Good morning, Data Sheet readers. Solar-powered drones. Data transfers via laser beams. They’re both part of Facebook’s grand plan for planet-wide Internet services. Plus, Airbnb is refreshingly gender-diverse for a tech company. Watch Fortune Live at 3 pm Eastern for an analysis of Twitter’s and Facebook’s latest quarters. Enjoy your weekend!
TOP OF MIND
Facebook's sky-high connectivity scheme. Here's one way to bring Internet connectivity to rural areas. The social media company has developed a solar-powered drone with the wingspan of a Boeing 737 that will be launched into the heavens with the help of a giant balloon. How to share information from drone to drone? Streaming lasers that can transfer data as fast as fiber-optic services.
TRENDING
Google to France: "Non," we won't apply "right to be forgotten" everywhere. It is challenging the suggestion that removal requests should apply to searches across Europe, not just the country of origin.
14 million and counting. That's how many systems were upgraded to Windows 10 within the first 24 hours. Corporate-wide migrations are proceeding more slowly, but they'll cost much less if they're completed within the first year, reports Computerworld.
Uber is pumping $1 billion into business development in India, projected to be the world's most populous country by 2022.
Super-unicorn messaging startup SnapChat could generate $50 million in revenue this year, reports Re/code. Its valuation is more than $15 billion.
Whether or not you like John Legere's in-your-face approach, his strategy to win more share for T-Mobile is definitely working. It added 2.1 million new subscribers last quarter.
Wow, Cisco is paying CEO Chuck Robbins more than John Chambers. His total potential compensation for this fiscal year: $16.7 million. (Hat tip to IDG News Service for noticing this one.)
LinkedIn did better than expected for its latest quarter, but mainly because of healthy sales for the training business it acquired with Lynda.com. Its core display advertising business is still declining.
Here's what the revamped Google Glass looks like. It is meant to be clipped on to different frames. The company is pitching applications in health care, manufacturing and energy, reports The Wall Street Journal.
THE DOWNLOAD
See how the big tech companies compare on employee diversity
Last year, in response to critics who accused them of being comprised almost entirely of white men, a number of the biggest players in tech published their employee demographic data for the first time. The numbers confirmed the doubters’ worst suspicions: Minorities accounted for just a tiny fraction of most of the companies’ workforces and no company could say that women made up 50% of its employees.
Now, several of these tech powerhouses have released an update, showing how their employee makeup has (or has not) changed since 2013. The results are largely disheartening: While firms may be talking a big game, most have made very little progress. That said, just having this data in the public realm is a step forward, allowing observers to see exactly where tech companies stand on diversity and to hold them accountable for improving.
Fortune checked up on nine well-known players (listed alphabetically): Airbnb, Cisco, eBay, Facebook, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. Read the analysis by Stacy Jones and Jaclyn Trop.
ALSO WORTH SHARING
The next court date for the Oracle-Google dispute over Java, won't make it onto the calendar until mid-2016.
Net neutrality has been in effect for just one month, but there have already been more than 2,000 complaints to the FCC inspired by the rule, reports the National Journal.
Alibaba is teaming up with Chinese researchers on a quantum computing project that could have big implications for data center security.
Prices for Samsung's flagship Galaxy smartphones could soon be cheaper. The plan was discussed in its disappointing Q2 earnings report.
That's an expensive prescription. It will cost $4.3 billion for the Pentagon to update its health records.
How can get you through lobby security? Jive Software has come up with a better approach to employee directories, with this mobile app.
MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS
What Pinterest is learning from the Pittsburgh Steelers about diversity by Laura Lorenzetti
What's the scoop on that prospect? This company has the inside story by Heather Clancy
Apple wins an Internet of things beauty contest by Phillip Elmer-DeWitt
Facebook is upping its security with this new feature by Michael Addady
Inside the secret society of executive moms by Kimberly Seals Allers
Hackers give up when they go up against this cybersecurity company by Robert Hackett
ONE MORE THING
Attention baseball fans! An entire minor league game was just played with a computer guiding the home plate umpire's pitch calls.
MARK YOUR CALENDAR
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)
.conf: 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: Application security principles. (Sept. 22 - 25; San Francisco)
BoxWorks: Cloud collaboration solutions. (Sept. 28 - 30; San Francisco)
Workday Rising: Meet and share. (Sept. 28 - Oct. 1; Las Vegas)
Minds+Machines: GE's annual industrial Internet event. (Sept. 29 - Oct. 1; San Francisco)
HP Engage: Big data, big engagement. (Oct. 4 - 6; San Diego)
Gartner Symposium ITxpo: CIOs and senior IT executives. (Oct. 4 - 8; Orlando, Florida)
AWS re:Invent: The global Amazon Web services community. (Oct. 6 - 9; Las Vegas)
I Love APIs: 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)
Dell World: Global conference for customers and partners. (Oct. 20 - 22; Austin, Texas)
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: 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)
Oktane: Identity management trends. (Nov. 2 - 4; Las Vegas)
FutureStack: Define your future with New Relic. (Nov. 11 - 13; San Francisco)
