Month: August 2018

Reaching event organizers to help them sell tickets isn’t cheap. Eventbrite — the 12-year-old, San Francisco-based ticketing company that announced plans last week to go public and sell $200 million worth of shares on the NYSE — has been losing money since 2016, posting losses of $40.4 million in 2016, $38.5 million for 2017 and $15.6 million so far this year.

Now the company is trying to make up for some of those losses by announcing a new pricing scheme. Today, it sent customers a note explaining that for those using its “Essentials” package (unlike its “Professional” package, whose bells and whistles include customer support, customer questions for attendees and more), reduced prices are coming for many of its customers. Specifically, payment processing fees are dropping from 3 percent to 2.5 percent. Fees for ticket are falling from .99 cents to .70 cents.

The moves don’t really mean that Eventbrite is charging less. In fact, instead of charging one percent of every ticket price as a service fee, Eventbrite will now take a 2 percent cut, which should add up for organizers that use the service for bigger events. It’s also removing a service fee cap of $19.99 that it used to institute no matter how much an event organizer was charging.

Asked about the pricing changes, a spokesperson sent us a fairly bland statement: “At Eventbrite we have always been committed to enabling event creators to deliver a diverse range of live experiences by offering a superior product at a fair price. The changes we announced today will mean lower ticket fees for the vast majority of our creators, and the millions of people that attend the events they plan, promote and produce each year. We succeed when our creators succeed and this change is indicative of a focus on ensuring we make the best decisions for the majority of our customers.”

It isn’t surprising that Eventbrite is looking for ways to fight rising acquisition costs owing to the competition it faces from all corners. In addition to platforms for smaller get-togethers like Paperless Post and competition for bigger events like Ticketmaster (which owns Live Nation), Eventbrite acknowledged in its S-1 filing that it could face competition from large internet companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter, too.

Eventbrite had reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO back in July. As noted on TechCrunch’s “Equity” podcast last week by Susan Mac Cormac, a partner at the global law firm Morrison Foerster, companies often file confidentially first if they are exploring other options, including, most notably, M&A.

“These unicorns,” says Mac Cormac, “it’s difficult for them to go public because they have such a huge valuation to begin with that M&A is often a better option. You don’t want to go out and have your stock fall 30, 40, 50 percent as sometimes happens.”

Partly through acquisitions, Eventbrite saw its revenue rise from $133 million in 2016 to $201 million last year. Last year, for example, Eventbrite acquired Ticketfly, a ticketing company that focused largely on the live entertainment industry and which had sold to the streaming music company Pandora in 2015 for a reported $335 million but Eventbrite was able to nab last year at the discounted price of $200 million.

Eventbrite has also made a broader international push in recent years, acquiring Ticketea, one of Spain’s leading ticketing providers, back in April, and acquiring Amsterdam-based Ticketscript back in January of last year. And those deals followed roughly half a dozen others.

Over the years, the company has raised roughly $330 million from investors, according to Crunchbase. Its biggest shareholders, shows its S-1, are Tiger Global Management, Sequoia Capital and T. Rowe Price. Collectively, the three entities own roughly half of Eventbrite’s pre-IPO shares.

It’s no surprise that political discourse in America is divided — especially online. And last week in MIT Technology Review, data visualization company Graphika brought those divides to life with 3D, colored depictions of the kind of filter bubbles found on Twitter in the U.S.

Co-written by Graphika’s CEO John Kelly and the company’s research director Camille François, the graphics imagine Twitter users as colored orbs (larger or smaller depending on their follower sizes) and groups them depending on who follows whom.

The authors told TechCrunch that to create these particular data visualizations they used data from about 13,500 of the best connected accounts following members of Congress and national-level official political party accounts. Other starting places, such as singular states or grassroots parties, also illustrated these looming national echo chambers the authors said.

The visuals help bring into stark realization some predictable trends. For example, there is essentially zero crossover in followers between extreme Trump supporters and people who are extremely anti-Trump. The progressive movement is strongest in its connections between Democrats and left-wing journalists, but has some connections on the conservative sphere, as well.

Progressive Data

One interesting point that the graphic does bring into focus is that, despite our preconceptions of either the entire left or the entire right representing a singular ideology, in fact it’s primarily accounts on the far edge of these groups who do most of the talking. The authors point out that for some of these accounts, the high and identical numbers of tweets point toward a bot instead of an actual user.

This kind of polarization is exactly what makes it possible for bad outside actors (like Russia) to influence political discourse and action in a social sphere. Instead of targeting the middle of the spectrum — where users are generally quieter and generally less strictly partisan in their views — these actors can engage with polarized communities, gain their trust and introduce new or exacerbating ideologies.

“It’s the digital equivalent of moving to an isolated and tight-knit community, using its own language quirks and catering to its obsessions, running for mayor, and then using that position to influence national politics,” the authors write.

If these data point to anything, it’s that it’s time we begin to value listening over talking.

“The extremes are screaming while the center whispers,” the authors told TechCrunch.

It’s human nature to want to confirm your beliefs with those who agree with you, especially in times of uncertainty or fear. However, by retreating to echo chambers that are being infiltrated with bad actors we’re doing nobody a favor, least of all our selves.

Toyota is investing $500 million into Uber. Under the agreement, Toyota vehicles will be equipped with Uber’s self-driving technology, an unnamed source familiar with the deal told TechCrunch.

The investment was first reported by the WSJ. TechCrunch confirmed the Toyota-Uber agreement with a source familiar with the deal. Uber declined to comment on the deal.

Unlike Uber’s partnership with Volvo, the ride-hailing company will not own these vehicles, according to the source. It’s unclear if Toyota will operate these autonomous vehicles or if another third-party, such as a fleet operator, will.

Toyota already has a relationship with Uber, albeit not as closely as under this new arrangement. Toyota announced at CES in January that it is working with Amazon, ride-hailing companies Uber and Didi, automaker Mazda, and Pizza Hut to develop an electric autonomous shuttle that can be used to deliver people or the packages. The business alliances were created to focus on the development of the new e-Palette Concept Vehicle in the near term.

Toyota also has a research arm, the Toyota Research Institute that is based in California. TRI debuted its first generation autonomous vehicle in March 2017. It’s Platform 2.1 vehicle, revealed just a few months later, features light ranging and detection radar developed by Silicon Valley startup Luminar.

Toyota (and by extension TRI) have a different deployment strategy for autonomous vehicles than its competitors. The company has previously said it plans to take a dual approach to autonomy that it calls “Guardian” and “Chauffeur,” both of which use the same technology stack.

Toyota’s idea is to develop fully autonomous cars to serve an aging population and the disabled as well as work on technology for regular production cars that could switch between assisted and full autonomy. This “guardian” technology would operate silently in the background.

In Facebook’s latest high profile departure, corporate communications lead Rachel Whetstone will leave for a top PR role at Netflix. Whetstone joined Facebook about a year ago after leaving a similar position running communications at Uber during some of the company’s most fraught days. Prior to Uber, Whetstone worked for Google as its SVP of communications and public policy.

Facebook confirmed Whetstone’s departure, which was first reported by Recode. “It’s been amazing to be able to learn from one of the best over this last year,” FB Comms VP Caryn Marooney said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “We are grateful for what Rachel has brought to our team and we know she will have continued success at Netflix”.

Whetstone won’t be leaving Facebook for another few months still as the company prepares for the transition. After her departure, Caryn Marooney will return to leading Facebook’s global communications team, a role she shared during Whetstone’s time with the company.

In a separate statement today, Netflix welcomed its new hire. “Rachel is a proven communications leader and a strong addition to the Netflix team,” said Netflix CEO Reed Hastings in a statement. “Her deep knowledge and international expertise will be invaluable as we bring Netflix and its expanding lineup of original content to an increasingly global audience.”

At Netflix, Whetstone will replace former PR head Jonathan Friedland who created his own PR crisis at the company earlier this summer when he was fired for his use of a racial slur.

At least 2 million people in the U.S. become infected with so-called “super bugs” and at least 23,000 people die as a direct result of these infections each year, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Now, HP’s Biohacker technology is working with the CDC on a pilot program to “print” and test antibiotics in an effort to catch these antimicrobial resistant strains from spreading faster.

The HP D300e Digital Dispenser BioPrinter technology works by using the same set up as a regular ink printer but instead dispenses any combination of drugs in volumes from picoliters to microliters to be used for research purposes.

Part of the reason these bugs spread so rapidly often comes down to mis-use of antibiotics, leading the bacteria to develop a resistance to the drugs available. The CDC hopes to give hospital providers access to the technology nationwide to cut down on the problem.

“Once a drug is approved for use, the countdown begins until resistance emerges,” Jean Patel, PH.D. D (ABMM), Science Team Lead, Antibiotic Resistance Coordination and Strategy Unit at CDC said in a statement. “To save lives and protect people, it is vital to make technology accessible to hospital labs nationwide. We hope this pilot will help ensure our newest drugs last longer and put gold-standard lab results in healthcare providers’ hands faster.”

The 3D bioprinting sector has been experiencing rapid growth over the last few years and will continue on pace through the next decade, mainly due to R&D, according to market researchers. Innovation in the space includes printing of organs, human tissue and drug research and development.

Further, this potentially valuable antibiotic resistance research could help patient care teams stem a grim future where we experience a regression in health and life spans due to no longer having the ability to treat currently curable diseases.

The HP BioPrinter is currently used by labs and pharmaceutical companies such as Gilead, which tests for drugs used against the Ebola virus. It is also being used in various CRISPR applications. The CDC will use these printers in four regional areas spread throughout the U.S. within the Antibiotic Resistance (AR) Lab Network to develop antimicrobial susceptibility test methods for new drugs, according to HP.

Ipsy, the beauty box subscription service and e-commerce site founded in 2011 by YouTube creator Michelle Phan, is expanding its business beyond sample-sized products. The company today is debuting a more expensive “Glam Bag Plus” subscription, which will ship customers five full-sized products for $25 per month.

The move aims to capitalize on Ipsy’s established customer base who now trust Ipsy’s beauty products recommendations to the point they’re willing to pay upfront for full-sized products, instead of only samples with the option to later shop online for the products they liked.

It may also help attract a new customer who doesn’t find value in samples – which are sometimes one-use products, or packaged poorly compared with their full-size counterparts, making them difficult to travel with or throw in a purse.

So far, Ipsy’s curation has been succeeding – it touts over 3 million subscribers, compared with rival Birchbox’s over 2.5 million.

Ipsy, for what it’s worth, tends to offer better samples than Birchbox, now majority owned by hedge fund Viking Global Investors, after some financial struggles.

Birchbox shipments are often too reliant on less valuable items, like single-use makeup wipes, tiny eyeshadows without a reliable protective case, or totally hit-or-miss perfume samples, for example. Ipsy, meanwhile, sends out full-sized makeup brushes and other full-sized items along with samples on a regular basis. It also prioritizes makeup products over hair and skin care items in its curation.

Plus, it ships products in a reusable makeup travel bag (which, frankly, is great for when you need to unload some of your less-loved samples on friends).

With the new Glam Bag Plus, customers will have the option of paying a little more – $25 per month instead of $10 – for a selection of full-sized products, which would normally retail for $120.

The company says it will work with brands like Sunday Riley, Ciaté London, Purlisse, Morphe, Tarte Cosmetics, Buxom, and others.

As before, the exact mix of products shipped will be based on subscribers’ beauty profile. Today, Ipsy creates over 10,000 different makeup combinations in its monthly Glam Bag memberships, it says, because of this personalization.

The Plus service will also ship out a deluxe (read: larger) makeup bag on the first delivery, then every third delivery afterwards, as part of its subscription.

The new service will better cater to skin and hair care companies, and especially to newer brands that may not offer a wide ranges of samples at this time, but still want to be able to reach Ipsy’s millennial subscriber base.

Initially, existing Glam Bag subscribers will be able to switch over to the Plus tier of service, which will ship its first bag in October.

However, the company is advising customers that it has limited quantities of Glam Bag Plus products, so if they choose to later downgrade back to the sample Glam Bag, they may end up on a waitlist if they decide later they want to re-join Plus.

Ipsy also says it’s not set up right now to handle customers who want both memberships, so those who do should create a second account as a workaround.

Ipsy’s co-founder Michelle Phan left the startup last fall to run online makeup site EM Cosmetics, but Ipsy itself remains profitable – and it has been for several years. The company’s real value is not the money to be made on the subscription business itself, but rather in helping beauty brands reach social media influencers and YouTube stars, whose makeup tutorials and recommendations help them to gain exposure.

While Ipsy, like many in the subscription business, won’t talk about its critical business metrics like churn or margins, the company believes the Plus subscription will do well because it’s something members have been requesting for some time. It also surveyed the user community and ran focus groups ahead of this product’s launch, it told Glossy.

The subscription will become available to more customers in the future, says Ipsy.

Hangouts Chat, Google’s business-focused Slack competitor is getting emoji reactions. That’s a feature that Slack has long had, so if anything, today’s move makes Hangouts Chat even more Slack-like than before.

Hangouts Chat, you may remember, is very different from Hangouts, Google’s chat app for regular users which at one point was supposed to be superseded by Allo. But then Allo failed and so the future of Hangouts remains uncertain. Hangouts isn’t getting emoji reactions today, though, that’s Hangouts Chat.

There’s really not much more to be said about this new feature. It works just like you’d expect and just like in Slack, this update allows you to now quickly add a thumbs-up emoji to all those comments in Hangouts Slack Chat that you couldn’t care less about but where internal politics dictate that you should say something (or, in Google-speak: “communication styles at work are evolving, and expressive communication modes are oftentimes preferred over simple text”). You could also use them for a quick internal poll or to acknowledge a request where typing ‘yes’ would’ve felt like too much work.

Either way, these new emoji reactions are now rolling out to all G Suite users. Google expects that everybody will have access to them within the next three days.

T-Mobile has revealed an uptick in the number of demands for data it receives from the government.

The cellular giant quietly posted its 2017 transparency report on August 14, revealing a 12 percent increase in the number of overall data demands it responded to compared to the previous year.

The report said the company responded to 219,377 subpoenas, an 11 percent rise on 2017. These demands were issued by federal agencies and do not require any judicial oversight. The company also responded to 55,372 court orders, a 13 percent rise, and 27,203 warrants, a rise of 19 percent.

But the number of wiretap orders — which allow police to listen in to calls in real time — went down by half on the previous year.

A spokesperson for T-Mobile told TechCrunch that the figures reflect a “typical increase of legal demands across the board” and that the increases are “consistent with past years.”

Although the results reveal more requests for customer data, the transparency report did not say how many customers were affected.

T-Mobile has 77 million users as of its second-quarter earnings.

Several tech companies began publishing how many government requests for customer data they received since Google’s debut report in 2010. But it was only after the Edward Snowden disclosures in 2013 that revealed mass surveillance by the National Security Agency when tech companies and telcos began regularly publishing transparency reports, seen as an effort to counter the damaging claims that companies helped the government spy.

T-Mobile became the last major cell carrier to issue a transparency report two years later in 2015.

The company also said that it responded to 64,266 requests by law enforcement for customers’ historical cell site data. That data became the focal point of the U.S. vs. Carpenter case earlier this year, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement must obtain a warrant for historical cell and location data. That figure is expected to fall during the 2018 reporting year as the new bar to obtain a court-signed warrant is higher.

T-Mobile also said it received 46,395 requests to track customers’ real-time location, and 4,855 warrants and orders for tower dumps, which police can use to obtain information on all the nearby devices connected to a cell tower during a particular period of time.

But the number of national security requests received declined during 2017.

The number of national security letters used by federal agents to obtain call records in secret and the number of orders granted by the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were each below 1,000 requests for the full year.

Tech companies and telcos are highly restricted in how they can report the number of classified orders demanding customer data in secret, and can only report in ranges of requests they received.

Since the Freedom Act was signed into law in 2015, the Justice Department began allowing companies to report in narrower ranges.

Autonomous vehicle startup AutoX has launched a grocery delivery and mobile store pilot in a partnership with GrubMarket.com and local high-end grocery store DeMartini Orchard.

The pilot will initially be limited to an area of about 400 homes in north San Jose. The company, which employees nearly 90 people, has just two autonomous vehicles that will be used for the initial launch. Eventually, AutoX aims to expand the pilot west to Mountain View and Palo Alto, with more delivery partners joining soon.

Once customers in the prescribed area have downloaded the app, they can make an order. For now, these orders must be placed the day before delivery. Or, when the AutoX car arrives, the window rolls down to reveal AutoX’s selections from which customers can choose.

The idea is to offer two shopping experiences with self-driving cars, AutoX COO Jewel Li explained in a statement. Customers can order goods from an app and get them delivered by a self-driving vehicle. Or the self-driving vehicle can bring a shelf of goods that customers can pick and choose from right outside their house.

Unlike many other startups racing to deploy autonomous vehicles, AutoX is focused on delivering things, not people.

“We don’t think it makes sense for people to drive around these two-ton vehicles to go pick up an apple,” AutoX director of business and operations Hugo Fozzati told TechCrunch. “These errands are creating congestion and a ton of pollution. We want to focus on something that’s going to have a lot of impact.”

The company, which launched in September 2016, has raised $43 million from strategic and financial investors. AutoX is based in San Jose and also has offices in China.

Of course, AutoX is hardly the only autonomous vehicle delivery company to emerge in the past two years. Starship Technologies, Mountain View, Calif.-based Nuro, Robomart and Chinese retail powerhouse, Alibaba are just a few that have unveiled their own vision for autonomous delivery.

The pilot is the first step in AutoX founder and CEO Jianxiong Xiao’s mission to open up autonomous vehicles to everyone. It’s a goal the company contends can be reached using economical (and better) hardware. The company does use light detection and ranging radar, known as LiDAR. But instead of loading up its self-driving vehicles with numerous expensive LiDAR units, AutoX relies more on cameras, which it argues have better resolution. The company’s proprietary AI algorithms tie everything together.

“It’s the first step of our mission to democratize autonomy, also a testament to our cutting edge AI and all its potential capabilities,” Xiao said about the pilot program. “We believe self-driving car technologies will fundamentally change people’s daily lives for the better.”

VMware is hosting its VMworld customer conference in Las Vegas this week, and to get things going it announced that its acquiring Boston-based CloudHealth Technologies. They did not disclose the terms of the deal, but Reuters is reporting the price is $500 million.

CloudHealth provides VMware with a crucial multi-cloud management platform that works across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, giving customers a way to manage cloud cost, usage, security and performance from a single interface.

Although AWS leads the cloud market by a large margin, it is a vast and growing market and most companies are not putting their eggs in a single vendor basket. Instead, they are looking at best of breed options for different cloud services.

This multi-cloud approach is great for customers in that they are not tied down to any single provider, but it does create a management headache as a consequence. CloudHealth gives multi-cloud users a way to manage their environment from a single tool.

CloudHealth multi-cloud management. Photo: CloudHealth Technologies

VMware’s chief operating officer for products and cloud services, Raghu Raghuram, says CloudHealth solves the multi-cloud operational dilemma. “With the addition of CloudHealth Technologies we are delivering a consistent and actionable view into cost and resource management, security and performance for applications across multiple clouds,” Raghuram said in a statement.

CloudHealth began offering support for Google Cloud Platform just last month. CTO Joe Kinsella told TechCrunch why they had decided to expand their platform to include GCP support: “I think a lot of the initiatives that have been driven since Diane Greene joined Google [at the end of 2015] and began really driving towards the enterprise are bearing fruit. And as a result, we’re starting to see a really substantial uptick in interest.”

It also gave them a complete solution for managing across the three of the biggest cloud vendors. That last piece very likely made them an even more attractive target for a company like VMware, who apparently was looking for a solution to buy that would help customers manage across a hybrid and multi-cloud environment.

The company had been planning future expansion to manage not just the public cloud, but also private clouds and data centers from one place, a strategy that should fit well with what VMware has been trying to do in recent years to help companies manage a hybrid environment, regardless of where their virtual machines live.

With CloudHealth, VMware not only gets the multi-cloud management solution, it gains its 3000 customers which include Yelp, Dow Jones, Zendesk and Pinterest.

CloudHealth was founded in 2012 and has raised over $87 million. Its most recent round was a $46 million Series D in June 2017 led by Kleiner Perkins. Other lead investors across earlier rounds have included Sapphire Ventures, Scale Venture Partners and .406 Ventures.