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Concert promoters are set to use legendary American songwriter Tom Waits in a bid to tackle ticket touts.
Organisers will demand fans provide photographic ID before allowing them entry to Waits' show at Edinburgh's Playhouse venue at the weekend (27/28Jul08).
The move will prevent people buying tickets in bulk and selling them at a higher price through the web or outside the venue - as the names on the tickets will have to match that of the photo identification.
It is the first time the new stringent measures have been applied in Scotland, and the Waits gig promoters insist it is a necessary move to fight touting and prevent fans from paying too much for shows.
But revellers who have bought legitimate tickets for the show on Sunday (28Jun08) don't agree with the strict measures - insisting they should have the right to sell on tickets they have purchased.
One fan tells the BBC, "These tickets aren't cheap, so why should they be prevented from selling something on, at face value, that they have already paid for?
"You're entitled to sell other goods you purchase, so I have some difficulty with a blanket ban on reselling of tickets at face value."


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The Saigon Industry Corporation (CNS) released plans to build an integrated circuit factory in Vietnam, at a seminar titled “Electronic Chip Production in Vietnam” held in Ho Chi Minh City on June 30.
CNS gave an overall picture of the semi-conductor industry in the world and Vietnam in particular at the seminar. It also showed the necessity of building an electronic chip factory in Vietnam to meet with today’s industrialization and modernization. The factory will be built at an estimated cost of US$190 million.
CNS also called on the government to adopt preferential policies regarding tax and investment capital.
Nguyen Van Dua, Permanent Deputy Secretary of the HCM City Party Committee, underlined the significance of the project, which would contribute greatly to the country’s industrial development.
The seminar, hosted by CNS, drew some 60 domestic and foreign professors, experts and businesses.
CNS, which started operations in 2006, is a diversified group with key products including Craven A cigarettes, mechanical products, computers and chemicals.

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Downtown Kincardine closed to traffic on weekends
The table is set for a new look in downtown Kincardine on weekends.
Speaking for the BIA and the District Chamber of Commerce, Community development officer Jenna Ujiya brought forward the idea of closing Queen St. to traffic from Durham Market north to Lambton St. from Fridays at 5pm until Sunday at 9pm. The timeframe for this would be July 4 to Sept. 7. It was approved by Kincardine Council.
Said Ujiya of the effects of Covid 19 on downtown businesses and the economic impact on them “it cannot be understated”. Closed, or operating at a significantly-reduced rate for the past 3 months, many businesses are hurting. And now that they can open, it has been difficult to support the current public health restrictions, and those to come, such as physical distancing, especially lining up outside stores on the narrow sidewalks.
A staggering 60 percent of businesses were at risk of closure at year-end, according to a Kincardine Business Pandemic survey, and without some changes such as this one proposed, “we are at risk of losing a significant number of businesses in the downtown core, devastating the local economy” said Ujiya.
As part of the road closure, some concerns such as distancing, queing, and passing by stores will be addressed, in keeping with the recommended guidelines for public safety such as five people allowed in the stores at once. As well, the guidelines already in place for outdoor patio experiences (including alcohol consumption) will be adhered to. Said Ujiya “this provides opportunity for our businesses to survive while they operate at 50 percent capacity or less, to (what is presumed to be) a significantly reduced tourist crowd, while also keeping both their employees and their patrons safe.”
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The 64 residents and businesses that responded to a survey (40 percent of the downtown businesses, not including many office owners who may not be affected either way), are hopeful that the street closure and the “market feel”, not to mention the larger space for patrons and diners to move around, will help their businesses. Most of them were in favour of a two to three day closure in the aforementioned block of stores. A 14 foot clearance for emergency and public works vehicles was requested by services representing the same, as well as businesses otherwise affected by this, on Harbour St.
Parking and accessibility were concerns whereby 40 parking spaces, including 4 designated for disability would be closed. Extra spaces could be accommodated if need be by the individual stores. Also taken into account was the possibility of more things opening up as the summer progresses such as Monday Market in the park. In this specific case, the 3 day closure would extend into Monday, adding patronage to Queen St. stores.
All in all, downtown Kincardine will have a different feel for a while, but we are all becoming accustomed to change. Please remember to support local businesses, and enjoy a “roomier” shopping and dining experience this summer.


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WASHINGTON -- A sharper-than-expected decline in industrial production in January was reported by the government yesterday, casting a pall over a glimmer of economic recovery reported just 24 hours earlier.
The 0.9 percent drop in January production was deeper and wider than the markets had expected, based on the already-known poor employment figures. Economists expected a January production decline of around 0.5 percent, mainly because of the slumping auto industry.
Yesterday's report was particularly disappointing, coming as it did just one day after reports that retail sales rose last month and auto sales improved early this month.
"The recovery obviously isn't ahead of schedule. If anything, it's behind schedule," said Murray Weidenbaum, chief economic adviser to President Ronald Reagan during the early 1980s and currently director of the Center for the Study of American Business at Washington University in St. Louis.
The government also reported yesterday that wholesale prices fell 0.3 percent in January, the second straight monthly decline, giving an early indication of the trend in retail prices and suggested that inflation remains under control.
Wholesale gasoline prices dropped 7 percent, the biggest decline in 10 months, and wholesale food prices fell 0.3 percent.
"I think the inflation outlook for the full year is a very bright one because there is excess capacity in almost every industry," said Paul Getman, who also noted increasing international competition and declining wage increases. "People can't afford to pay big price increases for goods, autos, houses," he said.
Although the drop in industrial output was the third in as many months and was the steepest in nearly a year, analysts said it could be lagging other, more hopeful, economic developments.
"It is behind the curve," said Mr. Getman, economist and managing director of Regional Financial Associates in Westchester, Pa. "It leaves me with the impression that the worst is over. There is no doubt, I think, that consumers are starting to spend again, and that's the necessary precondition for a recovery."
Thursday, more reassuring figures -- a 0.6 percent boost in retail sales and a decline in new unemployment claims -- gave the first real hint of an economic upturn. Domestic automakers also reported Thursday that sales of new cars and light trucks in the first 10 days of February were 23.8 percent higher than in the same period last year.
That report contrasted with yesterday's production figures, which showed a 12.7 percent drop in auto production last month, partly because of a winter storm in Detroit and seasonal layoffs.
William F. Treacy, chief economist with MNC Financial Inc., the Baltimore holding company that owns Maryland National Bank and American Security Bank, was particularly struck by the breadth of the production downturn, which included textiles, chemicals and industrial equipment.
U.S. factories were operating at an 8 1/2 -year low of 78 percent of capacity last month, down from 78.8 percent in December. It showed businesses were not yet convinced that consumers were ready to start serious buying, he said.
"I think it leaves us still expecting it is going to take some months before this recovery really gathers much momentum," Mr. Treacy said.
"I think we will see gradual, gradual improvement, probably in fits and starts, between now and the middle of the year. By the middle of the year, I think we will be starting to see significant improvement."
Samuel D. Kahan, chief economist with Fuji Securities in Chicago, said the latest figures suggested the economy was still "on hold," leaving the Federal Reserve Board with the "very difficult judgment" on whether to reduce interest rates further.
The National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors called for further credit easing by the Fed and said a survey of 267 wholesale executives showed only a "modest" 1 percent upturn in its confidence index, to 88.4 from 87.4, the first increase since the fourth quarter of 1990.


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AUSTIN, Texas, Jun 14, 2013 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- CSID, the global leader in identity protection and fraud detection technologies and solutions, recently conducted a survey to determine how small businesses under 100 employees are responding to the unique cyber security risks they face, what types of valuable data they store, and what challenges they face when it comes to implementing a plan for breach preparedness. The survey results demonstrate a lack of action to protect against security risks, despite large amounts of personal employee and customer data being stored. Most notably, the survey revealed:
-- Only 12 percent of small businesses have a data breach preparedness plan in place or are currently working on one
-- More than half (55 percent) of the small businesses surveyed store Social Security Numbers, 80 percent store email addresses and phone numbers, and 70 percent store home addresses for employees, customers and/or partners
-- Nearly 25 percent of small businesses stated that budget was a main obstacle for focusing on cyber security, while 43 percent of survey respondents were already comfortable with their current cyber security measures
"Small businesses own a lot of sensitive data, but aren't as prepared or knowledgeable about protecting it as they should be. With the prevalence of BYOD and cloud practices in today's small business cyber landscape, small businesses should understand the risks they face with protecting their data and how to mitigate them," said Bryan Hjelm, vice president of product and marketing at CSID. "Our goal here is to educate and empower small business owners to protect their consumers and keep their businesses healthy."
Small businesses are increasingly at risk for cyber attacks and breach. According to a 2012 study conducted by Symantec, 31 percent of cyber attacks were aimed at businesses with 250 employees or fewer, compared to 18 percent in 2011. The Ponemon Institute recently reported that more than 50 percent of small-to-medium sized businesses experienced a data breach in 2012.
CSID will host a webinar on June 18 at 12 p.m. CDT during National Small Business Week to discuss why small businesses are at risk in today's cyber landscape and share cost-effective measures that businesses can take to protect themselves from risk. Panelists will include small business and security experts from SpareFoot, Rackspace and the National Cyber Security Alliance. Register here to attend the webinar.
CSID is the leading provider of global identity protection and fraud detection technologies for businesses, their employees, and consumers. With CSID's advanced enterprise-level solutions, businesses can take a proactive approach to protecting the identities of their consumers all around the world. CSID's comprehensive identity protection products advance from credit monitoring to include a full suite of identity monitoring services; insurance and full-service restoration; identity authentication and voice biometrics; and proactive breach mitigation and resolution. For more information, visit www.csid.com. Join CSID on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/CSID and on Twitter at @CSIdentity.
INK for CSID Helen Murphy, 512-382-8988 firstname.lastname@example.org
Copyright Business Wire 2013


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National Fish & Chips Day: Peterborough shops still need your support
As we celebrate National Fish & Chips Day today (August 4) chippies across Peterborough say they still need the support of the public.
With the easing of lockdown, many people in the city have flocked back to their favourite outlets serving Britain’s most iconic takeaway, with many ‘chippies’ having found new ways to connect with their communities.
However, many outlets in the city say that there is still a long way to go until business returns to normal levels.
One particular problem has been competition from the Government’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme.
The scheme, which offered a 50 per cent discount on food and non-alcohllic drinks three nights a week across August, proved so popular that many restaurants have pledged to extend it beyond Monday’s deadline.
However, many local chip shops with no eat-in facilities do not qualify for the scheme and face increased competition, forcing business owners to be a little more creative.
Marcus Smith, who runs Netherton Fisheries said: “We’ve started a delivery service as we really wanted to help out some of the older members of the community and those shielding, it’s gone really well.
“We’ve also created a new website where customers can order online and ‘pick up in store’ and have launched a new gluten free range, available on mondays. We’ve had great feedback from our community.”
Netherton Fisheries have also been running a competition every day this week on their Facebook page to give away two free fish suppers.
Clancy’s of Eye have adopted a similar policy with owner Robert Cockerill running weekly competitions and fun riddles to keep the customers coming in.
He said: “Things are slowly returning to normal, all the suppliers are open again now and that makes things easier.
“We never really closed, just moved to three days a week. We now operate a call and collect service as I don’t think fish and chips travels well, we don’t want to compromise on the quality of our food.
“We are also offering free chips with any purchase to mark the day and encourage the local community to support us.”
A national survey of 2,000 UK adults carried out by UKCaravans4hire.com recently found that the while 59 percent of Brits say cod is their go to choice, mushy peas is the most popular sauce to accompany it.
The survey found that 25 percent preferred mushy peas, with curry sauce polling 19 percent and gravy 8.3.
Robert added: “Fish is definitely the best seller and still a favourite of the public, especially on a friday night but we pride ourselves on our curry sauce and that has proven very popular.”
While many seek a return to normal, there is a general acceptance that the Covid-19 pandemic will have a lasting affect on the takeaway industry.
BJ’s Plaice in Orton say they has seen the percentage of their orders that are deliveries rise to 90 percent.
A representative said: “ We are all adjusting the the new normal and I think people are used to it now. There’s much more demand for deliveries and I can’t see things ever going completely back to the way they were. We’re ok as trade it still good, which is helped by selling kebabs as well.”
Last year, the PR campaign around National Fish and Chip Day led to shops reporting record footfall and local outlets would massively benefit from this being repeated and they seek to get back on their feet after lockdown.


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GlaxoSmithKline has invested $139 million to expand its Rockville, Maryland, manufacturing site. GSK is hoping to meet an increased demand for its lupus drug Benlysta as the expansion would allow the company to boost production of a substance used in several of its drugs, including Benlysta, by about 50 percent. The expansion is not expected to create any new full-time jobs.
GSK is expecting a U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval for its self-injectable Benlysta in the second half of 2017, which will complement its intravenous version that has reached a reported $377 million in U.S. sales in 2016.
Read the Washington Business Journal report


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New Year's Eve has always been difficult for the foodtech majors as delays become inevitable with the surge in online demand. The difficulty of the task this year has again multiplied with multiple state governments implementing night curfews. To cater to this and resolve any issues, brands are taking an array of measures.
“We have an understanding of demand patterns during night curfews and the same is incorporated in every aspect of the business including demand-supply planning and delivery partner availability,” said a Swiggy spokesperson.
Additionally, the company has completed hyperlocal demand-supply planning and identified the specific slots which would see an increase in demand due to early ordering patterns.
“Delivery partners’ incentives and schemes are also tailored to satisfy this early ordering pattern,” said the Bengaluru-based company.
Swiggy’s hotline service for delivery partners will aim to resolve any on-ground issues.
“All partner apps also have the SOS button in case of any emergencies. We had implemented a 360-degree well-being and protection plan called Swiggy Suraksha earlier this year and the same will continue to be available for our partners,” said Swiggy in an e-mailed query.
"We see new benchmarks being set every year as this category grows and more and more people rely on food delivery on this special day. We expect this year to be no different and are fully geared for it," said a Zomato spokesperson.
Zomato’s employees will be pitching in to deliver orders this New Year’s Eve, said the company. Last year, Zomato received more than 4,600 orders in a minute and the company expects it to be more this year.
“Besides, we have always had emergency SOS services for our delivery partners in case of SOS support and roadside assistance. We are also working with the authorities to ensure our delivery partners are equipped with the right road safety and COVID-19 gear,” said the company in a statement.
Amid rising COVID-19 cases, night curfews have been implemented in a number of states including Karnataka, Delhi, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Kerala.
“December is generally the best month for the food services market. But, with the cases rising, the dine-in segment is bound to see a setback. Our business after COVID-19 saw a pivot with online gaining more prominence and we were seeing a 50:50 ratio between offline and online. But, during New-Years Eve, we are sure online orders will surge,” said Sagar Daryani, co-founder and CEO of Wow! Momo and vice president, National Restaurant Association of India (NRAI).
Wow! Momo outlets across the country will be open till wee hours in the morning to cater to the online order surge during the week. The company is also arranging carpool services for its delivery fleet as well as other employees, as it predicts that online orders will go on till late night which may create a hassle for the workers to return.
According to a recent report by the Retailers Association of India, quick-service restaurants (QSRs) witnessed 29 percent sales growth in November 2021, compared to the 5 percent during the same period in 2019 (pre-pandemic). Fine-dining restaurants, too, were near the pre-pandemic numbers in November 2021 and were looking to strengthen the numbers in December.


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Decisions by France and Germany to build domestic battery plants for electric vehicles will drive down the costs of the technology in HGVs, according to industry analysts.
The announcement by the two European countries that they will invest in battery cell production plants in their own countries in order to protect the industry from Asian rivals, comes as Volvo Trucks handed over its first two fully electric lorries to companies in Germany.
A refuse truck was delivered to waste and recycling company Renova and a distribution vehicle was handed over to DB Schenker; both will be operated in Gothenburg.
The two FL Electric models are part of a pre-series developed in collaboration with selected customers by the truck maker.
France has pledged to invest up to €700m (£600m) to build a domestic battery plant for electric vehicles (EV) and it follows Germany’s announcement in November 2018 that it would do something similar to help supply the European automotive industry.
- DAF Trucks continues trials of all-electric CF truck for urban operations
- Electric vehicles pave the way for micro distribution strategies
- DPD UK opens its first all-electric last-mile delivery depot
A spokeswoman at analysts Fitch Solutions said Volvo would be assembling its electric trucks at Renault’s factory in France, “so the battery technology will most likely be the same in Renault trucks.”
She said: “As such, the production cost of an electric truck should benefit from the economies of scale.
“In the case of Volvo, the Volvo Group stated that it wants to share the costs of expensive technologies across the group to take advantages of wider cost distribution.”
The Fitch Solutions spokeswoman added: “We believe the introduction of more EV battery production plants in the EU will create more competitive pricing for batteries as vehicle manufacturers will be able to source EV batteries from a number of players.
“While electric buses and trucks use slightly different battery cells - larger and heavier - than passenger vehicles, we expect the overall cost of the battery technology to decrease.”Freight in the City Expo page ≫


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Haircuts today are the same as they were in the 1950s, said Angelo DiPietro. They’re a “high end military cut.” The styles keep coming back.
DiPietro, 76, of Cortlandville, has been cutting hair since he was 18, when he got out of high school, for almost 58 years.
“I opened the shop here in 1961,” he said.
DiPietro and his wife, Benita, 69, are licensed barbers at Angelo’s Barber Shop at 34 Hubbard St., the site of Angelo’s parent’s grocery — DiPietro’s Grocery Store.
The shop is full of Cortland memorabilia — Ronnie James Dio posters, pictures of the former Clocktower, the grocery shop in its heyday, Cortland County Historical Society books and a 1940-era calendar.
“Ronnie Dio — he always came here when he came into town,” said Angelo DiPietro. “We grew up together in the neighborhood,” he said of the late rock singer, born Ronald James Padavona, one of Cortland’s superstars.
“I do old-fashioned regular cuts,” he said. He’s seen the Beatles’ bowl cuts, the long hair styles on men, mohawks and etchings onto scalps.
DiPietro did an etching of the word, “dome,” for his son in the ’90s when the teen went to a basketball game in Syracuse. He can’t remember what the occasion was. “It was a long time ago.”
He just did a lightning bolt etching for a kid. “I really don’t do that any more,” he said.
DiPietro does “farm cuts, regular cuts … It doesn’t matter. When you do it so many years, it doesn’t matter.”
“People ask me, when will he retire,” Benita said. “When we bury him.”
“I enjoy the people,” Angelo DiPietro said.
Angelo DiPietro, left, and his wife, Benita DiPietro.
Benita DiPietro has been a barber and stylist for 12 years, securing the barber license required so she can shave necks and faces, as well as styling, coloring and cutting.
“It’s nice to have an old barber shop here,” she said. “It’s like the days of Andy Griffith.”
They get last-minute calls: going to the prom, to a wedding: Can we get our hair done?” said Benita. “If we can do it, we’ll do it.”
“I come up frequently,” said Jae Harris of Houston, who moved out of the area after a lifetime in Homer. “I retain my hairdresser and my doctors.”
She’ll be back in February for her dad’s birthday and hit up her dentist. She was here in December and got her hair done by Benita.
“I really like her. I get a color and a trim, sometimes a cut. I am pushing 60. I need that. I know they say that age is just a number, but come on.”
The shop is “really cool,” she said. “It’s so family,” she said. “I like hearing about the family. What the kids are doing. I hear about the relatives.”
She likes the feeling of nostalgia in the shop.
Angelo DiPietro, left, and his wife, Benita DiPietro.Ang DiPietro and his wife Bonita DiPietro have the clock hand from the original Cortland clocktower at their barber shop on Hubbard Street.
“It’s small-time stuff. I miss that living in Houston. It’s a big city and it can feel very empty,” Harris said. The barbershop is a sanctuary. “It’s a sense of community. It’s really important. That’s why I make a point to come back here.”
The DiPietro’s customer base ranges the spectrum. There’s not any one part of society they can care for and they do children on up to people in their late 80s and early 90s. They work Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, accepting “drop ins” as well as appointments.
Benita said she was worried about working so closely with her husband at first. She used to work as a decorator and home decor host and cared for the couple’s children. “He would work all day. I used to work at 5 … When I decided to do this, well, he can’t fire me. It’s really not bad. We get along good, 47 years,” she said.
“It’s easy. It goes in one ear and out the other,” Ang DiPietro joked.
Fred Lutz of Homer has been a customer of Ang DiPietro’s about 25 years. On Jan. 3, he was at the shop to return a keyboard he borrowed. The barber has a passion for computers.
Lutz’s cut: “Take it all off,” he said. “I am getting to the point where I could shave my head.”
There’s a lot of nostalgia here,” Lutz said. “He’s been in business a long time … There used to be a lot of barbershops around. Now, not so many.”
Lutz noted that Ang DiPietro’s older brother operates a barbershop in Homer, in back of Dasher’s.
“I came down to chat,” Lutz said. “It’s the barbershop, the news source. We talk about what moves into town, what moves out of town, what’s going on. ‘How was your New Year’s.’”
There wasn’t any news on this particular day, but people were streaming into the shop and conversations reached a hubbub as the barbers got to work. There is no typical day. There could be five customers, there could be 25, Benita said.
“Stick around, you learn a lot,” Lutz said.
Benita said if the conversation turns to politics, she just listens. “I don’t get into politics.
Benita said men talk about women yak-yak-yakking. “They are just as bad as women.”


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TikTok tests new ‘nearby’ feature to allow more personalised feeds - what is it and how to use
and live on Freeview channel 276
Social media platform TikTok is testing a new ‘nearby’ feature which will allow users to find local restaurant recommendations as well as users who live in their area. A number of TikTok users are currently testing out the feature which allows them to view videos posted by those nearby, a spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch.
The TikTok spokesperson said: "We’re always thinking about new ways to bring value to our community and enrich the TikTok experience.”
The new feature was first reported by social media consultant Matt Navarra, with many marketing experts then chiming in about the rollout. In a tweet, Navarra said: “TikTok is working on a new ‘Nearby’ / ‘Local’ feed.
“This is in conjunction with a new option giving creators the ability to add a location tag to videos. TikTok is playing catch-up with Snapchat’s Snap map and Instagram’s recently launched searchable photo map features.”
The new feature comes just weeks after TikTok introduced a new addition known as Series. The feature allows content creators to monetise 20-minute videos by placing them behind a paywall.
TikTok ‘nearby’ feature - how to use
Currently, TikTok’s ‘nearby’ feature is only available to a select number of users in southeast Asia. If the trial is a success, new function could be rolled out to users across the world in the next few months.
For those who have access to the new tool, it can be found next to the "Following" and "For You" feeds at the top of the app’s home page. By clicking the "Nearby" option, users will gain access to the local feed.


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The first of Bethesda's three planned DLCs for Dishonored is due out in December, and it includes a lot of new gameplay features.
Bethesda announced a while back that it would be releasing three DLC packs for it's critically acclaimed game Dishonored, and the first one is just around the corner. On December 11, Dunwall City Trials will be released for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC at a price of $5, and will focus on adding new gameplay modes and achievements, as opposed to offering up more story missions. The new features will include a wave battle mode, achievements, drop assassination chains and time trials.
Notice the angled ceiling lamps… curious, quite curious.
The other two DLC packs will go on sale in 2013, the first one hitting in the spring and will be focusing on Daud, the leader of the supernatural assassins in the game. Details on the final DLC won't be revealed until closer to it's release, but Bethesda has announced that the two later DLC's will be more story driven than Dunwall City Trials


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Whip out the finger buns and party poppers, it’s time to welcome some new hires!
World Expeditions Travel Group Appoints Virginia Haddon to Manage PR for Key Brands
World Expeditions Travel Group (WETG) has appointed seasoned communications and marketing specialist, Virginia Haddon, to manage public relations for three niche brands, including its fast-growing European active travel brand, UTracks.
As well as UTracks, Virginia will be responsible for public relations for WETG’s school groups and youth brand, World Youth Adventures and its charity brand, Huma Charity Challenge.
Virginia is a travel industry veteran, having worked for more than 20 years devising and executing successful, complex campaigns and developing collaborative relationships across a wide range of sectors including travel, food and wine, and wellbeing.
Her most recent roles included managing the media for Luxperience and running her own consultancy, Cascade Communications.
Fusion Appoints New Vice President of Operations
After more than three decades in the hospitality industry, including 20 years managing hotels in Thailand, Samir Wildemann has moved east to Vietnam where he’s joined the Fusion hospitality group as vice president of operations.
Fusion is planning to open several new properties in the next two years including two hotels in Saigon, one in Vung Tau, and a new resort in Quang Binh. They recently completed two major expansion projects at existing resorts in Phu Quoc and Cam Ranh. Wildemann will help refine and enhance Fusion’s luxury experience at all Fusion properties.
The German-native’s most recent role was as general manager and senior vice president for Southeast Asia at Siam Kempinski Hotel, a position he held for three years from 2015 – 2018. He has held the position of Corporate Executive Officer at Okura Hotels & Resorts and opened The Okura Prestige Bangkok (2010 – 2015) and with Carlson Rezidor Bangkok (2008 – 2010).
TripAdvisor Appoints Kanika Soni as President of the Company’s Hotels Business Unit
TripAdvisor has announced that Kanika Soni will join the company as president of the hotels business unit, effective April 15. In this role, Soni will oversee TripAdvisor’s hotels business, representing a substantial part of the company’s total revenue. She will be responsible for product, engineering, sales and marketing for hotels.
Soni will report to Stephen Kaufer, TripAdvisor president and CEO, and will focus on building a future-focused strategy to ensure TripAdvisor’s continued growth and profitability in a rapidly shifting, increasingly complex and competitive global landscape.
MSC Cruises announce new appointments
MSC Cruises has today announced that Alessandro Guerreri has been appointed Managing Director of its Australasia business, overseeing local operations and commercial activities across this high-potential market.
Alessandro joins from MSC Cruises Head Office Geneva, Switzerland where he was most recently Business Unit Director On Board Retail, Casino, Spa, Photo & Other Revenues and a member of the Company’s senior management team.
After nine years as Managing Director, Australasia, where she oversaw the development and growth of MSC Cruises in this region, Lynne Clarke takes the position of MSC Cruises’ Chairman for the same.
With her great cruise industry experience, passion and knowledge of the local market, in her new role Lynne will oversee MSC Cruises’ relations with local institutions, maritime relevant entities and other stakeholders, seeking to advance opportunities for the Company.


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Mobilicity, a Canadian wireless carrier currently in creditor protection, plans to buy new radio airwaves with the help of a $65 million debt offering.
Mobilicity, the brand name of Data & Audio Visual Enterprises Wireless Inc., will participate in a government auction for AWS-3 spectrum set to begin in March, according to a court filing.
tap here to see other videos from our team.
Without Mobilicity’s involvement, Wind Mobile would have been the only company qualified to bid on blocks of spectrum set aside for smaller carriers in Ontario, British Columbia and Alberta. Wind hasn’t confirmed its participation in the auction but has said its plans include buying new spectrum. If it does, the two companies could push up the price with competing bids.
Wind Mobile’s CEO ready to bulk up network regardless of M&A opportunities
BCE Inc looks to solidify retail footprint with $594M purchase of Glentel Inc
The Canadian government is working to encourage a fourth national wireless carrier to compete with Telus Corp., BCE Inc. and Rogers Communications Inc., which together control 90% of subscribers.
Nick Anstett, a spokesman for Mobilicity, declined to comment beyond the court filing. A spokesman for Wind didn’t respond to a request for comment.
–With assistance from Scott Deveau in Toronto.


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Despite its relatively staid presence in industrialized regions like the United States and Western Europe, the toilet could stand a technological makeover. Three up-and-coming industrial designers may have found just the thing that the modern toilet needs to remain abreast of technological innovation, as they recently demonstrated with an award-winning prototype for a new kind of toilet that subtly reconfigures the user's posture while providing a plethora of biometric feedback.
In honor of World Toilet Day last month, three students from Central St Martin’s College at the University of Arts London — Sam Sheard, Pierre Papet, and Victor Johansson — took part in a competition that was put on by the U.K.-based plumbing company Dyno-Rod Drains. The objective? To design "the toilet of the future" and help "raise awareness on how we can upgrade the current 130 year old flush toilet to one that benefits our health and the environment."
Their winning prototype, the "wellbeing toilet," introduces many high-tech innovations to the modern can — Johansson and Papet said that it could eventually be used to analyze a user's waste to monitor for health defects such as diabetes or kidney diseases, and could even provide information about nutritional deficiencies or pregnancy.
But the real "game-changer" that the trio wanted to bring to the wellbeing toilet was something far more basic, Johansson and Papet told NBC News in an email. Being students of industrial design, they were most interested in reconfiguring the basic shape of the toilet into a sort of hybrid between the chair-like structure of modern toilets and angular position of "squat toilets."
"The sitting position is wrong" in modern toilet design in most Western countries, Johansson said. "The natural position for a human to sit is in a squatting position." Most modern toilets push users into a 90-degree upright sitting position much like the one people adopt when, say, sitting at a desk or dinner table.
This position, Johansson said, "is obstructing the bowels" whenever people go to the bathroom, which can lead to many health problems such as constipation to more serious colon infections.
The problem with trying to redesign something like a toilet, however, is that "it is incredibly difficult to introduce something new" since, like many basic pieces of furniture like chairs or tables, it's "something most people use all the time without giving it much consideration," Papet said.
"If you asked a toilet customer in the UK if he would consider buying a squatting toilet he would laugh at you," he added.
The design they settled on, therefore, attempts to subtly nudge users into "overcoming these apprehensions and help get them into a


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"7-Eleven is the world's number one convenience retailer and one of the largest beer retailers in the U.S. – from larger, better-known brands, to craft breweries we help support. We look forward to providing our Ontario customers the same service through beer & wine retailing that's on the horizon. In our discussions with Ontario craft brewers, we understand that showcasing their products in our stores, and having availability to our customers is a welcomed opportunity.
Access to our retail network is open to all beer & wine producers. These positive changes will provide exceptional convenience and choice to our Ontario customers." -- Doug Rosencrans, Vice President & General Manager, 7-Eleven Canada Inc.
What do you do when a city has basketball fever but lacks the facilities to treat the fever? Two Canadian retail brands took matters into their own hands.
Construction begins today on Espace Montmorency, Laval's largest ever mixed-used project. This brand new $450 million urban hub will be located in the heart of Laval and will be directly connected to Montréal's underground network via the Montmorency metro station. With an impressive offering of offices, cafés, restaurants, a hotel, residential units and inviting green spaces, the community and visitors will enjoy a vibrant new space. The project's champions, MONTONI and the Fonds immobilier de solidarité FTQ, are pleased to welcome a brand new partner, Groupe Sélection, for the development and construction of the residential portion, which will integrate three different types of living spaces to serve the needs of a diverse intergenerational clientele.
The 21 unionized workers employed at the government-run cannabis outlet in Rosemont have unanimously voted themselves a strike mandate, the Presse Canadienne has learned.
With a Choom Cannabis Co. store set to open in Niagara Falls Saturday, the owner says a recent national survey is indicative of the "buzz in the market place" when it comes to the "positive effects of cannabis and CBD (cannabidiol)."


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Modisette v. Apple Inc.Annotate this Case
The Modisettes were traveling in their car on Interstate 35W in Denton County, Texas. Wilhelm was also driving on I-35, while using the FaceTime application on his Apple iPhone. Wilhelm crashed into the Modisettes’ car, which had stopped due to police activity. The accident caused severe injuries to each of the Modisettes; Moriah, age five, subsequently died. Police found Wilhelm’s iPhone at the scene with FaceTime still activated. The Modisettes sued, alleging that Apple’s failure to design the iPhone to lock out the ability of drivers to use the FaceTime application while driving resulted in their injuries. The complaint incorporated data that show the compulsive/addictive nature of smartphone use and concerning the number of accidents that involve smartphone use. They alleged that Apple had failed to warn users and that Apple applied for a patent for its lockout technology in 2008, to disable the ability of a handheld computing device to perform certain functions, such as texting, while one is driving. The patent issued in 2014. Apple released Wilhelm’s iPhone 6 model in September 2014; FaceTime was a “factory-installed, non-optional application.” The court of appeal affirmed the dismissal of the action. Apple did not owe the Modisettes a duty of care. The Modisettes cannot establish that Apple’s design of the iPhone constituted a proximate cause of their injuries.


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May PMI falls to 44.8
By ECCT staff writers
Taiwan's manufacturing purchasing managers' index (PMI) fell 2.8 points month-on-month to 44.8 in May, owing to the impact from the coronavirus pandemic, according to a report by the Chung-Hua Institution for Economic Research (CIER).
May’s PMI was the lowest since July 2012 when the think tank began recording the index, according to CIER.
Among the five major sub-indexes in the PMI, new orders, production, and employment showed the steepest monthly declines since 2012, CIER said.
The sub-index on new business orders fell to 35.9, the reading on industrial output slumped to 36.8 and the measure on new export orders tumbled to 34.4. In addition, firms reduced headcount levels, accounting for a 3.2 point drop in the employment sub-index, according to CIER.
However, inventory levels stayed high, which CIER attributed to fears of potential supply chain disruptions. In addition, the six-month outlook index in the manufacturing sector rebounded to 30.8 in May, an increase of 5.1 from 25.7 in April.
Meanwhile, Taiwan's non-manufacturing index (NMI) also contracted May from a year earlier, standing at 45.2, although it was 2.7 higher than in April, according to CIER.
Among the eight major areas in the NMI, only the hotel/restaurant sector expanded in May, increasing to 59.7, according to the data.


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Google has inked a deal with India’s third-largest telecom operator as the American giant looks to grow its cloud customer base in the key overseas market that is increasingly emerging as a new cloud battleground for AWS and Microsoft .
Google Cloud announced on Monday that the new partnership, effective starting today, enables Airtel to offer G Suite to small and medium-sized businesses as part of the telco’s ICT portfolio.
Airtel, which has amassed over 325 million subscribers in India, said it currently serves 2,500 large businesses and over 500,000 small and medium-sized businesses and startups in the country. The companies did not share details of their financial arrangement.
In a statement, Thomas Kurian, chief executive of Google Cloud, said, “the combination of G Suite’s collaboration and productivity tools with Airtel’s digital business offerings will help accelerate digital innovations for thousands of Indian businesses.”
The move follows Reliance Jio, India’s largest telecom operator, striking a similar deal with Microsoft to sell cloud services to small businesses. The two announced a 10-year partnership to “serve millions of customers.”
AWS, which leads the cloud market, interestingly does not maintain any similar deals with a telecom operator — though it did in the past. Deals with carriers, which were very common a decade ago as tech giants looked to acquire new users in India, illustrates the phase of the cloud adoption in the nation.
Nearly half a billion people in India came online last decade. And slowly, small businesses and merchants are also beginning to use digital tools, storage services, and accept online payments. According to a report by lobby group Nasscom, India’s cloud market is estimated to be worth more than $7 billion in three years.
Like in many other markets, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are locked in an intense battle to win cloud customers in India. All of them offer near identical features and are often willing to pay out a potential client’s remainder credit to the rival to convince them to switch, industry executives have told TechCrunch.
Zendesk acquired Base CRM in 2018 to give customers a CRM component to go with its core customer service software. After purchasing the company, it changed the name to Sell, and today the company announced the launch of the new Sell Marketplace.
Officially called The Zendesk Marketplace for Sell, it’s a place where companies can share components that extend the capabilities of the core Sell product. Companies like MailChimp, HubSpot and QuickBooks are available at launch.
App directory in Sell Marketplace. Screenshot: Zendesk
Matt Price, SVP and general manager at Zendesk, sees the marketplace as a way to extend Sell into a platform play, something he thinks could be a “game changer.” He likened it to the impact of app stores on mobile phones.
“It’s that platform that accelerated and really suddenly [transformed smart phones] from being just a product to [launching an] industry. And that’s what the marketplace is doing now, taking Sell from being a really great sales tool to being able to handle anything that you want to throw at it because it’s extensible through apps,” Price explained.
Price says that this ability to extend the product could manifest in several ways. For starters, customers can build private apps with a new application development framework. This enables them to customize Sell for their particular environment, such as connecting to an internal system or building functionality that’s unique to them.
In addition, ISVs can build custom apps, something Price points out they have been doing for some time on the Zendesk customer support side. “Interestingly Zendesk obviously has a very large community of independent developers, hundreds of them, who are [developing apps for] our support product, and now we have another product that they can support,” he said.
Finally, industry partners can add connections to their software. For instance, by installing Dropbox for Sell, it gives sales people a way to save documents to Dropbox and associate them with a deal in Sell.
Of course, what Zendesk is doing here with Sell Marketplace isn’t new. Salesforce introduced this kind of app store concept to the CRM world in 2006 when it launched AppExchange, but the Sell Marketplace still gives Sell users a way to extend the product to meet their unique needs, and that could prove to be a powerful addition.
After appointing a new CEO and CFO last summer, cloud infrastructure provider DigitalOcean is embarking on a wider reorganisation: the startup has announced a round of layoffs, with potentially between 30 and 50 people affected.
DigitalOcean has confirmed the news with the following statement:
“DigitalOcean recently announced a restructuring to better align its teams to its go-forward growth strategy. As part of this restructuring, some roles were, unfortunately, eliminated. DigitalOcean continues to be a high-growth business with $275M in [annual recurring revenues] and more than 500,000 customers globally. Under this new organizational structure, we are positioned to accelerate profitable growth by continuing to serve developers and entrepreneurs around the world.”
Before the confirmation was sent to us this morning, a number of footprints began to emerge last night, when the layoffs first hit, with people on Twitter talking about it, some announcing that they are looking for new opportunities, and some offering help to those impacted. Inbound tips that we received estimate the cuts at between 30 and 50 people. With around 500 employees (an estimate on PitchBook) that would work out to up to 10% of staff affected.
It’s not clear what is going on here — we’ll update as and when we hear more — but when Yancey Spruill and Bill Sorenson were respectively appointed CEO and CFO in July 2019 (Spruill replacing someone who was only in the role for a year), the incoming CEO put out a short statement that, in hindsight, hinted at a refocus of the business in the near future.
“My aspiration is for us to continue to provide everything you love about DO now, but to also enhance our offerings in a way that is meaningful, strategic and most helpful for you over time,” he said at the time.
The company provides a range of cloud infrastructure services to developers, including scalable compute services (“Droplets” in DigitalOcean terminology), managed Kubernetes clusters, object storage, managed database services, Cloud Firewalls, Load Balancers and more, with 12 datacenters globally. It says it works with more than 1 million developers across 195 countries. It’s also been expanding the services that it offers to developers, including more enhancements in its managed database services, and a free hosting option for continuous code testing in partnership with GitLab.
All the same, as my colleague Frederic pointed out when DigitalOcean appointed its latest CEO, while developers have generally been happy with the company, it isn’t as hyped as it once was, and is a smallish player nowadays.
And in an area of business where economies of scale are essential for making good margins on a business, it competes against some of the biggest leviathans in tech: Google (and its Google Cloud Platform), Amazon (which as AWS) and Microsoft (with Azure). That could mean that DigitalOcean is either trimming down as it talks investors for a new round; or to better conserve cash as it sizes up how best to compete against these bigger, deep-pocketed players; or perhaps to start thinking about another kind of exit.
In that context, it’s notable that the company not only appointed a new CFO last summer, but also a CEO with prior CFO experience. It’s been a while since DigitalOcean has raised capital. According to PitchBook, DigitalOcean last raised money in 2017, an undisclosed amount from Mighty Capital, Glean Capital, Viaduct Ventures, Black River Ventures, Hanaco Venture Capital, Torch Capital and EG Capital Advisors. Before that, it took out $130 million in debt, in 2016. Altogether it has raised $198 million and its last valuation was from a round in 2015, $683 million.
We’ll update this post as we learn more. Best wishes to those affected by the news.
Epsagon, an Israeli startup that wants to help monitor modern development environments like serverless and containers, announced a $16 million Series A today.
U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), a new investor, led the round. Previous investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and StageOne Ventures also participated. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $20 million, according to the company.
CEO and co-founder Nitzan Shapira says that the company has been expanding its product offerings in the last year to cover not just its serverless roots, but also giving deeper insights into a number of forms of modern development.
“So we spoke around May when we launched our platform for microservices in the cloud products, and that includes containers, serverless and really any kind of workload to build microservices apps. Since then we have had a few several significant announcements,” Shapira told TechCrunch.
For starters, the company announced support or tracing and metrics for Kubernetes workloads including native Kubernetes along with managed Kubernetes services like AWS EKS and Google GKE. “A few months ago, we announced our Kubernetes integration. So, if you’re running any Kubernetes workload, you can integrate with Epsagon in one click, and from there you get all the metrics out of the box, then you can set up a tracing in a matter of minutes. So that opens up a very big number of use cases for us,” he said.
The company also announced support for AWS AppSync, a no-code programming tool on the Amazon cloud platform. “We are the only provider today to introduce tracing for AppSync and that’s [an area] where people really struggle with the monitoring and troubleshooting of it,” he said.
The company hopes to use the money from today’s investment to expand the product offering further with support for Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform in the coming year. He also wants to expand the automation of some tasks that have to be manually configured today.
“Our intention is to make the product as automated as possible, so the user will get an amazing experience in a matter of minutes including advanced monitoring, identifying different problems and troubleshooting,” he said
Shapira says the company has around 25 employees today, and plans to double headcount in the next year.
Cyral, an early-stage startup that helps protect data stored in cloud repositories, announced an $11 million Series A today. The company also revealed a previous undisclosed $4.1 million angel investment, making the total $15.1 million.
The Series A was led by Redpoint Ventures. A.Capital Ventures, Costanoa VC, Firebolt, SV Angel and Trifecta Capital also participated in on the round.
Cyral co-founder and CEO Manav Mital says the company’s product acts as a security layer on top of cloud data repositories — whether databases, data lakes, data warehouse or other data repository — helping identify issues like faulty configurations or anomalous activity.
Mital says that unlike most security data products of this ilk, Cyral doesn’t use an agent or watch points to try to detect signals that indicate something is happening to the data. Instead, he says that Cyral is a security layer attached directly to the data.
“The core innovation of Cyral is to put a layer of visibility attached right to the data endpoint, right to the interface where application services and users talk to the data endpoint, and in real time see the communication,” Mital explained.
As an example, he says that Cyral could detect that someone has suddenly started scanning rows of credit card data, or that someone was trying to connect to a database on an unencrypted connection. In each of these cases, Cyral would detect the problem, and depending on the configuration, send an alert to the customer’s security team to deal with the problem, or automatically shut down access to the database before informing the security team.
It’s still early days for Cyral, with 15 employees and a handful of early access customers. Mital says for this round he’s working on building a product to market that’s well-designed and easy to use.
He says that people get the problem he’s trying to solve. “We could walk into any company and they are all worried about this problem. So for us getting people interested has not been an issue. We just want to make sure we build an amazing product,” he said.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today we’re continuing our exploration of companies that have reached material scale, usually viewed through the lens of annual recurring revenue (ARR). We’ve looked at companies that have reached the $100 million ARR mark and a few that haven’t quite yet, but are on the way.
Today, a special entry. We’re looking at a company that isn’t yet at the $100 million ARR mark. It’s 60% of the way there, but with a twist. The company is bootstrapped. Yep, from pre-life as a consultancy that built a product to fit its own needs, Cloudinary is cruising toward nine-figure recurring revenue and an IPO under its own steam.
Google Cloud today announced the launch of its premium support plans for enterprise and mission-critical needs. This new plan brings Google’s support offerings for the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in line with its premium G Suite support options.
“Premium Support has been designed to better meet the needs of our customers running modern cloud technology,” writes Google’s VP of Cloud Support, Atul Nanda. “And we’ve made investments to improve the customer experience, with an updated support model that is proactive, unified, centered around the customer, and flexible to meet the differing needs of their businesses.”
The premium plan, which Google will charge for based on your monthly GCP spent (with a minimum cost of what looks to be about $12,500 per month), promises a 15-minute response time for P1 cases. Those are situations when an application or infrastructure is unusable in production. Other features include training and new product reviews, as well as support for troubleshooting third-party systems.
Google stresses that the team that will answer a company’s calls will consist of “content-aware experts” that know your application stack and architecture. Like with similar premium plans from other vendors, enterprises will have a Technical Account manager who works through these issues with them. Companies with global operations can opt to have (and pay for) technical account managers available during business hours in multiple regions.
The idea here, however, is also to give GCP users more proactive support, which will soon include a site reliability engineering engagement, for example, that is meant to help customers “design a wrapper of supportability around the Google Cloud customer projects that have the highest sensitivity to downtime.” The Support team will also work with customers to get them ready for special events like Black Friday or other peak events in their industry. Over time, the company plans to add more features and additional support plans.
As with virtually all of Google’s recent cloud moves, today’s announcement is part of the company’s efforts to get more enterprises to move to its cloud. Earlier this week, for example, it launched support for IBM’s Power Systems architecture, as well as new infrastructure solutions for retailers. In addition, it also acquired no-code service AppSheet.
Google announced today that it is buying AppSheet, an eight-year-old no-code mobile-application-building platform. The company had raised more than $17 million on a $60 million valuation, according to PitchBook data. The companies did not share the purchase price.
With AppSheet, Google gets a simple way for companies to build mobile apps without having to write a line of code. It works by pulling data from a spreadsheet, database or form, and using the field or column names as the basis for building an app.
It is integrated with Google Cloud already integrating with Google Sheets and Google Forms, but also works with other tools, including AWS DynamoDB, Salesforce, Office 365, Box and others. Google says it will continue to support these other platforms, even after the deal closes.
As Amit Zavery wrote in a blog post announcing the acquisition, it’s about giving everyone a chance to build mobile applications, even companies lacking traditional developer resources to build a mobile presence. “This acquisition helps enterprises empower millions of citizen developers to more easily create and extend applications without the need for professional coding skills,” he wrote.
In a story we hear repeatedly from startup founders, Praveen Seshadri, co-founder and CEO at AppSheet, sees an opportunity to expand his platform and market reach under Google in ways he couldn’t as an independent company.
“There is great potential to leverage and integrate more deeply with many of Google’s amazing assets like G Suite and Android to improve the functionality, scale, and performance of AppSheet. Moving forward, we expect to combine AppSheet’s core strengths with Google Cloud’s deep industry expertise in verticals like financial services, retail, and media and entertainment,” he wrote.
Google sees this acquisition as extending its development philosophy with no-code working alongside workflow automation, application integration and API management.
No code tools like AppSheet are not going to replace sophisticated development environments, but they will give companies that might not otherwise have a mobile app the ability to put something decent out there.
The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here.
VMware is closing the year with a significant new weapon in its arsenal. (I restrained myself from using a “pivotal” pun here. You’re welcome.)
The acquisition — first announced in August — helps the company in its transformation from a pure virtual machine supplier into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside the acquisitions of Heptio and Bitnami, two other deals that closed this year.
The company told us that starting early next year, it will stop selling political ads: “At this point in time, we do not yet have the necessary level of robustness in our processes, systems and tools to responsibly validate and review this content.”
The last episode of the first season of “The Mandalorian” went live on Disney+ on Friday, and showrunner Jon Favreau wasted very little time confirming when we can expect season two of the smash hit to land: next fall.
The last 12 months served as a grande finale to 10 years that saw triple-digit increases in startup formation and VC on the continent. Here’s an overview of the 2019 market events that capped off a decade in African tech.
Maxar’s goal in selling the business is to help alleviate some of its considerable debt. The purchasing entity is a consortium of companies led by private investment firm Northern Private Capital, which will acquire the entirety of MDA’s Canadian operations — responsible for the development of the Canadarm and Canadarm2 robotic manipulators used on the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station, respectively.
Lucas Matney argues that as is so often the case with the next big thing in tech, cloud streaming is much more likely to become the next big feature of a more traditional platform, rather than the entire platform itself. (Extra Crunch membership required.)
Equity took the week off, but we kept Original Content going with a review of Netflix’s new fantasy show “The Witcher.”
The acquisition gives VMware another component in its march to transform from a pure virtual machine company into a cloud native vendor that can manage infrastructure wherever it lives. It fits alongside other recent deals like buying Heptio and Bitnami, two other deals that closed this year.
They hope this all fits neatly into VMware Tanzu, which is designed to bring Kubernetes containers and VMware virtual machines together in a single management platform.
“VMware Tanzu is built upon our recognized infrastructure products and further expanded with the technologies that Pivotal, Heptio, Bitnami and many other VMware teams bring to this new portfolio of products and services,” Ray O’Farrell, executive vice president and general manager of the Modern Application Platforms Business Unit at VMware, wrote in a blog post announcing the deal had closed.
Craig McLuckie, who came over in the Heptio deal, and is now VP of R&D at VMware, told TechCrunch in November at KubeCon, that while the deal hadn’t closed at that point, he saw a future where Pivotal could help at a professional services level, as well.
“In the future when Pivotal is a part of this story, they won’t be just delivering technology, but also deep expertise to support application transformation initiatives,” he said.
Up until the closing, the company had been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange, but as of today Pivotal becomes a wholly-owned subsidiary of VMware. It’s important to note that this transaction didn’t happen in a vacuum where two random companies came together.
In fact, VMware and Pivotal were part of the consortium of companies that Dell purchased when it acquired EMC in 2015 for $67 billion. While both were part of EMC and then Dell, each one operated separately and independently. At the time of the sale to Dell, Pivotal was considered a key piece, one that could stand strongly on its own.
Pivotal and VMware had another strong connection. Pivotal was originally created by a combination of EMC, VMware and GE (which owned a 10% stake for a time) to give these large organizations a separate company to undertake transformation initiatives.
The future looked bright at that point, but life as a public company was rough and after a catastrophic June earnings report, things began to fall apart. The stock dropped 42 percent in one day. As I wrote in an analysis of the deal:
The stock price plunged from a high of $21.44 on May 30th to a low of $8.30 on August 14th. The company’s market cap plunged in that same time period falling from $5.828 billion on May 30th to $2.257 billion on August 14th. That’s when VMware admitted it was thinking about buying the struggling company.
VMware came to the rescue and offered $15.00 a share, a substantial premium above that August low point. As of today, it’s part of VMware.
Salesforce turned 20 this year, and the most successful pure enterprise SaaS company ever showed no signs of slowing down. Consider that the company finished the year on an $18 billion run rate, rushing toward its 2022 revenue goal of $20 billion. Oh, and it also spent a tidy $15.7 billion to buy Tableau this year in the most high-profile and expensive acquisition it’s ever made.
Co-founder, chairman and CEO Marc Benioff published a book called Trailblazer about running a socially responsible company, and made the rounds promoting it. In fact, he even stopped by TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco in September, telling the audience that capitalism as we know it is dead. Still, the company announced it was building two more towers in Sydney and Dublin.
It also promoted Bret Taylor just last week, who could be in line as heir apparent to Benioff and co-CEO Keith Block whenever they decide to retire. The company closed the year with a bang with a $4.5 billion quarter. Salesforce, for the most part, has somehow been able to balance Benioff’s vision of responsible capitalism while building a company makes money in bunches, one that continues to grow and flourish, and that’s showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon.
The company just keeps churning out good quarters. Here’s what this year looked like:
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
Today, something short. Continuing our loose collection of looks back of the past year, it’s worth remembering two related facts. First, that this time last year SaaS stocks were getting beat up. And, second, that in the ensuing year they’ve risen mightily.
If you are in a hurry, the gist of our point is that the recovery in value of SaaS stocks probably made a number of 2019 IPOs possible. And, given that SaaS shares have recovered well as a group, that the 2020 IPO season should be active as all heck, provided that things don’t change.
Let’s not forget how slack the public markets were a year ago for a startup category vital to venture capital returns.
We’re depending on Bessemer’s cloud index today, renamed the “BVP Nasdaq Emerging Cloud Index” when it was rebuilt in October. The Cloud Index is a collection of SaaS and cloud companies that are trackable as a unit, helping provide good data on the value of modern software and tooling concerns.
If the index rises, it’s generally good news for startups as it implies that investors are bidding up the value of SaaS companies as they grow; if the index falls, it implies that revenue multiples are contracting amongst the public comps of SaaS startups.*
Ultimately, startups want public companies that look like them (comps) to have sky-high revenue multiples (price/sales multiples, basically). That helps startups argue for a better valuation during their next round; or it helps them defend their current valuation as they grow.
Given that it’s Christmas Eve, I’m going to present you with a somewhat ugly chart. Today I can do no better. Please excuse the annotation fidelity as well:
Yesterday, Adobe submitted its quarterly earnings report and the results were quite good. The company generated a tad under $3 billion for the quarter at $2.99 billion, and reported that revenue exceeded $11 billion for FY 2019, its highest ever mark.
“Fiscal 2019 was a phenomenal year for Adobe as we exceeded $11 billion in revenue, a significant milestone for the company. Our record revenue and EPS performance in 2019 makes us one of the largest, most diversified, and profitable software companies in the world. Total Adobe revenue was $11.17 billion in FY 2019, which represents 24% annual growth,” Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told analysts and reporters in his company’s post-earnings call.
Adobe made a couple of key M&A moves this year that appear to be paying off, including nabbing Magento in May for $1.7 billion and Marketo in September for $4.75 billion. Both companies fit inside its “Digital Experience” revenue bucket. In its most recent quarter, Adobe’s Digital Experience segment generated $859 million in revenue, compared with $821 million in the sequentially previous quarter.
Obviously buying two significant companies this year helped push those numbers, something CFO John Murphy acknowledged in the call:
“Key Q4 highlights include strong year-over-year growth in our Content and Commerce solutions led by Adobe Experience Manager and success with cross-selling and up-selling Magento; Adoption of Adobe Experience Platform, Audience Manager and Real-Time CDP in our Data & Insights solutions; and momentum in our Marketo business, including in the mid-market segment, which helped fuel growth in our Customer Journey Management solutions.”
All of that added up to growth across the Digital Experience category.
But Adobe didn’t simply buy its way to new market share. The company also continued to build a suite of products in-house to help grow new revenue from the enterprise side of its business.
“We’re rapidly evolving our CXM product strategy to deliver generational technology platforms, launch innovative new services and introduce enhancements to our market-leading applications. Adobe Experience Platform is the industry’s first purpose-built CXM platform. With real-time customer profiles, continuous intelligence, and an open and extensible architecture, Adobe Experience Platform makes delivering personalized customer experiences at scale a reality,” Narayan said.
Of course, the enterprise is just part of it. Adobe’s creative tools remain its bread and butter with the Creative tools accounting for $1.74 billion in revenue and Document Cloud adding another $339 million this quarter.
The company is talking confidently about 2020, as its recent acquisitions mature and become a bigger part of the company’s digital experience offerings. But Narayan feels good about the performance this year in digital experience: “When I take a step back and look at what’s happened during the year, I feel really good about the amount of innovation that’s happening. And the second thing I feel really good about is the alignment across Magento, Marketo and just call it, the core DX business in terms of having a more unified and aligned go-to-market, which has not only helped our results, but it’s also helped the operating expense associated with that business,” he said.
It is no small feat for any software company to surpass $11 billion in trailing revenue. Consider that Adobe, which was founded in 1982, goes back to the earliest days of desktop PC software in the 1980s. Yet it has managed to transform into a massive cloud services company over the last five years under Narayan’s leadership and flourish there.
Salesforce announced today that it has named Bret Taylor as president and chief operating officer of the company. Prior to today’s promotion, Taylor held the position of president and chief product officer.
In his new position, Taylor will be responsible for a number of activities including leading Salesforce’s global product vision, engineering, security, marketing and communications. That’s a big job, and as such he will report directly to chairman Marc Benioff.
Taylor has had increasing responsibilities over the last couple of years, taking the lead on many of Salesforce’s biggest announcements at Dreamforce, the company’s massive yearly customer conference. In fact, Benioff said in a statement that Taylor has already been responsible for product vision, development and go-to-market strategy prior to today’s promotion.
“His expanded portfolio of responsibilities will enable us to drive even greater customer success and innovation as we experience rapid growth at scale,” Benioff said in the statement.
Brent Leary, founder at CRM Essentials, who has been watching the company since its earliest days, says it feels like this could be part of succession plan down the road. This promotion could be a signal that Taylor is being groomed to take over for Benioff and co-CEO Keith Block whenever they decide to move on.
“It’s been feeling like he’s being groomed for the big chair somewhere down the line. He’s a generation behind the current leadership, but his experiences at startups and creating iconic technologies at iconic companies uniquely positioned him for a move like this at a company like Salesforce,” Leary told TechCrunch.
Taylor came to Salesforce when the company purchased Quip in August 2016 for $750 million. He was promoted to president and chief product officer in November 2017. Prior to launching Quip he was chief technology officer at Facebook.
Google Cloud today announced Transfer Service, a new service for enterprises that want to move their data from on-premise systems to the count. This new managed service is meant for large-scale transfers on the scale of billions of files and petabytes of data. It complements similar services from Google that allow you to ship data to its data centers via a hardware appliance and FedEx or to automate data transfers from SaaS applications to Google’s BigQuery service.
Transfer Service handles all of the hard work of validating your data’s integrity as it moves to the cloud. The agent automatically handles failures and use as much available bandwidth as it can to reduce transfer times.
To do this, all you have to do is install an agent on your on-premises servers, select the directories you want to copy and let the service do its job. You can then monitor and manage your transfer jobs from the Google Cloud console.
The obvious use case for this is archiving and disaster recovery. But Google is also targeting this at companies that are looking to lift and shift workloads (and their attached data), as well as analytics and machine learning use cases.
As with most of Google Cloud’s recent product launches, the focus here is squarely on enterprise customers. Google wants to make it easier for them to move their workloads to its cloud and for most workloads, that also involves moving lots of data as well.
Atlassian has a portfolio of developer tools like Bitbucket, Jira and Confluence. It also has a marketplace with hundreds of add-ons, but what it lacked was a development platform to call its own. Today, that changed when the company announced the Forge platform.
“Forge will empower developers to more easily build and run enterprise-ready cloud apps that integrate with Atlassian products,” the company wrote in a blog post announcing the new tools.
The platform consists of three main components. For starters, it’s providing a serverless Function as a Service (FaaS) for developers to build hosted applications on Forge without worrying about the underlying infrastructure resources required to run the applications. The tool is actually built on AWS Lambda, AWS’s FaaS.
This should allow more developers to get involved because it strips away a layer of complexity around managing infrastructure. “A FaaS platform also lets us eliminate common pain points such as authentication, identity, scaling and tenancy,” the company wrote in the blog post.
The tool kit also includes a UI component called Forge UI for building user interfaces on the web or devices. Forge UI uses a declarative language that should make it easier to build user interfaces, and as with the function layer, the idea here is to simplify the process for users. Atlassian will deal with all of the security involved in building a user interface, something that many developers struggle with.
“By abstracting away the process of rendering the UI layer, Forge makes stronger guarantees about how apps present or transmit sensitive data, such as user-generated content and personally identifying information,” the company wrote.
The final piece is a command line interface (CLI) called Forge CLI. The idea here is to build continuous delivery pipelines with Bitbucket and run them from the command line. If you put all three of these components together, you have a pretty comprehensive development environment with tools for building functionality and designing user interfaces, while managing operations from a command line.
There are lots of platform service offerings out there, so Atlassian faces some competition here, but for developers who planned on building apps for the Atlassian marketplace, this set of tools could prove useful and help push more developers to join in.
Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the grey space in between.
This morning we’re digging into the current IPO market, asking ourselves how much damage WeWork really did to other companies hoping to go public. Is the IPO window closed, and if not, what sort of companies can still get out?
There’s some good news out today for late-stage startups looking to debut — along with a few impending tests regarding the market’s appetite for risk that we should understand as we head into 2020.
In terms of IPOs, Bill.com’s felt comfortably standard for 2019. Bill.com was a heavily venture-backed company that had raised just under $350 million while private across myriad rounds, and by the time it wanted to go public it still lost money.
At the same time, the company had a number of strengths. These include historically slim losses as a percent of revenue ($7.3 million in its most recent fiscal year, against $78.4 million in revenue), differentiated revenue sources (subscription income and rising interest payments), and improving gross margins (74 percent in its most recent quarter, up from a little under 72 percent in the year-ago period).
Those factors combined were sufficient to entice investors to price the company’s IPO far above its initial expectations of $16 to $18 per share. Instead, Bill.com raised its range once and then priced above the higher interval. At $22 per share, the company’s value rose by about 60% compared to its most recent private financing. (You can read more on the debut here.)
This matters as WeWork was said to have closed the IPO window for companies more focused on growth than profits. The way the market reality was discussed in venture circles seemed to indicate that WeWork’s implosion had slashed investor interest in growth, with public market players now favoring profits, or something close.
Bill.com’s most recent three-month period featured far-larger losses than its year-ago quarter, which mattered little in the end. The firm’s solid growth and moderate losses, it seems, were more than enough to secure a strong welcome to the public markets.
You may be wondering why we just spent so much time explaining why a healthy company managed to go public. The goal, simply, was to point out that not only can companies still losing money and burning cash go public, they may even get a strong reception.
But what about companies in slightly less good shape? What does Bill.com’s IPO pricing indicate for Sprout Social, a company of similar size that’s going public this week which is also unprofitable, but growing more slowly (29.5% year-over-year in Q3 2019, compared to Bill.com’s 57%)?
Its pricing and debut will be a more interesting test. And luckily for us, it should price its shares this evening. (Even more fun, it targeted the same $16 to $18 per-share initial IPO price range that Bill.com initially had in its own sights.)
If Sprout Social manages to price in-range, we’ll have another data point in favor of the IPO window being comfortably open. It’s not surprising that Bill.com’s IPO priced well, but Sprout Social’s slower growth rate likely make its losses less palatable; if it can debut all the same we’ll know that the band of venture-backed companies that can public post-WeWork in the dead of December is wide.
That’s good news for illiquid unicorns and their backers, provided that their companies are at least as healthy as Chicago’s Sprout.
Finally, we have one more test of the IPO market ahead of us.
China-based Ucommune is a co-working company with self-described “global impact and ambitions.” Claiming to be the “largest co-working space community in China,” Ucommune espouses “sharing, innovation, responsibility and success for all.” In its F-1 document, filed yesterday and setting in motion a possible US-listed IPO, Ucommune details comical levels of unprofitability and growth.
If all that sounds familiar, it should. It should feel similar to WeWork, which makes the timing of Ucommune’s IPO filing all the more amazing. WeWork’s pulled IPO was minutes ago, and here we are, staring down the filing of yet another coworking IPO?
The situation gets even better. Observe the following results:
Business-to-business payments company Bill.com priced its IPO today at an above-range $22 per share. The firm, selling 9.82 million shares in its offering, will raise around $216 million at a roughly $1.6 billion valuation.
The company’s IPO pricing comes during a modestly uncertain time for unprofitable companies looking to go public. Following the WeWork IPO mess, concerns arose that growth-oriented companies might struggle to drum up investor interest when going public.
Bill.com’s offering makes it plain that not all loss-making companies are equal; the firm’s pricing journey indicates that its growth story resonated more with investors than concerns relating to its losses. The company had targeted a $16 to $18 per-share IPO price range. However, that range was raised to $19 to $21 per share yesterday, ahead of pricing.
To understand what the Bill.com IPO means for startups, let’s remind ourselves of how much capital it raised while private itself, and how it performed financially.
Bill.com raised $347.1 million while private across a host of Series and venture rounds, including $100 million in 2017 and $88 million in 2018. The Palo Alto-based company raised from Franklin Templeton, JP Morgan and Temasek during its late-stage private life. When it was younger, Bill.com raised capital from Emergence, DCM, Icon Ventures, Financial Partners Fund and Scale Venture Partners, among others.
The company was valued, according to Crunchbase data, at precisely $1 billion on a post-money valuation following its 2018 investment. This makes its IPO a comfortably up transaction, adding value to even Bill.com’s most recently added private investors.
Heading into its IPO, Bill.com posted both growing revenue and growing losses:
The firm’s net loss growth looks worse than it really is, given that it lost less than $1 million in its year-ago Q3; but investors looking for a path to profits may not have appreciated the direction or pace of its net results, regardless of how small a base they were calculated from.
An above-range pricing on a company that raised its pricing interval while losing more money than it did a year ago should allay concerns among private companies that the IPO window is closed. It is not, provided that your losses are slim as a percent of revenue and your growth is solid.
A year ago, we asked some of the most prominent smart home device makers if they have given customer data to governments. The results were mixed.
The big three smart home device makers — Amazon, Facebook and Google (which includes Nest) — all disclosed in their transparency reports if and when governments demand customer data. Apple said it didn’t need a report, as the data it collects was anonymized.
As for the rest, none had published their government data-demand figures.
In the year that’s past, the smart home market has grown rapidly, but the remaining device makers have made little to no progress on disclosing their figures. And in some cases, it got worse.
Smart home and other internet-connected devices may be convenient and accessible, but they collect vast amounts of information on you and your home. Smart locks know when someone enters your house, and smart doorbells can capture their face. Smart TVs know which programs you watch and some smart speakers know what you’re interested in. Many smart devices collect data when they’re not in use — and some collect data points you may not even think about, like your wireless network information, for example — and send them back to the manufacturers, ostensibly to make the gadgets — and your home — smarter.
Because the data is stored in the cloud by the devices manufacturers, law enforcement and government agencies can demand those companies turn over that data to solve crimes.
But as the amount of data collection increases, companies are not being transparent about the data demands they receive. All we have are anecdotal reports — and there are plenty: Police obtained Amazon Echo data to help solve a murder; Fitbit turned over data that was used to charge a man with murder; Samsung helped catch a sex predator who watched child abuse imagery; Nest gave up surveillance footage to help jail gang members; and recent reporting on Amazon-owned Ring shows close links between the smart home device maker and law enforcement.
Here’s what we found.
Smart lock and doorbell maker August gave the exact same statement as last year, that it “does not currently have a transparency report and we have never received any National Security Letters or orders for user content or non-content information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).” But August spokesperson Stephanie Ng would not comment on the number of non-national security requests — subpoenas, warrants and court orders — that the company has received, only that it complies with “all laws” when it receives a legal demand.
Roomba maker iRobot said, as it did last year, that it has “not received” any government demands for data. “iRobot does not plan to issue a transparency report at this time,” but it may consider publishing a report “should iRobot receive a government request for customer data.”
Arlo, a former Netgear smart home division that spun out in 2018, did not respond to a request for comment. Netgear, which still has some smart home technology, said it does “not publicly disclose a transparency report.”
Amazon-owned Ring, whose cooperation with law enforcement has drawn ire from lawmakers and faced questions over its ability to protect users’ privacy, said last year it planned to release a transparency report in the future, but did not say when. This time around, Ring spokesperson Yassi Shahmiri would not comment and stopped responding to repeated follow-up emails.
Honeywell spokesperson Megan McGovern would not comment and referred questions to Resideo, the smart home division Honeywell spun out a year ago. Resideo’s Bruce Anderson did not comment.
And just as last year, Samsung, a maker of smart devices and internet-connected televisions and other appliances, also did not respond to a request for comment.
On the whole, the companies’ responses were largely the same as last year.
But smart switch and sensor maker Ecobee, which last year promised to publish a transparency report “at the end of 2018” did not follow through with its promise. When we asked why, Ecobee spokesperson Kristen Johnson did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Based on the best available data, August, iRobot, Ring and the rest of the smart home device makers have hundreds of millions of users and customers around the world, with the potential to give governments vast troves of data — and users and customers are none the wiser.
Transparency reports may not be perfect, and some are less transparent than others. But if big companies — even after bruising headlines and claims of co-operation with surveillance states — disclose their figures, there’s little excuse for the smaller companies.
This time around, some companies fared better than their rivals. But for anyone mindful of their privacy, you can — and should — expect better.
Google Cloud today announced the launch of its new E2 family of compute instances. These new instances, which are meant for general purpose workloads, offer a significant cost benefit, with saving of around 31 percent compared to the current N1 general purpose instances.
The E2 family runs on standard Intel and AMD chips, but as Google notes, they also use a custom CPU scheduler “that dynamically maps virtual CPU and memory to physical CPU and memory to maximize utilization.” In addition, the new system is also smarter about where it places VMs, with the added flexibility to move them to other hosts as necessary. To achieve all of this, Google built a custom CPU scheduler “ with significantly better latency guarantees and co-scheduling behavior than Linux’s default scheduler.” The new scheduler promises sub-microsecond wake-up latencies and faster context switching.
That gives Google efficiency gains that it then passes on to users in the form of these savings. Chances are, we will see similar updates to Google’s other instances families over time.
Its interesting to note that Google is clearly willing to put this offering against that of its competitors. “Unlike comparable options from other cloud providers, E2 VMs can sustain high CPU load without artificial throttling or complicated pricing,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “This performance is the result of years of investment in the Compute Engine virtualization stack and dynamic resource management capabilities.” It’ll be interesting to see some benchmarks that pit the E2 family against similar offerings from AWS and Azure.
As usual, Google offers a set of predefined instance configurations, ranging from 2 vCPUs with 8 GB of memory to 16 vCPUs and 128 GB of memory. For very small workloads, Google Cloud is also launching a set of E2-based instances that are similar to the existing f1-micro and g1-small machine types. These feature 2 vCPUs, 1 to 4 GB of RAM and a baseline CPU performance that ranges from the equivalent of 0.125 vCPUs to 0.5 vCPUs.


text:
Field Reports10 Jul, 2010 By: Thomas Haire, Jacqueline Renfrow Response
Aronson Set to Launch DevTel Products
By Thomas Haire (firstname.lastname@example.org)
POMPANO BEACH, Fla. — Capitalizing on the success of Cash4Gold and expanding his Green Bullion business model, CEO Jeff Aronson is launching DevTel Products, a business focused on bringing new consumer products to market utilizing direct response marketing.
“We came out of the blocks quickly with Cash4Gold, creating one of the most successful DR campaigns in recent years,” Aronson tells Response in an exclusive interview. “At this point, taking what we’ve learned and the back-end customer management systems we’ve come across with that success, expanding into the product forum is our clear next step. DevTel’s goal will be to make people’s lives easier one product at a time.”
Aronson says DevTel’s first product hit DRTV air at the end of May. He adds, “We roll out another five or six products in next few months, and fully expect to release up to 30 products in 2011.”
While DR is going to be the lifeblood of DevTel’s activities, Aronson says the company expects to experiment with a variety of new advertising models and media. But, product is still the key. “We sort through the product ideas under consideration and narrow down our focus through our internal committees,” he says. “We have a relentless commitment to provide high-quality products — problem/solution-based products — to make life easier for consumers.”
Aronson projects DevTel’s business at “about $400-600 million within three years, and more than $1 billion by year five,” and says the company will introduce products in a variety of vertical markets, including health-and-beauty and housewares. If his projections come true, this will be the third $100 million-plus company Aronson has created before age 40, including Albar Metals and Cash4Gold.
While launching DevTel, Aronson also says he’s working on a few products in the financial services space, “things that we can build on a similar platform to Cash4Gold.” At the same time, Cash4Gold is maintaining steady growth after its huge early run, and has now grown into a six-country market.
“We’ve had tremendous success overseas, as we’ve entered the market in Canada, the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands and Spain,” Aronson contends. “The U.K., specifically, has been a fantastic model and market. And, while some of the non-English speaking markets have been tougher culturally, we’ve learned how to create a more hands-on effort to get the business up and running.”
Hydra Progresses InStyler’s DRTV Campaign Into an Online Explosion
By Jacqueline Renfrow
When Zac Brandenberg launched Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Hydra in 2003, his vision was to create synergistic online marketing operations and to drive the growth of E-commerce, lead generation and performance-based customer acquisition. Quickly becoming the hub of its operations, the company turned its focus to its ad network and its distribution of online campaigns for clients. Using its online DR channels, and a results-based pricing model, Hydra has helped clients focus on acquisition and see the importance in differentiating a DRTV campaign from an online one.
“For the most part, a company’s primary orientation is to build an online ‘shopping cart’ to take orders from traffic driven by the DRTV campaign,” says Mason Wiley, senior vice president of marketing at Hydra. “Hydra’s network, on the other hand, offers a distribution platform that is capable of driving incremental business by broadcasting the marketer’s campaign to an online audience of hundreds of millions across all online channels — E-mail, search, display and social media.”
In December 2008, Hydra was called upon to do just that for InStyler — a rotating, hot iron hair straightener and curler — and its marketing provider Tre Milano LLC, a division of Modern Media. At the time, all of InStyler’s sales were driven by their DRTV campaign and Hydra was hired to increase business through ads across online channels. Recently, Wiley chatted with Response about the campaign.
Q: What was your overall marketing strategy for InStyler, and how did you work to combine branding and DR?
A: With InStyler, we created online ads and a landing page that had a look and feel that were consistent with the DRTV campaign. So, we do employ branding as a means to provide consistency and synergy between messages. We also work to establish a brand image that supports the product promise and inspires trust and credibility. At the same time, we unleash all of the DR “tricks” we have up our sleeve to drive response. We don’t see any conflict between the two — good branding enhances DR results.
Q: How important has online marketing become in the overall marketing strategy for InStyler and other brands?
A: Hydra is only using the Internet to drive sales for InStyler. DRTV commands the greatest share of the media budget and sales, but online is increasing in importance and size. Historically, the use of online by DRTV has been limited to capturing branded search and type-in traffic driven by DRTV ads. We have been helping DRTV advertisers employ outbound online advertising to drive a new and incremental source of sales volume. Typically, we’ll start them with a test to demonstrate effectiveness, and then budget and sales results scale up from there.
Q: What adjustments did you have to make to the InStyler campaign after its initial launch?
A: The campaign was initially launched using InStyler’s existing landing page — one designed for taking orders from DRTV-driven traffic rather than a specifically optimized one for online. By January 2009, this was driving only about 10 sales per day. So with permission from the client, we optimized the campaign based on Hydra experience and changes were made including removing all navigation, creating new copy to explain the product’s benefits (plus adding press quotes to enhance credibility), optimizing the response form, and streamlining the order and upsell process. We launched the optimized campaign in March 2009, and unit sales immediately jumped from an average of 10 per day to 100 per day. Achieving higher conversion rates made the campaign more competitive in the affiliate marketplace, and Hydra was able to secure higher distribution among its affiliate publishers. Starting in May 2009, sales increased to an average of 200-300 a day. During the past year, InStyler gained more than 40,000 new customers, each purchasing two InStyler units.
Q: What does the future hold for Hydra?
A: To maximize online success, it has become clear that we have to have our hands on all the levers. For example, high distribution itself doesn’t work if the campaign creative is not effective. This recognition is resulting in our evolution to a full-service, online marketing company. We are continuously improving our capabilities to deliver high volumes of high-quality customers for our advertisers.