Barely two weeks after hiring former Jive exec Lynda Smith as its chief marketing officer, today it will announce that it has a new CFO. It’s Lee Kirkpatrick, and he’s leaving Say Media, where he had the same title. He started his new job on May 7.

Twilio is growing so fast that it’s a little hard to keep track of all the news coming out of it. In his new role, Kirkpatrick will be responsible for Twilio’s finances and worldwide strategy. The company recently added Belgium, Finland, the Netherlands and Sweden to the steadily growing stable of countries where it is operating. It also recently struck a deal with Microsoft to add telephony features to its Azure cloud computing platform, so, yeah, maybe now might be the time to add a CFO.

What’s Job One? Well, here’s a funny tradition at Twilio: Every employee, no matter their level or level of technical ability, is required to build a Twilio application in order to become familiar with how the service works. So, part of this week will be devoted to that. Companies like eBay unit StubHub, Salesforce.com and Airbnb have used it to create some custom apps that include the use of a phone.

It’s a very Twilio sort of thing to do. When the company was in the process of raising its most recent funding round — a $17 million series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Union Square Ventures — Bessemer partner Byron Deeter created a Twilio-connected number and asked CEO Jeff Lawson to call it. As VentureBeat reported at the time, when Lawson called, he heard an automated voice message asking him to press 1 for $5 million, press 2 for $10 million and press 3 for $15 million.

It turned out that C round topped out at $17 million late last year, bringing its total capital raised to about $34 million, so there’s a decent-sized pile of money to look after. Before Say Media, Kirkpatrick held executive jobs at Ofoto, the Kodak Gallery and Reuters.

But there’s a third option emerging, where the actual teams and venues are offloading excess inventory, and instead of paying face value, customers can name their price — sort of like hotel rooms on Priceline.com.

ScoreBig.com, which launched in October 2010, is promising that winning bidders will end up getting tickets up to 60 percent off, and a minimum of 10 percent off.

“Forty percent of live event tickets go unsold nationwide,” said Peter Sinclair, the company’s VP of Marketing. “Even when they fill up the building, they are giving a lot of tickets away.”

Sinclair said this is a way for those venues or teams to move that inventory without degrading the brand. He declined to say who they work with in particular, but that the Los Angeles-based company works directly with teams in every league and ticket vendors, like TicketMob.

Today, the company is opening its site to anyone after having a long wait list. Additionally, it is launching an iPhone app called ScoreBig Daily, which offers deals on three to six of the best performances that are available that evening in your city. The free app is only availalbe for iPhone, and is only currently available in San Francisco and Los Angeles. New York will be added this summer with a national roll-out following.

Both the iPhone app and the site allow customers to name their price and choose where in the auditorium they want to sit. Plus, there are no convenience fees because all of the costs are passed on to the venue or sports team.

So far, the company has been able to maintain an inventory of roughly one million tickets at any given time on the site, and Sinclair says revenues have been growing since they started marketing. As a rough indication, Sinclair said in March they doubled the number of transactions compared to January and that April is already ahead of March.

The company has raised $20 million in two rounds from Bain Capital, U.S. Venture Partners and other individuals.

Photo Credit: Lewis Howes. 

San Francisco-based Spreecast is StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr’s next act, and it offers live group-video sessions that are instantly archived. It’s focused on people who want to be broadcasters — like bloggers or offline personalities — and who can attract an audience.

Spreecasts, which are by default public, have up to four people on camera at a time, while others participate in text chat through their choice of Facebook, Twitter or Spreecast account. The person who starts the conversation gets access to a producer control panel that brings in new questions and speakers.

All sorts of companies have tried this sort of thing with varying degrees of success, like Tinychat, Paltalk, Livestream (now more focused on events), Socialeyes (haven’t heard from them in a while) and Operator11 (now defunct).

Spreecast has gone after people with high Klout scores to seed its user base — but then, Google+ recently got the Dalai Lama to do a Hangout with Archbishop Desmond Tutu. (His Holiness’s Klout score is 82!)

What I’d love to see is something that starts out with a multiplatform approach to social video, but Spreecast is built for just the Web, and all its video runs in Flash. Now that Adobe is halting development on Flash for mobile devices, that gap is only going to get harder to bridge.

(Tango does a pretty good job of spanning platforms, but it is not on Macs yet, and it’s for one-to-one video calls.)

Another new company in the space is LiveLead. Where Spreecast is about public Webcam conversations, LiveLead is about private sharing of video and photo content.

LiveLead, which currently requires a Facebook account to join, sets up private rooms where friends view content and text chat about it. Anyone in the room can take the lead and push something new for everybody to watch.

Again, this isn’t that novel an idea. Others, like ClipSync, Google Hangouts, and even the new Flickr Photo Sessions, provide communal content-viewing experiences. LiveLead’s angle is that it focuses on people who are already friends.

New York City-based LiveLead has a team of three — a former Wall Street finance guy, a graduate student in computer security, and a former privacy-focused social network researcher — and is angel funded.

Visitors to Yahoo Sports and its Rivals.com fan properties will see links to SeatGeek embedded in a team’s schedule page; links will also appear within articles, blogs and on the 130 team-specific college sports pages at Rivals.com. Yahoo has more than 51 million unique visitors a month.

The links simply say “buy tickets”; clicking through brings up a stadium seating diagram, with a list of available seats and prices on the right side of the page.

SeatGeek says it is aggregating roughly 19 million tickets for upward of 60,000 sports events from more than 50 secondary markets, including StubHub, Ticketmaster’s TicketsNow, RazorGator and others.

Russell D’Souza, co-founder of SeatGeek, said the service is free to consumers, and that the company collects an affiliate fee from the seller, which will now be split partially with Yahoo in some cases. Since the average purchase ranges between $250 to $300, SeatGeek’s cut can be between $25 to $30 per transaction, D’Souza said. SeatGeek also has partnerships with The Wall Street Journal and the New York Daily News.

D’Souza said before he and Jack Groetzinger started the company, they used to open six windows in their browsers to compare ticket prices on dozens of sites where tickets were posted for sale by smaller brokers. He said there were often hidden fees, service fees and shipping fees, which made it even more complicated.

“It would be really hard to compare, so we wanted to create an interface for any event that would expose to users where the best seats were in the stadium and how much they’ll be paying,” D’Souza said.

Generally speaking, D’Souza said, the secondary ticket market is great for finding deals on tickets for events that are sold out, but a little-known fact is that it’s also good for events that still have tickets available.

“If an event is sold out, you have to go there — there’s only one option. But if it’s not sold out, you’ll end up finding tickets from season-ticket holders and brokers who will list it below face value,” he said.

By making it easier to sort through the various marketplaces, SeatGeek hopes to make consumers more aware of the alternatives. From its site, the company also offers venue maps and price forecasts to advise users when to buy tickets.

SeatGeek has raised about $2.5 million in venture capital from Founder Collective, NYC Seed and others. Founder Collective, an early-stage investor in New York, previously invested in Get Me In, a European secondary-market ticket vendor that was acquired by Ticketmaster in 2008.

Ms. Norrington, who runs eBay’s marketplace business–which accounts for more than half of its revenue–decided to leave for “personal family reasons,” the company said.

People familiar with Ms. Norrington’s decision said it was driven by concerns for the health of a family member.
The 50-year-old executive will remain at eBay through March, with Chief Executive John Donahoe heading the marketplaces division until Ms. Norrington’s successor is named.

EBay (EBAY) declined to make Ms. Norrington available for comment. In a statement, Mr. Donahoe said, “Lorrie has led eBay Marketplaces through significant fundamental change as we drive a multiyear turnaround strategy to enhance the shopping experience for buyers and sellers.” The marketplace business includes eBay’s auction and fixed-price listings, as well as a classifieds site and the StubHub ticket exchange.

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But much as they irritated, those changes seem to have had a positive effect on eBay’s business. In its most recent quarter, eBay (EBAY) showed modest growth, narrowly beating analysts’ estimates thanks to some impressive growth in its PayPal online payment business. Add to this Donahoe’s unloading of most of Internet calling service Skype, a much criticized acquisition engineered by his predecessor, Meg Whitman, and his revamp of the company seems to be gaining momentum. But is it enough to reinvigorate eBay’s business and fend off Amazon (AMZN)?

Liveblog

11:31 am: A first question from Walt. You’re viewed by people as a sort of Web 1.0 company, and you’re all about auctions. Today you seem to be morphing into more of a no-haggle auction store, a buy-it-now venture.

Donahoe: We’ll never be a retailer. Initially, eBay started selling long-tail inventory and they sold it in an auction format and that made sense at the time. Today, eBay is 30-35 percent auctions. A lot of the inventory on eBay today is brand new. Now they’re not necessarily the same items you’d get in a retail store….But what you have on eBay that you don’t have anywhere else are items that have been returned or refurbished, items that are cheaper. EBay gives you a choice of inventory.

11:36 am: Walt–Do consumers get that? Do they understand that you’re only 30 percent auctions now?

Donahoe says they do. “I think perception does lag reality; I think there’s more inventory than people are aware of, but we’re correcting that….What eBay is very good for is if you have bulk inventory, we’re a good way to get rid of it.”

11:37 am: Walt asks about eBay’s other businesses: PayPal and Skype. Skype seems to be bigger than ever these days. Why couldn’t you make that work?

Donahoe says Skype is a fantastic business. But the challenge was one of focus. “In the Internet today, you can’t be all things to all people….And we didn’t have synergies with Skype…so we sold a portion of it.”

Walt–Well if there wasn’t synergy, why did you buy it?

Donahoe says that at the time eBay made the purchase there appeared to be synergies and the company hoped to make good use of its technology, but that didn’t quite pan out. “I’m not sorry we made the acquisition,” he said. “And I’m not sorry we divested it either.”

11:41 am: What’s the point of PayPal, asks Walt.

Donahoe: What PayPal’s done is to provide consumers with a safe way to make purchases online.

Walt jumps in and notes that it’s just as easy these days for people to use their credit cards. So why bother with PayPal?

Donahoe notes that things like cash and credit cards can be lost. PayPal cannot. “It’s a digital wallet,” he says, adding that he expects mobile payments to come into broad use within the next three years.

11:44 am: Continuing his riff on PayPal, Donahoe talks about the PayPal iPhone app, which allows people to “bump” payments to one another. “I think the idea of the digital wallet will facilitate digital commerce growth and PayPal’s growth as well.”

11:46 am: Walt–How big is your phishing problem? I get emails fairly often warning me that my PayPal account is in trouble for some reason. You are the target of a lot of phishing, aren’t you?

Donahoe: Phishing was an issue for eBay a few years ago. But over the last five years, we invested quite a bit of money fighting it, and I think we’ve done a good job.

11:48 am: Walt–So who’s your main competitor?

Donahoe says the usual suspects–Amazon, Etsy, Wal-Mart (WMT).

11:49 am: Donahoe–Wal-Mart is the largest offline retailer in the world. Costco (COST) competes in the exact same segment with the exact same business model very successfully. So does Target (TGT). The same thing can happen online. Amazon can be successful and eBay can be successful, too.

11:50 am: Is the iPad another big platform for you, Walt asks.

“I think more devices are becoming part of the shopping experience,” says Donahoe. The line between online and offline is blurring and I think these new devices are enabling that. He adds that he thinks eBay’s iPad app is the best eBay experience he’s seen to date.

11:52 am: A quick poll of the audience–Who has an iPad? Quite a few folks, evidently.

11:53 am: Walt–You say the iPad app is the best eBay experience, but this is a new device. You’ve been on the Web for years. Why isn’t that the best experience.

Donahoe: The core eBay Web experience–in the last few years we’ve gone from a [score of] 2 to a 4. But we’ve still got a long way to go, and we’re still focused on making it the best eBay experience in the world. But these new devices allow us to start over and make new customized applications that help us serve users in the way that they want to shop.

11:55 am: Why so much focus on fashion?

Donahoe says eBay is the largest seller of fashion in the world. What we’re doing is driving more vertical shopping experiences on eBay, he adds. We’re trying to offer more customized experiences in different categories.

11:56 am: Walt asks about StubHub. There’s a lot of controversy over the secondary ticket market.

Donahoe: StubHub is a marketplace. It never buys tickets. What it’s doing is enabling season ticket holders to resell the tickets they aren’t using. Sometimes for above-market prices, sometimes for below-market prices. What StubHub has done that the scalper market never could, is that it’s completely transparent. You know who the buyer is, who the seller is, and StubHub guarantees every purchase. It provides complete transparency.

Q & A

Q: Can you talk about PayPal’s role in paying for content?

A: Digital is going to be a big opportunity for PayPal. If you go on Facebook, you can buy game credits with PayPal. In the media world, we’ll have payment solutions such that content providers can have a PayPal button on their content and people can use it to purchase it. It will provide a seamless experience inside the content itself. Digital’s going to be a big opportunity.

Q: What do you tell sellers who feel they’re being nickel-and-dimed by eBay’s many fees?

A: I think for years, eBay was nickel and diming. But over the past few years, we’ve restructured our fees. Today, consumers can list for free and businesses can list in the fixed-priced format. We’ve tried to simplify and streamline our pricing. We’re still cheaper than Amazon.

Q: Why do my PayPal purchases default to my bank account when I’d like to use my credit card? Will you move toward a model where consumers can choose how they pay through PayPal?

A: Consumer choice is important to us, says Donahoe, adding that the vision is to offer multiple means of payment.

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

ThredUP, which formally launches its free site this weekend, bills itself as a hybrid between DVD-rental service Netflix (NFLX) and second-hand tickets marketplace StubHub. Parents with extra clothes log them on the site, which coordinates and manages the exchanges and shipping.

Here’s how it works: A parent with a pile of outgrown but “gently used” kids’ clothes registers for the site to get free shipping boxes in the mail. Then he or she enters a few facts about all the used clothes they place in each box, like the age of the kids that can wear them, the season, and a few brand names. That box gets logged on the site, where another mom or dad looking for some clothes might find it fits their needs.

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Revenue for the quarter was $2.37 billion, up 16 percent year over year, and ahead of the Street at $2.29 billion. Non-GAAP EPS of 41 cents beat the Street by a penny.

The company said results reflected “excellent growth” at PayPal and StubHub, and improvement in growth rates in the core eBay business, as well as positive effects from currency.

The Marketplaces unit saw revenue grow 15 percent, with net transaction revenue up 17 percent. Gross merchandise value was $14.2 billion, up 24 percent from a year ago.

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Many songs are missing the correct album titles and cover art—or just show up in Apple Inc.’s (AAPL) iTunes with mysterious names like “Track04.” Over the years I’ve used several programs to import and buy music, resulting in wild inconsistencies in my collection. I’ve got songs by Beyoncé (with accent), Beyonce (without accent), Beyoncé Knowles (with accent) and Beyonce Knowles (without accent).

Several companies have developed programs that tap into vast databases of songs to tame music collections. I’ve been testing one by San Francisco startup TuneUp Media that’s available to download online and buy in Apple’s stores. While I was reluctant to pay $19.95 for a year’s subscription to a service I reckon should be in iTunes for free, TuneUp has largely delivered on its promise to scrub my music collection with minimal effort, making sure tracks were properly titled and adding extras like album cover art.

TuneUp’s greatest asset is that it works seamlessly with iTunes (for Mac and PC). With TuneUp hooked on to the right side of the iTunes program, you drag “dirty,” or mislabeled, songs into a box identified by a spray bottle of cleaner. The software identifies songs by taking clues from information you’ve embedded in your music, as well as sampling the song’s digital fingerprint. TuneUp looks for a match to those clues in a database of songs maintained by Sony Corp.’s (SNE) Gracenote.

Some matches are a slam dunk, but almost half of my collection proved to be problematic. Of the 500 most-played songs in my pop-oriented collection, TuneUp found “matches” for songs across 79 albums and “likely matches” for songs across 209 albums. It couldn’t identify 10 songs. The company says it counts matches as a 90% or higher chance of a match, and “likely” as at least 75% chance of a match. Songs with a likelihood under 75% are labeled “not found.”

TuneUp gives you the chance to review each of the matches before it adjusts your catalog. (It comes with an undo button.) Accepting all of the sure matches is easy enough, but slogging through the likely matches is troublesome. TuneUp gives you only the option to accept or reject its one recommendation after listening to the file, if you want.I worried that I might be inadvertently mislabeling a song, but haven’t yet found evidence of errors in my collection. The company says it cut out alternative matches to simplify the cleaning process, but is working on adding them to future releases of the software.

Once a song has been cleaned by TuneUp, it is given a consistent name, track number, album cover and other helpful information, such as the year it was released. Now I’ve got songs by just Beyoncé (with accent) and almost all of my songs feature the album cover art that looks so nifty on iPhone screens. The software assigns your songs genre identifications, which can be handy for matching music to your mood. Most of the classifications aren’t terms I would have come up with: Beyoncé is dubbed “urban crossover,” while Michael Jackson is either “disco” or “other pop” depending on the era—but at least they’re consistent. You also can tell TuneUp not to change any specific part of a song’s existing catalog listing, including genre.

TuneUp takes a few seconds, depending on your computer and Internet speed, to identify and re-classify each song. Attempting to scrub a whole collection—mine has more than 10,000 songs—can be a lengthy affair. The company suggests cleaning 500 songs at a time, but you can do many more than that if you leave it running over night.

I tried out a free competitor to TuneUp called MusicBrainz Picard, which matches songs based on a database collected by a swarm of Internet users, rather than one particular company. TuneUp and MusicBrainz, which is run by a nonprofit, are as different as Britannica and Wikipedia in their approaches to cataloging information.

The MusicBrainz approach to building a user-generated database is powerful and has been tapped by companies such as the BBC and Amazon.com (AMZN) to improve the way they keep track of music on their sites. Some of my songs that TuneUp couldn’t identify, such as the song “This Way” by hip hop group Dilated Peoples, were a breeze for MusicBrainz. To date, MusicBrainz has about 700,000 “releases” (such as whole albums) and 8,000,000 individual “tracks” in its database.

But MusicBrainz’s database has limitations, such as the inability to catalog album-cover images or song lyrics, both of which are copyrighted material. The free Picard program lets you tap the MusicBrainz database from your own computer. Serious music fans will be attracted to Picard because it is more precise than TuneUp; Picard guides you to choose from a variety of options when it isn’t certain of a match. But the software is rudimentary and requires concentration and time to use. Picard also doesn’t connect directly into iTunes’ catalog. To use it with iTunes, you have to first clean up all of your music files with Picard and then re-import your songs into iTunes.

I recommend TuneUp for the average music fan who might view cleaning up a music collection as the sort of task that shouldn’t take much longer than one rainy Sunday afternoon. Picard is better for people for whom maintaining an orderly music collection is a never-ending project.

TuneUp comes with a feature called “Tuniverse,” which fills the right side of the screen with information related to whatever song iTunes is playing at the time. That information includes YouTube videos, biographical details from Wikipedia, Google (GOOG) News, music recommendations from Amazon and tickets from StubHub to coming concerts in your area. While I initially worried Tuniverse would feel like added advertising on the screen, I’ve come to enjoy the extra information. And once again, I was left wondering why Apple hasn’t built these capabilities directly into iTunes. I, for one, learned from Tuniverse that Beyoncé has a concert in San Francisco next week, and I just might buy a ticket.

Walt Mossberg is on vacation.

Write to Geoffrey A. Fowler at Geoffrey.Fowler@wsj.com

Though the average price of a ticket on eBay (EBAY)-owned StubHub fell to $102 in 2008 from $112 in 2007, it began seeing gains in transaction volume and sales late in the year. Its first-quarter ticket sales rose 16 percent, while transaction volume climbed 26 percent, and StubHub President Chris Tsakalakis said it expects even stronger results in the second quarter.

“We see that, despite prices coming down, that we’re able to more than offset that with an increase in transaction volume,” he said.

StubHub sold more than 9,000 tickets to this year’s Bowl Championship Series, compared with about 3,500 last year, for example.

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Analysts had been expecting worse, with estimates at $1.94 billion in revenue and earnings of 34 cents per share. There was nothing much out of line with eBay’s Q2 forecast, though–sales of $1.85 billion to $2.1 billion and 35-38 cents profit per share. Analysts’ forecasts equate to $1.98 billion and 35 cents per share.

The company attributed the of sales revenue loss to, among other things, a stronger dollar and lower sales among all of its Marketplaces businesses, which include StubHub, Shopping.com and eBay itself. Overall, the group saw a revenue drop of 18 percent to $1.22 billion year-over-year.

In contrast, Skype, one of the company’s subsidiaries, saw a revenue gain of 21 percent to $153.2 million year-over-year. EBay (EBAY) says that it plans to spin Skype off in an IPO sometime next year, though it’s widely believed to be open to an outright sale.

That’s the possibility floated, albeit in an offhand way, via Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay in a note published this morning: “We would likely expect further divestments of non-core businesses, possibly including StubHub.”

I understand why the auction site dropped StumbleUpon, a Web 2.0 publishing business with a novel and unproven revenue model. And it makes sense to stop carrying Skype, a telecom business that requires a lot of time, money and maintenance.

But Stubhub, which eBay bought for $307 million a little more than two years ago, seemed like a bona fide fit: The ticket resale business mirrors eBay’s (EBAY) core auction in pretty obvious ways. I’ve asked Lindsay to tease out his thinking for us, and will update if he does.

UPDATE: Here’s Lindsay, via email: “It seems that eBay is going right back to basics, and is dispensing with the ‘we are an auction company’ ethos that got them into so much trouble. We see StubHub as coming out of that era. We think the market in tickets is changing rapidly and there is a chance to sell StubHub at the very top. They might well take it and pursue a much more pure play retail/second hand portfolio and go back to geographic expansion of the marketplaces/PayPal core.”

Meanwhile, if eBay does decide to jettison StubHub, now would be a very interesting time to do so. TicketsNow, its primary competitor, is likely to go on the block in the near future: Parent company Ticketmaster (TKTM), which acquired the business for $265 million a year ago, has said it would dump the business in order to mollify antitrust critics (and Bruce Springsteen fans) who want to stop the company’s proposed merger with Live Nation (LYV).

Anyone want to corner the market on the ticket-scalping industry?

[Image credit: Hyrck]