Data Sheet—Friday, August 14, 2015

TOP OF MIND

Why GE replaced annual reviews with this app. (Yes, millennials had something to do with it.)

One thing I absolutely do not miss about my former life as a manager was the tedious process of delivering annual performance reviews. I always found in-the-moment feedback to be far more useful for both giver and receiver.

Good news! That process is slowly giving way, even in places with famously rigid employee evaluation mandates. Exhibit A: General Electric, which just opted for an app that lets managers offer ongoing feedback far more frequently. It's called PD@GE, for "performance development at GE." Microsoft, Accenture and Adobe have made similar moves. The goal: constant improvement.

"GE may not have invented the stack ranking, but it's the company most identified with it," writes Quartz reporter Max Nisen. "And given the longstanding and pervasive influence GE has had over the business world, its move could represent the beginning of the end for a practice that has been at the heart of how corporations have managed people for many decades." I encourage you to read the whole article.

TRENDING

The first thing you'll notice about Samsung's new smartphones is the huge screens, which take up almost the entire front face. The new models also boast another unique feature: you need one if you want to use the South Korean's new mobile payments service, which debuts modestly in the U.S. later this month.

Google has an extra two weeks to respond to antitrust objections in Europe.

Tune in for this cliffhanger. Netflix and Amazon have longer to shore up their defenses. Apple won't be ready to discuss its vision for Internet-streaming "television" services until next year, according to sources cited by Bloomberg.

Uber lawyers have prevailed in Connecticut, where the ride-sharing company was sued by 15 taxi and limousine companies for unfair competition.

Square seeks to cash in on conversion. Many small businesses haven't upgraded their point-of-sale technology to handle chip-enabled credit cards mandated by Mastercard and Visa as of Oct. 1. The consequences? The retailer is responsible for fraudulent charges. Square's offer covers that liability.

Patent suits pending. Oracle now claims the last six versions of the Android operating system infringe on Java. The five-year-old case became active again two months ago, when the Supreme Court refused to weigh in on whether businesses can really protect application programming interfaces.

There was also more drama in the dispute between Internet service providers Limelight Networks and Akamai Technologies, after a court revived a $45 million ruling against Limelight. What makes the 10-year-old case intriguing is that Limelight didn't directly infringe on the patents. It was accused of enablement.

THE DOWNLOAD

Qualcomm must adapt its business model for the Internet of things

Qualcomm’s $2.4 billion purchase of fellow chip company CSR closed Thursday, and while it wasn’t the biggest chip deal the industry has seen since Qualcomm said it would purchase the UK firm in October last year, this is a deal that has high stakes for Qualcomm—a company struggling to remake itself completely as its core cellular radio business becomes an ever smaller portion of its portfolio and activist investors pressure management. Fortune senior editor Stacey Higginbotham weighs in with an update on the ongoing saga.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

That was fast. The company-formerly-known-as-Google has already spun out a group writing augmented reality software, including the game "Ingress."

Apple hired more diverse candidates in 2014 than in any prior year, but CEO Tim Cook recognizes that's just a start.

Coincidence? A Harvard student who publicly pointed up a privacy flaw in Messenger had his Facebook internship canceled.

MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS

Publishers have themselves to blame for the ad-blocking apocalypse by Mathew Ingram

Touch the person you're Skyping with by Laura Lorenzetti

Robots have learned how to mimic natural selection by Michal Addady

ONE MORE THING

A whole new world. Disney's uses for virtual reality extend way beyond theme park rides.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

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

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

IT Dev Connections: New this year: an Executive Insights track focused on digital technology strategy. (Sept. 14 - 17; Las Vegas)

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

.conf2015: "Get your data on" with Splunk. (Sept. 21 - 24; Las Vegas)

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

nginx.conf: The modern web. (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)

Tableau Conference 2015: Tableau’s annual customer conference. (Oct 19 -23; Las Vegas)

Dell World: Global conference for customers and partners. (Oct. 20 - 22; Austin, Texas)

Virtuous Circle Conference: Internet policy in the round (Oct. 12-13, Menlo Park, California)

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)

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)