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TOP OF MIND

Even more money for Uber? The ride-sharing company is expanding like mad: it’s operating in almost 250 markets worldwide. Now, the controversial upstart looking for another $1.5 billion to $2 billion to support those ambitions, reports The Wall Street Journal, citing “people familiar with the matter.” As of December 2014, the prominent unicorn was valued at $41.2 billion. This round could boost that to $50 billion, according to the report.

TRENDING

Some Pinterest employees can sell some shares. The social network company has closed a $186 million Series G equity round. The funding includes new investors Wellington Management and Goldman Sachs, reports Re/code. Pinterest will also let some employees sell some vested shares; it previously allowed this in October 2012.

Can this consortium terminate the dominance of Bloomberg terminals? Symphony Communications Services (formerly Perzo) promises a more secure (and easier-to-use) messaging system for traders and financial industry professionals. With 14 of the world’s biggest financial firms behind it—including Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and J.P. Morgan Chase—the open source approach is finding willing adopters

Chinese smartphone sales slow down for first time in six years. Q1 shipments shrank by about 4.3% in the world’s biggest market to about 98.8 million units. Apple managed to outship Xiaomi and Huawei.

SurveyMonkey gets interim chairman after CEO’s untimely death. Board member Zander Lurie, who is a senior vice president at GoPro, will step in for the next three months. The company is searching internally and externally to replace the late Dave Goldberg, who passed away May 1 after an accident while vacationing.

Softbank is treading cautiously. It just beat profit expectations for its fiscal year ended March 31, but doesn’t feel confident enough to predict what it thinks will happen during the current one. By the way, Masayoshi Son just promoted former Google exec Nikesh Arora to president, setting him up as a likely CEO successor.

THE DOWNLOAD

Reinventing software development isn’t easy, but Cloud Foundry is trying

Pivotal, IBM, Hewlett Packard, and others are building Cloud Foundry together—and using it as a weapon against each other. Fortune writer Barb Darrow reports.

It’s getting harder for large companies to write the custom software they need to run and prosper in an era where they need to connect to customers (and potentially devices)worldwide. If you log into an online system to pay bills or select healthcare benefits, you’re likely using the new-age applications that these companies need to design, build, test, and deploy quickly and with minimal hassle.

This week in Santa Clara, Calif., a gaggle of tech vendors will gather to sing the praises of Cloud Foundry, a common set of tools called a “platform as a service” that aims to enable this modern type of development. Like the Linux operating system and OpenStack cloud framework before it, Cloud Foundry is an open-source project, meaning that the software and documentation is available to anyone as long as changes made are submitted back to the broader group.

“Most enterprises have developed systems that are difficult and expensive to deploy and operate, where cloud-native companies have invested in automation and architectures to make those problems go away,” says Andrew Clay Shafer, senior director of technology for Pivotal, a spin-out of EMC and VMware that offers a commercial version of Cloud Foundry.

“Cloud native” companies use modern tools to build software that is a set of tiny components or microservices that work together as opposed to the big, monolithic applications of yesteryear. These new companies are not bound by decades-old processes and gear.

“You can’t hope to continuously deliver software or operate microservices at scale if deployment is time-consuming and error-prone,” Shafer says. “Standardizing the platform and architectures which adhere to that cloud native platform contract makes deploying software a boring non-event so organizations can focus more resources on creating value and less on undifferentiated heavy lifting.”

All these Cloud Foundry vendors—Pivotal, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, ActiveState and others—pledge to support that core foundation but also add their own secret sauce to their branded version.

“We will cooperate on interoperability and compete on execution,” said Angel Diaz, IBM Software Group’s vice president of cloud architecture and technology. In theory, that means that IBM’s Bluemix version of Cloud Foundry will work with Pivotal’s Pivotal CF, which will work with the HP Helion Development Platform. As always, the proof will be in the pudding.

The Cloud Foundry Summit will showcase many of these vendors but, more importantly, several actual users of Cloud Foundry, including Pivotal customers Allstate Insurance, Garmin, Humana, and Comcast. IBM customers Gamestop, Mindjet, and Cognitive Scale will also be in attendance.

Read more about what to expect at this week’s conference.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Australia takes on taxes. It believes at least 30 multinational companies are diverting profits to other countries to evade what they really owe. Among those on that list: Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

Ellen Pao thinks $1 million is way too much. That’s how much Kleiner Perkins says it paid to fight her gender discrimination lawsuit. The firm wants her to pay the bill, but will let her off the hook if she doesn’t appeal. She has until June 8 to do so.

Is Apple Pay as successful as it seems? A contrarian point of view suggests not.

A new Amazon patent offers hints about what the e-commerce giant really hopes to do with its automated package delivery service.

IBM is adding to its resources for corporate mobile app development, through a new partnership with software company Ionic.

Apple wants to cover its supply chain with renewable energy, too. Expect more wind, solar, biogas and fuel cell investments.

One down, 49 to go. New York has officially approved bitcoin exchange itBit, but the company many find it tough to win over other states.

Alibaba now owns almost 10% of Zulily. The e-commerce giant bout almost $56 million in the U.S. retailer’s stock last week; its stake is valued around $150 million, reports The Wall Street Journal.

Plus, T-Mobile is carrying BlackBerrys again. The two broke up last year, but both are putting a higher emphasis on business customers so they’ve reunited.

More Toshiba turmoil. The giant Japanese company just expanded an internal accounting investigation. Plus, it’s cancelling a year-end dividend. The company’s stock lost almost $2.5 billion in value Monday after the revelation.

MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS

Twitter, LinkedIn use this hot technology that makes data crunching look easy by Jonathan Vanian

FAA’s relaxed drone rules could mean big changes for industry by Clay Dillow

Britney Spears is the latest celeb to get her own app. Who should be next? By Daniel Bukszpan

Here’s how Snapchat plans to make money by Ben Geier

Yahoo sues former employee, claims she leaked information to book author by Kia Kokalitcheva

Why so many Apple Watch apps don’t work by Philip Elmer-DeWitt

Shinra’s ‘persistent world’ platform rethinks the cloud-based video game by Brady Dale

Scientists win when they are social with their work, study shows by Mathew Ingram

ONE MORE THING

Don’t worry, you can still read your Kindle during takeoff. An appeals court has dismissed a flight attendant lawsuit that challenged the recently relaxed rules for inflight use of electronics devices.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR

Annual Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference: JP Morgan’s 43rd invite-only event. (May 18 - 20; Boston)

Signal: The modern communications conference. (May 19 - 20; San Francisco)

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)