Good morning. Did you hear the one about the shoe company Allbirds pivoting to providing AI compute?
Sounds like a Silicon Valley subplot, but it’s true. The Nasdaq-traded company (BIRD, of course) jumped from $2.50 a share to about $17—yes, really—on the news, valuing the company at about $148 million.
The San Francisco outfitter’s wool shoes have always been, for better or worse, linked to the real Silicon Valley; now it can confidently dispense with any abstraction.
Besides, employees are gonna need comfortable footwear to walk all those data center aisles. Who says you can’t teach an old bird a new trick? —Andrew Nusca
P.S. For the more fashionable among you, a favorite epithet for men’s tech pants, per GQ: “Allbirds for your legs.”
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Live Nation and Ticketmaster are monopolists, jury says
Hear me now, Eddie Vedder: Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation illegally monopolized U.S. live event markets, according to a New York jury.
The jury found that Live Nation holds illegal monopolies for ticketing at more than 200 major venues and unlawfully made the use of dozens of large amphitheaters it controls conditional on artists using its promotion services.
The court has yet to determine penalties for the transgressions, but the stock price for rival StubHub noticeably ticked up. (Most other companies in the category—SeatGeek, AEG’s AXS, and as of last month, Eventbrite—are privately held.)
For its part, Live Nation was untroubled. (Its shares were down by 6%.) The company estimates it will owe less than $350 million in damages and expects the final outcome to be similar to the settlement it made with the U.S. Department of Justice during the trial, which required Ticketmaster to open ticketing to other vendors at 13 venues.
Still, the company is hardly out of the woods. Live Nation could face more legal action from various states—including a forced sale of Ticketmaster, acquired in 2010—as it plays out. —AN
Snap to lay off 1,000 staffers
Activist investors strike again. Snap, the Los Angeles-area company behind Snapchat, will indeed shed 1,000 staffers, or about 16% of its full-time workforce.
Snap will also close more than 300 open roles.
“We … made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value,” CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo, later adding: “We believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers.”
It was only a few weeks ago that Irenic Capital Management, which owns a 2.5% stake in Snap, pushed for a leaner, more performant company. “Snap should be worth a lot more than $7 billion,” the firm wrote, calling out cash burn for its Specs smart glasses, broad overhiring, and larger rival Meta’s substantial outperformance.
But life moves pretty fast, as Ferris Bueller once said. The clock is now ticking for Snap’s CEO to do the hard things—spin up the great money-making engine at the company’s core and ditch everything else—before the relief wears off. —AN
Apple and Google can’t escape nudify apps
No matter how tough a stance some of the world’s mightiest corporations can take against so-called nudify apps—which allow the creation of nonconsensual, sexualized images of people—they can’t seem to stamp them out in their app stores.
According to a report published Wednesday by the Tech Transparency Project, Apple and Google explicitly prohibit such apps on their platforms, yet their “search and advertising systems actually point users to them.”
“Apple and Google ran ads for nudify apps in some of the search results, and the app stores even suggested additional nudify search terms through their autocomplete function,” TTP found. Oof.
(Apple declined to weigh in on the findings; Google said that it had since suspended many of the apps in question.)
It’s hardly a matter of money. TTP estimates that the racy apps “made more than $122 million in lifetime revenue,” a drop in the bucket for Apple or Google, which together generate that in about as much time as it takes to watch an episode of Severance.
No, this is about running a tight ship. It’s clear that more enforcement is necessary when this latest generation of apps uses generative AI with looser standards than what’s acceptable in the stores in which they’re sold. —AN
More tech
—Apple Siri staffers will reportedly be sent to an AI coding bootcamp.
—Caterpillar acquires self-driving assets from Monarch, an electric tractor startup.
—Amazon launches Shenzhen smart warehouse. The Shein-Temu wars rage on.
—Euro VC funding in Q1: Up 30% in value, down 40% in volume, and mostly AI-focused.
—FTC settles with WPP, Dentsu, Publicis over “brand safety” boycott claims, as expected.
—A nationwide survey of data center energy usage is coming via the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
—EU threatens to force Meta to allow third-party AI assistants in WhatsApp.
