With software developed, tested and turned in, the results of UCLA Anderson School of Management’s DEV Contest were announced on Sunday afternoon to a room full of smiling faces. The winners were given their prizes and their competitors applauded rapidly in their support, a great sign of LA’s flourishing tech community’s mindset of encouragement and coexistence to all that strive to build and create.
On Friday, February 22, USC’s Business and Entertainment Association (BEA) is hosting its 4th annual E2: Evolution of Entertainment Conference at the Town & Gown Hall at the USC Campus. The event is designed for professionals and students alike who are interested in or are currently working in the field of entertainment or new media. It’s focus is on the evolving changes in technology that have had an influential impact on the business of entertainment.
Wouldn’t it be cool if you can tell your iPhone what song to play or what kind of music you enjoy and it automatically pulls up the songs for you? At the moment Spotify or Pandora can help aggregate certain songs for you, but you still need to type out what you’re looking for and at times it takes a couple of steps to get to what you want. The new app, Vela brilliantly solves that problem for you. It is the first app that brings on-demand music using voice technology.
Think about how many images are on the web. Millions, billions, trillions? Yes. The Internet thus far has been monetized by display, video, and in-text advertising — but the one place every user’s eye focuses on first are photos. Photos that are prime real estate and have never been monetized before, until one very ambitious Silicon Beach startup, GumGum, recognized the opportunity and created the first and largest in-image advertising platform, and an entirely new market. Photos…the final frontier.
The biggest culprit to a startup failure is a dysfunctional founding team. Intimidation alone of finding the right team kills many new ventures before they had a chance. The D.C.-based startup CoFoundersLab has addressed this issue by taking the guesswork out of matchmaking by introducing scientific methods, deep research and algorithms that have proven to lead to successful matches. They have partnered with Cross Campus to bring education and offline matchmaking events to Santa Monica quarterly
Over 500 startups applied last quarter to Launchpad LA’s accelerator, but only eight were chosen. Those eight have recently completed the program and are ready to do business.
This is class four for Launchpad LA. Sam Teller, the Managing Director of Launchpad LA hinted that big news would come soon. “The teams have accomplished an incredible amount in the past four months.
The creators of the renowned StartupWeekend — a place where random ad hoc teams work frantically for 54 hours to build a demo of a new business and then complete for fame and fortune — have picked up where StartupWeekend left off and have birthed a new course for entrepreneurs who need to level up called StartupWeekend Next.
ChowNow, the turnkey interactive food ordering platform, just raised $3 million in additional funding to launch new products and expand national operations. Funds were contributed by returning investor GRP Partners along with Double M Capitol, Karlin Ventures, LaunchPad LA and Daher Capitol, all local investors. ChowNow came out of incubator LaunchPad LA.
TechZulu had the pleasure again this year to help bring all the New Media Expo (NMX) 2013 Keynotes sessions live. If you missed out on the keynotes live we have all of them for you on demand.
A traffic jam of expensive cars lined up to pull into the packed parking lot of MuckerLab for its second graduating class demo day. The large gathering of top investors spilled out of the office into the surrounding sidewalk and swelled with buzz and speculation of what the 10 newly formed companies had to offer. Some flew in from overseas, different states and from Silicon Valley to attend.
