Path CEO Dave Morin Joi...

Path co-founder and CEO Dave Morin is joining the board of the event ticketing startup Eventbrite , the company is announcing today. The news of the appointment follows what has been, so far, quite a busy year for the startup, which has now sold 60 million tickets, and is expanding globally with websites in eight different languages. Morin, whose background includes time as the former head of the Facebook Platform and several years at Apple, will bring his knowledge of social to the ticketing company, says Eventbrite. Morin joins Barry McCarthy, former CFO of Netflix, Sean Moriarty, former CEO of Ticketmaster, Roelof Botha, former CFO of PayPal and Partner at Sequoia Capital, among others serving on Eventbrite’s Board of Directors. “Eventbrite has long been a believer in the impact of the social graph, and the work that Dave did while at Facebook has had a profound impact on our business,” Kevin Hartz, CEO of Eventbrite says. “Our integration with Facebook Connect in 2008 predicated an exponential increase in traffic and engagement among event attendees,” he added. Eventbrite is heavily benefitting from Facebook integration. In 2011, the company reported that every time an event was shared on Facebook, it generated an additional $2.52 on average in ticket sales for event organizers and 11 clicks back to the Eventbrite page. And this was before the launch of Facebook’s Open Graph in early 2012, and the introduction of “actions” like “bought,” or “want” or “watch,” etc. Notably, Eventbrite was one of the Facebook Open Graph launch partners, but it’s not yet using “actions.” According to Tamara Mendelsohn, VP of Marketing at Eventbrite, however, they’re “working on something now” on that front, and we should see the results of that soon. Facebook is also the number one driver of Eventbrite’s traffic, says Mendelsohn, but the company won’t share how much. As for engagement levels, you can see in the chart below what the impact of Facebook integrations have already had on the company’s business. With Morin’s guidance on deeper integrations, those numbers should jump yet again. Outside of social integrations and global expansion, the company has also been pushing itself forward in the mobile payments space. In March, Eventbrite launched a complimentary credit card reader to go along with its iPad ticketing app “Eventbrite at the Door,” which attaches to the iPad’s dock connector, allowing users to swipe credit cards. Just prior to this, the company had announced a product called “Endurance,” specifically for selling tickets to races and walks, like marathons and fundraising events. And only last week, Eventbrite announced integrations with   SponsorHub  for connecting event organizers with sponsors. “Eventbrite is fundamentally changing the way people create, promote and find events and gatherings in their local communities,” said Morin in a statement. “I’ve been more than impressed by their level of innovation, their commitment to their users, and by their long term focus. The decision to join the board as they forge into making event discovery more mobile and social was an easy one. At the end of the day, we all live for great events.” Eventbrite has been making a huge push towards reaching $1 billion in gross ticket sales this year, about doubling the number of events on the platform in 2011 (458,207 events in 2011) and tickets sold (20,798,509 tickets in 2011). In 2011, Eventbrite sold $400 million worth of tickets, up from $207 million in 2010.

With Its New Google+ Ap...

Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is worth a look, especially because it’s hopefully just a first glimpse at what more of Google’s mobile apps will look like in the near future. So far, the Google+ mobile app was adequate but nothing to brag about for Google. For the most part, it worked (though it did crash at times) and gave you access to Google+’s most important features. Even Google+’s most ardent fans wouldn’t have called it exciting, though. The latest redesign, however, suddenly makes the app one of the more interesting social networking clients on the market today. Unlike the previous version of the app, which felt like it was designed by committee and lacked luster, this new version almost makes Google+ feel like a Path-like “mobile first” service. It’s highly visual, puts an emphasis on images, and its endless scrolling with new items quickly sliding into place as you scroll down is a nice design touch that feels very different from Google’s latest, often lackluster, design efforts. Just compare the new Google+ app to something like Currents , Google’s once-hyped Flipboard competitor. It’s not a bad app. It does what it says it does, but it just doesn’t inspire the same kind of enthusiasm as the highly visual Flipboard . The Gmail for iPhone app, which didn’t even work at first, is a better effort but still feels more like Gmail for a small screen than email re-imagined for mobile the same way Sparrow, for example, does. The new Google+ app, however, finally re-imagines what the service should look like on a mobile device. It doesn’t just try to recreate a version of the Google+ desktop site for a smaller screen. From what we’ve heard, the new app was developed in-house by Google and the new design wasn’t informed by any recent acquisitions. So Google clearly has the design chops to develop apps like this. The Google+ team, Steven Levy wrote last year , generally gets a bit more freedom to experiment and make fast decisions than other groups at Google. Maybe it’s no surprise then, that we would first see an app like this come out of the Google+ group. Let’s just hope other teams at Google will look at this app and let it inform their work as well.

Thumbtack Revamp Makes ...

Thumbtack.com , a site that helps people find local service providers (from house cleaners to DJs to math tutors, to use the three examples on the company homepage), unveiled a big redesign earlier this week. Co-founder Sander Daniels says the original version of Thumbtack tried to make finding a service provider easier by avoiding the standard search interface — people posted what job they were looking for, then Thumbtack connected those posters with a professionals who were qualified to do the work. That’s still the basic idea, but the new site is “significantly easier and more sophisticated,” Daniels says. Now, when you type in the general category that you’re looking for, Thumbtack helps you with the listing by asking questions about the basic information that you’ll need to enter. For example, when I told Thumbtack that I was looking for a housecleaner, the site promised that it has more than 100 cleaners near San Francisco, and it asked me about how often the cleaning needs to happen, how many bedrooms and bathrooms I have, and the best times for the cleaners to come. There are more esoteric services too — as you can see in the screenshot above, where someone’s looking for a paranormal investigator. As part of the revamp, Thumbtack has created a slick-looking video walking viewers through a couple of use cases, which you can watch here . And in an effort “to support the 275,000 freelancers and small businesses who use our site to find work” (as Daniels puts it), Thumbtack also partnered with the Kauffman Foundation to measure the small business friendliness of cities and states, based on things on hiring costs, regulations, and economic health. You can see the results here , where I learned that California gets an “F” in overall friendliness — but at least I was slightly molliffed to see that within the state, San Francisco’s Bay Area is tops. Thumbtack announced raising a $4.5 million Series A led by Javelin Venture Partners in January.

This Is What Developing...

You know how all Android developers complain about fragmentation? Yeah, this is what fragmentation looks like. Animoca, a Hong Kong mobile app developer that has seen more than 70 million downloads, says it does quality assurance testing with about 400 Android devices. Again, that’s testing with  four hundred different phones and tablets for every app they ship! The photo above is just a sampling of Animoca’s fleet of Android test units. Yat Siu, who is CEO of Animoca’s parent company Outblaze, snapped and posted it from Outblaze’s headquarters today. In total, Siu says their studio has detected about 600 unique Android devices on their network. “We haven’t managed to track down all of those devices because, in large part, they are no longer available for sale,” he says. Sad cakes! On top of that, Siu said that the number of handsets from the lower-end Asian manufacturers is also growing rapidly. These are the phone makers that Nokia chief executive Stephen Elop was probably talking about in his famous “burning platform” memo  when he said that are Chinese OEMs were “cranking out a device much faster than, as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest, ‘the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation.’” If you take those out, the actual number of devices you need to test for is much lower. But if you want to break into Asian markets, these phones matter and make it especially challenging for Android developers to ensure their apps work on every single Android device. Android fragmentation is a huge issue because developers have to check their work on dozens of devices. Animoca happens to be backed by Intel Capital and IDG-Accel, so it has the resources to buy all of these devices for testing and pay employees to use them. But imagine the long-tail of developers! Imagine the people who make the more the roughly 500,000 apps in the Google Play store. Total nightmare. It puts a real dent in Eric Schmidt’s prediction from six months ago that developers might start going Android first within six months. His deadline is up now and there aren’t signs of this happening. Appcelerator did a survey of 2,100 of its developer clients in March and found that, if anything, interest in Android development is stagnating . Siu is nonplussed though. He’s told me in the past that thorough QA testing makes Animoca’s apps retain users better because so many other Android developers do a bad job at it. Unlike iOS users who throw up their hands in frustration, write bad reviews and just leave, Android users tend to be delighted when they find apps that actually work flawlessly. He adds, “We like fragmentation as users prefer choice. We are not big believers that one size fits all.”

TenderTree Rolls Into B...

It’s always refreshing when a startup tackles a real-world problem instead of building another photo-sharing/local reviews/social calendar service. Case in point: TenderTree , a company that’s trying to improve the way people find reliable care for their aging family members, and then pay them for their work. A recent participant in the latest 500 Startups batch with less than a million in funding, TenderTree is launching now into its beta, targeting the San Francisco Bay area to start. Founded by Aaron Ginn, Andy Agrawal, and Dana Wu , the idea for TenderTree came out of Ginn’s own experience, and subsequent troubles, with finding care for his godmother who lived in another city. He says that although there are brick-and-mortar agencies for this, as well as sites like Care.com, these competitors don’t really meet everyone’s needs. Agencies will send out a few different caregivers to interview, but they don’t have the selection of a larger marketplace, like Care.com does. However, not all online services go the extra step to provide the essential steps of running background checks on applicants (or don’t do so for free), nor do they all check for caregivers’ CNA accreditation. And they don’t check their references, or test them on their skills. TenderTree , though, verifies all the caregivers on the site – even going so far as to quiz them on their skills (are they really “good at cooking” or are they just saying that?, e.g.). The site also has a $3 million liability insurance policy which it provides to anyone who continues to use the platform after the hire has been made. That’s not hard to do, given that TenderTree generates contracts automatically, handles the taxes, allows caregivers to submit their time cards online, and then allows the employers to pay via the platform. (^^ Nice. For the record, I’ve now begged them to expand to child care, but that’s not TenderTree’s focus at present). The service is also considerably cheaper than home care agencies, explains Ginn. “They charge, on average, about $30/hour. On our site, it’s about $15 because we remove a lot of the overhead, we remove the franchise fees, we remove a lot of the taxes, and we remove a lot the manual labor that goes into how they provide in-home care,” he says. TenderTree is kicking off its launch in San Francisco with over 1,000 caregivers on the site. By year-end, they plan to arrive in L.A. Beta users can now sign up here .