Overall, great news for our fair city with a 25% increase in funds raised in 2013 over the year before. This last year, we saw a record high of over $1 billion raised with 200 launches and 25 successful exits which yielded $1.11 billion.
These figures, among others, indicate LA’s digital startups aren’t simply keeping pace with past years, but exceeding them.
The United States is the economic powerhouse that it is because of a culture of innovation, entrepreneurs, and the “can do” attitude that makes it so distinct. While we entertain startup strategies such as being lean or agile, it’s impossible to ignore that, for example, LA has a culture of entertainment, Nashville that of music, New York, a culture of finance and fashion, and Silicon Valley, indeed, a culture of disruptive innovation.
Usually, home appliances at a tech event as large as CES would be put into a corner, but not at Samsung. A huge portion was devoted to their new home appliance section. “Heck, Samsung even put a washer and a dryer as one of their main centerpieces on the floor!”
Google has acquired smart home appliance company, Nest Labs for $3.2 billion in cash. It’s a move that will see the giant search engine retain amazing talent and potentially achieve its target of reinventing the “home of the future” using the Internet.
How it works: Every time someone connects to your Karma hotspot, both you and the connecting individual get a free 100mb of data to use. You can add additional data online through your account and Wi-Fi connections are always open to encourage sharing.
Every day, 1000’s of new bright-eyed and bushy tailed companies sprout from depths of start-up soil. Some are formed in incubators, and some are the results of a few cocktails and some ink on a napkin. Others come from angry laid-off executives, and even some stem from the optimistic naiveté of college and high school students. Like a song on the radio, we never quite know how some blow up and become chart topping billion-dollar organizations while others – even crowd favorites – simply bang, pop and fizzle; never to be heard from again.
Finding a parking space is not an easy task but Parkopedia is looking to solve this headache that plagues the masses. The world’s leading parking information provider, Parkopedia pairs millions of drivers with 28 million parking spaces in 40 countries around the world. In a move to further enhance its service, Parkopedia has integrated its parking information with Ford in the Ford SYNC® AppLink, an in-car connectivity system.
AT&T held their 6th annual developers summit in Las Vegas this year at CES 2014. Several updates and announcements were made while also presenting the top 6 apps created during the weekend hack-a-thon.
Last Monday, Jan 6th, marked the culmination of AT&T’s Developer Summit at CES 2014 along with the release of open APIs for its U-Verse platform on Android. Now developers can build Android apps with AT&T Labs and AT&T Foundry to let customers better interact with their televisions from a smartphone, tablet or other such mobile devices.
The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas boasts more than 3,200 exhibitors, 300 sessions, and 152,000+ attendees from 150 countries. Overwhelmed yet? Well don’t be, because we’ve done the hard work for you. Here are some of our top staff picks thus far from CES 2014.
