Good morning. Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman says her company’s breakup, which will cost billions, is still on track for November. Uber is establishing a massive credit line. Plus, it takes more than analytics certifications to be a good data scientist.
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TOP OF MIND
Hewlett-Packard details the high cost of breaking up. Executives devoted a significant portion of the company’s earnings call Thursday to sharing more information about the company’s pending split into two separate public entities. The tab will include $400 million to $450 million in “dis-synergy” costs associated with replicating certain corporate functions like accounting and human resources, along with a $1 billion one-time charge and up to $2 billion from a restructuring of the enterprise services division. The outlook isn’t exactly bright ahead of the separation: HP just reduced its forecast for the current quarter.
TRENDING
Buy here, there and everywhere. PayPal’s soon-to-be-new CEO Dan Schulman wants his soon-to-be-independent company to rule mobile commerce. It will be much more than the payment service behind a “buy” button. “We want to democratize the management and the movement of money,” he told media on Wednesday.
Google’s plan to turn YouTube into a huge product catalog. You can think of it as a Home Shopping Network for millennials. The Internet giant’s new “TrueView for shopping” service overlays advertisements onto YouTube segments. The links will send potential buyers to third-party sites where they can buy what they see.
Uber is looking for $1 billion in credit, which could signal that its IPO plans are becoming more concrete, reports The Wall Street Journal. Meanwhile, the ride-sharing company just got bad news from France via a ruling that upholds restrictions on “unlicensed” taxi services.
The security-versus-privacy showdown in Washington this week recast high-tech companies like Google and Facebook as protectors of consumer data. Which is exactly what the industry needs right now. “It’s a nice confluence of business pressure and public pressure to do something,” said the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Mark Jaycox.
Twitter should consider itself officially on notice. Tech investor Chris Sacca, also an early Uber backer, plans to be more openly critical of the company because he thinks it will be “cathartic.” He notes in a lengthy blog post: “I am soon going to post a few things that I personally hope the Twitter team will accomplish. I want to make it clear that my feedback comes from a place of loyalty and persistent gratitude.”
In New York, new Bitcoin rules are coming. The state is taking proactive steps to regulate how financial services firms use the virtual currency, citing the need to protect consumers.
THE DOWNLOAD
Data science is still white hot, but nothing lasts forever
Enjoy your fat salaries while you can data scientists, because the rising tide of new talent and—gasp—automation will take their toll. Fortune’s Barb Darrow reports from this week’s big data conference in Boston.
Every day tech industry execs bemoan the lack of data scientists—the people who theoretically know how to look at the data your company generates, and delve into it to derive the all-important insights we keep hearing about.
And on Thursday, the hype continued. At a Big Data panel in Boston, nearly 100% percent of the speakers talked about the dearth of qualified data scientists and the impact that is having on business. Several actually said the time to hire a data scientist was: "yesterday."
What do you expect? Two years ago, The Harvard Business Review, apparently an arbiter of such things, dubbed data scientist "the sexiest job of the 21st century."
So, if you can't go back in time to hire a data scientist, sooner is still better than later, said Michael Schmidt, CEO of Nutonian, a Cambridge, Mass.-based data analytics startup. It's good to have the data person in place before you start mapping out plans for what you're going to do with the data and whether and how to clean it up.
But hiring a data scientist presupposes that there is a data scientist out there to hire and therein lies a problem. According to Dr. Tara Sinclair, Indeed.com's chief economist, the number of job postings for data scientist grew 57% for the first quarter this year compared to the year-ago quarter. And searches for data scientist grew 73.5% for the same period.
Hint: successful candidates require far more than a technical certification. Visit Fortune.com for the rest of Darrow’s report.
ALSO WORTH SHARING
Upside surprise. Intuit’s fiscal Q3 financial results were better than expected, plus the tax software company reported a huge jump in small-business subscribers to QuickBooks Online.
Google’s strategy for the Internet of things isn’t limited to the Nest smart thermostat. The company is working on an operating system, called Brillo.
Super-cheap Chromebooks are all the rage this year, particularly in education accounts where they are beating out Apple’s iPad.
What does Medium want to be when it grows up? Founder Evan Williams, who also had a hand in Twitter and Blogger, seems to be repositioning the platform as a social network.
BlackBerry wants to buy back roughly 2.6% of its shares.
YouTube’s livestreaming technology just got a whole lot better, which positions it as a much more viable competitor to Amazon’s Twitch service.
You win some, you lose some. Samsung’s latest smartphone, Galaxy S6, isn’t quite the success that the company needs. On the other hand, it seems poised to win early-mover advantage when it comes to mobile virtual reality technology.
Will you be the first person or last person on your block to invest in a connected doorbell? With the likes of Apple and Comcast preaching the benefits, this smart home gadget is becoming the latest “it” accessory.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
A Chinese app that steals Wi-Fi passwords just raised $50 million by Scott Cendrowski
This tech company had a blockbuster first day of trading following IPO by Verne Kopytoff
Why can’t all wireless charging options just get along? by Jason Cipriani
Hillary Clinton joins LinkedIn because ‘she’s looking for a new job’ by Claire Zillman
Twitter tries to help the neighborhood (and qualify for a tax break) by Jonathan Vanian
Brit + Co raises $23 million for its DIY empire targeting millennials by Kia Kokalitcheva
Boston is using big data to solve traffic jams by Barb Darrow
ONE MORE THING
I wonder if Bill Gates ever thanked the IBM recruiter who advised his future wife, Melinda French, to take a job at Microsoft? Why she insists that the couple’s foundation prioritize investments in the future of women and girls. “When I look at Africa, I don’t just see the destitute stories,” she told Fortune’s Nina Eastman. “I focus on the ingenuity and change of the communities.”
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
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)
Cassandra Summit: Largest gathering of Cassandra database developers. (Sept. 22 - 24; 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)
QuickBooks Connect: SMBs, entrepreneurs, accountants and developers. (Nov. 2 - 4; San Jose, California)
