TOP OF MIND

Can Samsung's heir apparent dethrone Apple? Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee is the company's most international executive, fluent in both Japanese and English. Thrust into the spotlight at Samsung Electronics after his father's heart attack 14 months ago, Lee runs no single business but holds sway over all of them. That could change in December, when the company announces its annual organization changes.

Lee's challenge: simplify a complex corporate structure, inspire creativity, and truly globalize the Korean technology giant. In a nuanced analysis, Fortune's Adam Lashinsky paints the portrait of a leader who asks the right questions yet still manages to be surprisingly accessible. Does he have what it takes to innovate?

TRENDING

Square is prepping to go public but filed its prospectus confidentially, according to several news outlets. (Bloomberg broke the story.) My question: does this also signal a potential conclusion to the CEO search at Twitter, where Square CEO Jack Dorsey is holding down fort?

Coming soon, more places to buy Apple Watch. Best Buy will be the first retailer to sell the smart wearable, outside of Apple's own stores.

Should social networks police terrorist talk? The Senate Intelligence committee wants the likes of Facebook, Google and Twitter to flag suspicious emails, video and other content much like they already do for child pornography.

Cisco's plan to stop selling storage hardware should make long-time partners NetApp and EMC happier.

Wall Street-backed messaging firm Symphony orchestrates more funding. Current backers include Goldman Sachs and a dozen big-name financial services companies. The new round could boost Symphony into unicorn status, reports the Wall Street Journal.

THE DOWNLOAD

This startup wants to be the Apple of the data center

Companies generate huge amounts of data that they slice and dice to help make decisions. But data-processing software is just one piece of the puzzle. All that data has to live somewhere. Over the past few years, flash storage technology has gained considerable attention as one of the most efficient ways to retain information—while allowing companies to access it quickly.

A wave of startups focused on flash hardware quickly emerged to fill the void. As the technology caught on, big legacy storage companies like EMC and Western Digital gobbled many of them up.

Pure Storage is among the flash storage survivors. John Colgrove, a storage veteran from Veritas Software, and John Hayes, a storage newbie, founded the company in 2009. Pure boasts its software smarts as well as its know-how on building hardware based on flash as advantages. Its clients include SurveyMonkey, Workday, and ConocoPhillips.

The company is not yet profitable, but it says revenue tripled last year. In an interview with Fortune writer Jonathan Vanian, Hayes declined to comment on plans for a possible IPO. But he talks up why flash is so important and why Apple is an inspiration. Here's the edited Q&A.

ALSO WORTH SHARING

Honey, pick up some milk at Amazon on the way home. The e-commerce giant will test this grocery sales concept first in Sunnyvale, California, reports Silicon Valley Business Journal.

Oracle rivals NetSuite and Infor strengthen their offense. Both just made significant changes to their management bench on the heels of respectable growth.

Coming soon in select stores near you: the Apple Pay rival backed by Best Buy, Target and Wal-Mart.

More exposure for Twitter. It added 11 million unique visitors in June, according to the latest comScore metrics.

Mobile phone "kill switches" less effective than hoped. “I have seen time and time again, the technological fixes can always be circumvented, and it’s purely a question of economics,” one lawyer told WSJ.

Attention bitcoin investors. The Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame have filed to run an exchange in New York.

How IPO-bound television maker Vizio secretly tracks viewing habits. 

A group of shareholders can't sue Facebook execs over what they believed were inadequate disclosures about growth prospects prior to the initial public offering.

Google's new patent give-away plan will definitely help some entrepreneurs get off the ground. But it probably won't be all the effective against patent trolls.

MY FORTUNE BOOKMARKS

This is what drives Apple investors nuts about Amazon by Phillip Elmer-DeWitt

The century-old tech that ensures train safety by David Z. Morris

This billion dollar market didn't even exist five years ago by John Gaudiosi

Starbucks wants your phone as much as it wants to sell you coffee by John Kell

LinkedIn just changed this very popular feature—and people are complaining by Benjamin Snyder

ONE MORE THING

How Salesforce addresses gender-based pay inequity? One employee at a time. “This is not a one-time fix. This is part of the work we will be doing annually,” the company's human resources chief, Cindy Robbins, told The New York Times.

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)

.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)

FutureStack: Define your future with New Relic. (Nov. 11 - 13; San Francisco)