn. The career networking site narrowly beat Q1 expectations but reduced its forecast for the current quarter and the rest of the year. That revelation didn’t sit well with Wall Street: shares tumbled 25%. Twitter’s stock suffered a similar decline this week, after it likewise disappointed investors.
TRENDING
The gloves will come off in June. A “standstill” agreement that prevents Intel from launching a hostile takeover of Altera expires one month from today, sources tell Reuters. Apparently, the maker of chips for mobile and industrial Internet applications rebuffed a $54 per share offer from the chip giant in April.
Oracle co-CEO Safra Catz is intrigued by the idea of somebody else buying Salesforce. Her view, shared during the company’s first media day: “Helpful to us in the short- and medium-term.” Her peer, Mark Hurd, spent his time talking up Oracle’s cloud revenue, now “well over” $2 billion annually.
The biggest cloud of all? How the scrappy OpenStack federation—representing more than 100 companies—thinks it can offer scale that rivals the big-three public cloud service providers: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.
Elon Musk’s latest grand plan, Tesla Energy. He wants consumers and small businesses to use the battery technology from electric vehicles to power homes and offices. The idea isn’t to replace the electric grid but to supplement it during periods of peak power demand.
Facebook is doing pretty darn well with small businesses. There are now more than 40 million “active” pages on the social network—it added more than 10 million in the last 12 months alone.
Now showing: Nielsen will track ad stats for Roku. Viewership metrics for video streaming services like Amazon and Netflix are notoriously elusive. The new deal will provide unprecedented visibility across more than 10 million devices.
Plus, teenagers certainly love Google's YouTube video network. Advertisers will be tougher to convince.
THE DOWNLOAD
Apple and IBM want to address the world’s aging population. First stop? Japan
The next big focus for the companies’ expansive mobile partnership: serving the elderly. Fortune senior editor Andrew Nusca reports.
It's hard to believe that a sign with "Apple + IBM" on it once verged on sacrilegious, but it's becoming an increasingly common sight as two technology titans realize it's better to be friends than enemies.
IBM CEO Ginni Rometty and Apple CEO Tim Cook stood on stage together Thursday morning at IBM's Watson headquarters in New York City to announce a new partnership with Japan Post Group that aims to, ultimately, address the enormous accessibility challenges facing the world's growing population over age 65.
Rometty and Cook silently flanked Japan Post Group president and CEO Taizo Nishimuro, himself nearly 80 years old, as he spoke for more than 20 uninterrupted minutes about Japan's rapidly aging population and how IBM's apps and services, and Apple's iPads and iPhones, would help better connect the country's senior citizens to society.
“Japan is home to the fastest-aging society in the world,” Nishimuro said, gingerly and in halting English. Thirty-three million people—about 25% of Japan's total population—are age 65 or older, he said. That's going to increase to 40% in coming years.
Meanwhile, Japan Post Group—a postal service, a bank, a life-insurance provider—is moving toward what some believe will be the world's largest IPO, larger than Chinese e-commerce darling Alibaba. It's all a part of prime minister Shinzō Abe's economic plan, known as Abenomics, Nishimuro said.
“I gave myself a mission," he said. "Transform Japan Post Group into an integrated lifestyle support company."
As Nishimuro spoke, Cook, to his right, looked on with a twinkle in his eye and an admiring smile that blossomed into a full grin when Nishimuro mentioned the words "iPhone" and "iPad." Rometty, to his left, nodded and smiled every few lines.
The initiative breaks down into several parts. Apple will supply its iPad, whose operating system, iOS, already has a wealth of built-in accessibility features including settings for people with impaired vision or hearing, such as large type or dictation. IBM will custom-build applications through its Global Business Services group—its leader, Bridget van Kralingen, introduced the trio—that will include reminders or alerts about medications, exercise, and diet; as well as services for grocery shopping and job matching. All of them will run on IBM's MobileFirst for iOS cloud computing service, and Big Blue will layer in its own analytics, accessibility, and natural language technologies. Finally, IBM will train Japan Post employees to help them help the elderly.
Read more about the mission of this unique three-way partnership.
ALSO WORTH SHARING
Imprivata’s new prescription for secure patient records. It’s paying about $26 million for biometrics company HT Systems, which makes vein-scanning technology.
Report: Microsoft just bought a digital pen company. It paid $30 million for N-trig, a component supplier for the Surface tablet product line, sources tell The Wall Street Journal.
Jawbone closes $300 million round. The new infusion from BlackRock was first reported by Fortune in late February. The fitness band maker is trying to reverse a string of financial mishaps triggered by product delays (among other things).
Security company FireEye will have a better year than expected, after reporting a 69% sales increase for Q1. One big client is health insurer Anthem, which disclosed a massive data breach in February.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff wants to fix the gender pay gap, at least at his own company. Why his worthy goal will take years, longer than he probably hoped.
Dell wants big businesses to take its IT services skills more seriously. It is angling to cash in on big corporate data center and private cloud projects as rivals IBM and Hewlett-Packard downplay their hardware business in favor of cloud services opportunities.
Fab news for phablet makers. New mobile analytics data suggests larger-screen devices accounted for almost 20% of active users in March 2015, compared with just 6% back in January 2014.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
Former 'Candy Crush' developer wants a piece of the $30 billion VR market by John Gaudiosi
How tech can stop the looming food crisis by Jason Jay
Most Internet traffic will be encrypted by year end. Here’s why. by Robert Hackett
Warby Parker gets its unicorn horn by Daniel Roberts
Why Apple is poaching Britain’s best music radio producers by Philip Elmer-DeWitt
Flywheel gives taxis new ammunition in fight against Uber by Kia Kokalitcheva
A year ago, Nintendo was on the brink. Now it’s back, and here’s why by John Gaudiosi
ONE MORE THING
Guess your age! How accurate is Microsoft’s facial recognition technology? Fortune tests the “how-old.net” site with photos of iconic CEOs and world leaders.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
MicrosoftIgnite: Business tech extravaganza. (May 4 – 8; Chicago)
NetSuite SuiteWorld: Cloud ERP strategy. (May 4 – 7; San Jose, California)
EMC World: Data strategy. (May 4 - 7; Las Vegas)
SAPPHIRE NOW: The SAP universe. (May 5 – 7; Orlando, Florida)
Gartner Digital Marketing Conference: Reach your destination faster. (May 5 – 7; San Diego)
Cornerstone Convergence: Connect, collaborate. (May 11 - 13; Los Angeles)
Cloud Foundry Summit: Open source development. (May 11 - 12; Santa Clara, California)
Annual Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: JP Morgan’s 43rd invite-only event. (May 18 - 20; Boston)
Signal: The modern communications conference. (May 19 - 20; San Francisco)
MuleSoft Connect: Tie together apps, data and devices. (May 27 - 29; San Francisco)
MongoDB World: Scale the universe. (June 1 - 2; New York)
HP Discover: Trends and technologies. (June 2 - 4; Las Vegas)
Apple Worldwide Developers Conference: Future of iOS and OS X. (June 8 - 12; San Francisco)
Hadoop Summit San Jose: Mainstreaming adoption. (June 9 - 11; San Jose, California)
Red Hat Summit: Energize your enterprise. (June 23 - 26; Boston)
Brainstorm Tech: Fortune’s invite-only gathering of thinkers, influencers and entrepreneurs. (July 13 - 15; Aspen, Colorado)
LinuxCon North America: All about open source. (Aug. 17 - 19; Seattle)
VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco)
Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco)
BoxWorks 2015: Cloud collaboration solutions. (Sept. 28 - 30; San Francisco)
Workday Rising: Meet and share. (Sept. 28 - Oct. 1; Las Vegas)
HP Engage: Big data, big engagement. (Oct. 4 - 6; San Diego)
Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida)
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: World's largest gather of women technologists. (Oct. 14 - 16; Houston)
Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco)
