“The Silicon Beach movement is the future of the Los Angeles tech area – tech, mobility, digital content, entrepreneurship, etc. I wanted to connect LA’s incredible entrepreneurs with the larger business community and with the resources of USC.”
Business
Marketing your startup can be one of the most daunting tasks an entrepreneur faces on their journey to world domination. Let’s face it– between finalizing your product for launch and working with developers to get the site or app up (or maybe you are a developer yourself), a marketing strategy, big or small, can feel like a bad hangover the same morning you need to go into work. Just make it go away…
CallFire creates simple text and voice platforms for businesses to use to reach their customers. CallFire’s growth has been tremendous: surpassing the 200,000 user mark, reaching the 200 million campaign mark for executing calls and texts campaigns, and a 100% growth in the past 12 months. Born on the shores of Santa Monica, California, the company is taking its beta-tested Cv3 platform out into the public today.
Silicon Valley may still be the capital of technology with a mix of new (Google, Facebook) and old (Apple, HP) sprinkling the landscape. However, Silicon Valley isn’t the only place to grow technology innovators from the ground up. Los Angeles has seen its own startup scene develop with Silicon Beach, which stretches between Santa Monica and Playa Vista.
TechZulu & Gadget Review present REACH. A quarterly event series seeking to dive deep into what comes next in technology, and giving you the opportunity to experience it first hand with the gadgets on site. Experience gadgets from the big brands with million dollar budgets to the startups bootstrapping and raising via IndieGoGo.
The U.S. Senate on May 6 passed the third version of Senate Bill 743, otherwise known as the Marketplace Fairness Act, which requires consumers to pay sales tax on all Internet purchases. How does this affect the growing crowdfunding industry? Initially, it affects reward-based crowdfunding because the moment anyone takes money in exchange for an item, the transaction becomes subject to sales tax.
Social analytics and personalization platform GraphDive has closed $2 million in its first ever equity round from Crosslink Capital, Correlation Ventures, Plug & Play Tech Center, Start Capital and angel investors Pejman Nozad, Ullas Naik and Scott Banister.
Clean, safe and reliable natural gas company Southern California Gas Company (SoCalGas) has established $1 million innovation fund in partnership with Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator (LACI), to speed the development of clean technologies to meet current global energy needs and become a sustainable energy source.
Let’s face it, while the last couple of decades have produced amazing growth in the fields of technology, the economy however has been in a bit of a slump. Luckily, the LA Tech scene is helping to establish a new post-recession era, evidenced by SGN’s (Social Gaming Network) acquisition of San Diego-based developer Mob Science and their current projection of $50 Million for the year of 2013.
CoinMKT has launched in public beta to make buying and selling Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies convenient. The startup aims to take advantage of the increasing use of digital, peer-to-peer currencies that let users buy or sell online instantly. CoinMKT works simply. Open an account, deposits USD or cryptocurrency into the account. The CoinMKT then becomes their trading account so that they can begin trading cryptocurrencies.
