Data Sheet—Monday, July 13, 2015

The industry mourns well-respected Nintendo President Satoru Iwata, who succumbed to cancer over the weekend. Read on for more about his legacy, along with other news you should know this Monday.

TOP OF MIND

Videogame world shocked by Nintendo leader's passing. Satoru Iwata, a programmer who served as the company's fourth president, fought bile duct cancer for at least two years. Just 55 years old and a gamer "at heart," his most profound legacy was the introduction of the wildly successful Wii gaming console.

TRENDING

Big bucks to block cyberattacks. CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm founded by two former McAfee executives, has snagged $100 million in funding led by Google Capital.

IBM's latest employee perk is for women only. Working mothers traveling for business reasons can now ship expressed breast milk to their babies.

eBay wanted to sell its enterprise e-commerce division by July 1. As of early Monday, there's nothing official, but Re/code reports private equity firm Thomas H. Lee could prevail with a deal worth almost $1 billion.

Oracle is playing hardball with software licensing audits to nudge businesses toward its cloud agenda. Are you really surprised?

Facebook's video business is growing super-fast, but the social network's copyright policies are still at the starting block.

Watch out ESPN. Twitter's "coverage" of the DeAndre Jordan free-agent drama playing out last week was better than yours.

The FTC is curious about Apple's treatment of rival music services in its app store, according to sources cited by Re/code.

A matter of opinion. Can Reddit founder Steve Huffman guide the online community through its mid-life crisis, now the interim CEO Ellen Pao is out?

The cloud migration has India's outsourcing firms scrambling for new strategies, as big accounts cut back their business.

Automakers have plenty of data to sell, so they're being very stingy with sharing. Regulatory considerations aside, that strategy is shortsighted.

THE PITCH

More businesses should trace the connection between calls and mobile marketing

Here’s a rhetorical question. Doesn’t it annoy you personally when you search out a restaurant, store or other business using your smartphone and the site that shows up doesn’t include a phone number?

There are times when it’s clearly far quicker to call with a question than it is to find an email address, compose a message, and then wait for a response. Or tap out a text. Or find someone who’s actually online for a chat exchange. These are all communications channels that most businesses would rather push customers or customer prospects to use.

Yes, it’s far more common to leave out phone numbers or voice contacts on websites than one would expect. That’s a big oversight in any digital marketing strategy: one that could be costing businesses real leads.

Concrete evidence comes from a recent analysis by Invoca, a software company from Santa Barbara, California, that sells a call intelligence platform used by marketing teams. Here’s the stat you care about the most: more than half of the 32 million calls analyzed by the company were driven by mobile marketing activities.

Now, correlate that with the all-too-common for businesses to leave out voice contacts on websites.

Mind you, Invoca is in the business of call intelligence, so it’s not surprising that the company would come up with a conclusion that talks up the value of tracking voice leads or interactions. But its data makes a lot of sense. Here’s the observation from Invoca President Eric Holmen:

We know that phone conversations are important, but we wanted to really dig into our data to determine what actions motivate inbound calls to businesses and how those conversations impact businesses on the other end of the line. Our data shows that industries emphasizing the call channel and making it easy for their customers to move seamlessly from digital to voice interactions will come out substantially ahead.

New technologies from the likes of Invoca and DialogTech help surface that data. You can read the rest of this analysis at Fortune.com.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Apps, not websites. That's what the future of mobile search will prioritize. This and more, in this cerebral New York Times interview with Google senior vice president and engineer Amit Singhal.

Do the math. Apple may not be the smartphone marketshare leader, but it claimed more of the industry's profits than ever in the first quarter.

Dubious distinction. Litigation by patent trolls could reach an all-time high.

Conspiracy theory. Hacking Team, the recently hacked Italian cybersecurity firm, suspects a foreign government was behind the incident.

Comcast is going cable-free with a $15-per-month Internet-only programming bundle meant to lure younger viewers.

Microsoft has some new cloud goodies available. It'll chat up new Azure services—and much more—at its annual worldwide partner conference this week.

Plus, the day of reckoning for Windows 2003 is finally here. Are you ready?

Oh, the irony. This connected gadget is supposed to relieve your addiction to connected gadgets.

MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS

Is Korea the next big market for Tesla? by Kirsten Korosec

MIT researchers have bound a way to make rotten software fresh again by Jonathan Vanian

Bloomberg palace intrigue continues, as the king consolidates his power by Mathew Ingram

Twitter pulls Vine ad after criticism from an epilepsy charity by Ryan Daly

How this author's fictional world inspired real VR by John Gaudiosi

Why you probably shouldn't install iOS 9 on your iPhone just yet by Jason Cipriani

ONE MORE THING

Trying to dodge discovery? You might want to think twice about listening to Spotify in your hideout.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Brainstorm Tech: Fortune’s invite-only gathering of thinkers, influencers and entrepreneurs. (July 13 - 15; Aspen, Colorado)

Esri Business Summit: Mapping the value of data. (July 18 - 21; San Diego)

LinuxCon North America: All about open source. (Aug. 17 - 19; Seattle)

SuccessConnect: Simplify the way the world works. (Aug. 10 - 12; Las Vegas)

VMworld: The virtualization ecosystem. (Aug. 30 – Sept. 3, 2015; San Francisco)

Dreamforce: The Salesforce community. (Sept. 15 - 18; San Francisco)

.conf2015: Splunk's "get your data on" gathering. (Sept. 21 - 24; Las Vegas)

Cassandra Summit: Largest gathering of Cassandra database developers. (Sept. 22 - 24; San Francisco)

AppSec USA 2015: Application security principles. (Sept. 22 - 25; 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)

I Love APIs 2015: Apigee's annual conference. (Oct. 12 - 14; San Jose, California)

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing: World's largest gather of women technologists. (Oct. 14 - 16; Houston)

DevOps Enterprise Summit: Lean principles meet technology management. (Oct. 19 - 21; San Francisco)

Oracle OpenWorld: Customer and partner conference. (Oct. 25 - 29; San Francisco)

TBM Conference 2015: Manage IT like a business. (Oct. 26 - 29; Chicago)

QuickBooks Connect: SMBs, entrepreneurs, accountants and developers. (Nov. 2 - 4; San Jose, California)