Happy Friday, Data Sheet readers. The rumor du jour in the Salesforce situation is that Microsoft is not “actively” weighing an offer. Then again, tomorrow’s another day. Among this morning’s more certain news: Fitbit has filed its IPO papers, and Ericsson has expanded its patent suit against Apple to Europe.
This issue marks the introduction of “The Pitch,” an ongoing item dedicated to Fortune’s original coverage of marketing, social media analytics and advertising technologies. Today’s spotlight shines on several former Microsoft execs who have founded a marketing analytics startup that can link specific content to specific sales.
If you find Data Sheet useful, share this link for today’s edition and encourage your colleagues to subscribe. If you need a mid-afternoon break, tune in at 3 pm Eastern for Fortune’s video recap of the week’s top news, Fortune Live.
Wishing everyone a great weekend, especially all the mothers in Data Sheet’s readership, including my own. Enjoy!
TOP OF MIND
Fitbit trains for its IPO. The fitness wearables company has filed for $100 million initial public offering. Among the revelations: Fitbit sold close to 11 million devices last year, which means it accounted for almost half the overall market from a unit shipment standpoint. Plus, the company actually turned a profit last year. Stay tuned for more details as they emerge.
TRENDING
Here’s the rationale for Alibaba’s leadership change: founder and executive Jack Ma wants to transition the team to a “younger generation.” By the way, Reuters reports that the giant Chinese e-commerce company could be taking a 20% stake in India’s No. 2 smartphone company, Micromax Informatics.
Ericsson takes Apple patent suit to Europe. The two are fighting over royalty payments for communications technology used in the iPhone. The expanded litigation comes after the two failed to negotiate a global licensing agreement.
Uber wants to buy Nokia’s valuable digital mapping service. The deal could be valued at up to $3 billion, reports The New York Times. Any offer will need to compete with a rival bid from a consortium of German automakers, including BMW, Audi, and Mercedes-Benz. The NYTimes cites sources close to the situation. Why so interested? Nokia’s mapping service is one of the few that could rival Google’s.
China’s new national security legislation stresses ‘sovereignty’. Government officials want to establish a more specific formula for protecting data and punishing cybersecurity attacks, reports Reuters. The legislation mentions protecting “national space sovereignty, security and development interests.” That means efforts to prioritize domestic suppliers likely to continue.
Appeals court: Bulk call data collection is illegal. Three New York judges ruled that systematic collection of domestic calling records isn’t justified. The Patriot Act provision that inspired this in the first place is set to expire June 1.
THE DOWNLOAD
Advanced Micro Devices wants to bet the farm on data centers
AMD hopes to turn a profit again by the second half of 2015. Fortune’s Jonathan Vanian reports on why the company’s innovation in graphics could become an edge for servers.
After missing out on mobile and playing second fiddle to Intel for decades in the personal computing market, AMD is ready to remake itself with a new type of semiconductor and venue for sales. This time it's using a combination of the graphics chips found in gaming consoles and the traditional X86 chips inside a computer to make what it hopes is its ticket to success in the corporate data center market.
At its first analyst day event this week under new CEO Lisa Su, the 40-year-old-plus chip company said it would go after the data center market to make up for the lagging sales of personal computers.
“This is probably the single biggest bet we are making as a company,” said Su, who acknowledged that AMD’s data center business currently produces less than $300 million a year. This number is fiddlesticks compared to the $3 billion a year it derives from selling chips to video game console makers like Microsoft and Sony as well as other companies involved in the gaming business. And it's even less when compared to the $3.7 billion that Intel’s data center group took in last quarter.
Su said that the “data center is practically greenfield for us” and she acknowledged at several points that it’s going to be challenging for the company to penetrate the market. What will make AMD stand out, however, is its investment in its lineup of chips that can tap into the powers of both a CPU (the brains behind a chip’s computing powers) and a GPU (a processor that helps render graphics) instead of only one or the other, AMD’s leadership team claimed.
These hybrid chips are great for video game console makers because their machines need help rendering high-end graphics without sacrificing speed. And it’s not just graphics that get a boost from the chips; these chips could help with some of the more power-hungry tasks performed in the data center, like analyzing tons of data with the help of emerging data-crunching technologies like the Hadoop distributed file system.
Former AMD corporate vice president now turned analyst Patrick Moorhead explained to Fortune in an email that AMD’s previous lack of investment in the server market has set the company back, but now that it appears to be doubling down, Moorhead “can see them doing a lot better now.”
However, Moorhead wrote that there are still challenges. For the rest of Vanian’s article, visit Fortune.com.
THE PITCH
Ex-Microsoft execs connect the dots between marketing content and sales performance
Which of your company’s pitch presentations translate into revenue most often? For that matter, which ones are modified most often by the sales team?
Three-year-old startup Highspot, founded by several former senior Microsoft managers, uses machine learning to answer these notoriously elusive questions.
“Marketing teams create an arsenal of content, when it changes in the field, they lose all visibility into its performance,” said Highspot CEO and co-founder Robert Wahbe, the former corporate vice president for Microsoft’s server group. “They can’t see who is using it, how it is resonating with the customers, and how effectively it is helping to convert more sales. Content Genomics lets marketing and sales find out which content is performing well and what is falling flat.”
Highspot’s technology measures how often specific brochures, presentations, white papers and other marketing content are modified or customized. It works with cloud applications that businesses already use to manage and share documents of this nature, including Salesforce, conferencing applications such as WebEx, email apps including Outlook or Gmail, and collaboration services including Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. From there, the software traces which pieces wind up in the hands of prospects and whether those leads are eventually closed, Wahbe said.
Highspot scored $9.6 million in Series A funding last November, led by Madrona Venture Group. Technically speaking, this marketing intelligence feature is still in “beta.” Still, it’s being rolled out this week to the startup’s roughly 100 customers including SAP’s Concur business unit, human resources data company PayScale, and travel site Booking.com.
“Content marketing is not a new way to reach the customer, but there is a lot of time wasted on creating and sharing content that just doesn’t get read,” said Madrona managing director Tim Porter, when the round was disclosed. “Robert and his team are bringing data science to the workings of sales and marketing to allow them to close more deals and do it more quickly.”
ALSO WORTH SHARING
More than just a funding round? Re/code reports that Accel and giant drone maker DJI are planning an investment fund focused on applications and technologies centered on unmanned aerial vehicles. The two announced a $75 million financing deal earlier this week.
Spotify is eying up video. The music streaming service is talking with several digital media companies (including Fortune’s publisher Time), reports WSJ.
PayPal wants to make its small-business loans program even bigger. Entrepreneurs can now borrow up to $85,000.
Local-reviews site Yelp is looking for a buyer, someone willing to deal with the baggage of its Google partnership. It relies on the search giant for more than half of its online visitors, reports WSJ.
Data center dilemma. Equinix just submitted a $3.5 billion bid for Telecity Group, which throws a monkey wrench into its multibillion-dollar merger with Interxion. The object of its affection will consider the new offer.
Cisco wants to play a role in “in app” communications. It will pay an undisclosed sum for Tropo, which sells software for embedding chat features or conferencing services into applications.
Wonder how Facebook manages more than 2 billion digital photos? Here’s the answer. While we’re on the subject of Facebook buildings, here’s a peek at its new digs in Menlo Park, California, where everyone (including Zuck) works in full view.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
Facebook ‘filter bubble study’ raises more questions than it answers by Mathew Ingram
A tale of (maybe) two CEO transitions by Barb Darrow
Coursera CEO: Colleges will survive the online education revolution by John A. Byrne
Virtual reality now actual reality with four VR headset launches coming soon by John Gaudiosi
Does venture capital have a ‘club’ problem? By Dan Primack
Reddit moves to embrace its future as a media entity by Mathew Ingram
ONE MORE THING
Go ahead, hack your electric vehicle. Tesla owners give new meaning to the term, “pimp my ride.”
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
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)