Data Sheet—Friday, July 17, 2015

TOP OF MIND

Google’s quest for diversification advances. The search giant made notable progress on the mobile front during the second quarter. For one thing, the “watch time” for YouTube viewers using smartphones or tablets more than doubled. Plus, new CFO Ruth Porat is already making her mark: the company delivered more profit than expected. Watch the stock today: in pre-market trading, it's up more than 13% over Thursday's closing price of $579.85.

TRENDING

Samsung’s management prevailed in their quest to engineer an $8 billion merger of two affiliates. The play, a blow to hedge fund Elliott Management, gives heir-apparent Lee Jae-yong more control over the world’s largest smartphone maker.

AMD remains vulnerable to slow personal computer sales, but the CEO thinks the second quarter will be its “revenue trough for the year.”

eBay ends things on a high note. It’s now predicting revenue growth of 3% to 5% this year. Plus, it finally managed to sell its corporate e-commerce division, albeit at a loss. That removes a big burden to future growth. PayPal and eBay should start trading as separate companies next Monday.

Give Facebook a hand, for making an acquisition that’s got everybody talking about gesture recognition technology.

Hillary Clinton is suspicious of how sharing economy companies treat workers. Jeb Bush, meanwhile, wants more companies like Uber that don’t mind “disrupting the established order.”

Creative lobbying tactics. Speaking of which, Uber doesn’t much like New York Mayor Bill de Blasio’s local regulatory ideas. The company is sharing its displeasure with local members in an unusual way—as a “feature” within its mobile app.

And the Emmy goes to … Amazon or Netflix?

THE DOWNLOAD

Why Palantir and Hershey want food companies to swap data

When most people think of the big data company Palantir, they probably have an image in their minds of secretive government agencies like the CIA, FBI, and the Department of Homeland using its software to locate terrorists or investigate major white-collar crime.

But it turns out that chocolatiers are also interested in Palantir’s number crunching technology.

Fortune’s Jonathan Vanian reports on the firm’s alliance with The Hershey Company. The two are creating the CPG Consortium, a group for the consumer-packaged goods industry that will use analytics and big data to “get in front of emerging trends that impact the industry as a whole.”

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Reddit’s former CEO and current leader agree on this: they’d like to see the community be far less tolerant of trolls and “unfettered free speech.”

May I have a receipt? Business travelers now use Uber cars more than taxis, at least according to an analysis of corporate expense reports.

It’s still about storytelling. This Hollywood director thinks businesses can learn plenty about virtual reality from video games.

Go forth and conquer. Microsoft wants to outfit field repair teams with software, the motivation for its FieldOne acquisition.

Class-action lawsuit advances. Apple’s retail employees may get overtime for the time its security team takes to search their bags post-shift.

Meet the company steering many of the world’s autonomous cars. Germany’s Bosch thinks driverless vehicles will be ready for the freeway by 2020.

Google’s thumbs-up for the OpenStack Foundation is a big deal for open- source advocates within the cloud community.

Motorola has a smartphone launch up its sleeve later this month.

MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS

How spy agencies around the world used this company’s software by Jonathan Vanian

New version of Google Patents makes its easier to weed out low-quality patents by Jeff John Roberts

5 things we learned at Fortune Brainstorm Tech by Stacey Higginbotham

What the rise and fall of iPad sales says about the future of the Apple Watch by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Google, Airbnb air transgender ads during ESPYs by Claire Zillman

ONE MORE THING

Keep cool and carry on. This material could prevent electronics devices from overheating and frying.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

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)

Gartner Customer 360 Summit: Strategies for digital engagement. (Sept. 9 - 11; San Diego)

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)

CX San Francisco: Forrester's forum for customer experience professionals. (Oct. 22 - 23)

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

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

eBusiness Chicago: eBusiness and channel strategy. (Oct. 29 - 30)

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

CMO+CIO: Forrester's summit on strategy collaboration. (Nov. 2 - 4; Sarasota, Florida)

Oktane15: Identity management trends. (Nov. 2 - 4; Las Vegas)