January, 2019

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Google partners with Sony Pictures Imageworks to launch an open source VFX render manager

TechCrunch LA

Google today announced that it has partnered with Sony Pictures Imageworks , Sony’s visual effects and animation studio, to launch OpenCue , an open source render manager. OpenCue doesn’t handle any of the actual rendering processes but it provides all the tools to break down those different steps and then schedule and manage the different rendering jobs across large rendering farms, both local and in the cloud.

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Dow Jones VentureSource: Southern California Gets $2.96 Billion In VC In Q4

socalTECH

Southern California raised $2.96 billion in venture capital in Q4 of 2018, according to data from Dow Jones VentureSource , released on Friday. According to the report, Los Angeles garnered the lion's share of the local funding, with $1.77 billion in deals, followed by $0.77 billion in San Diego and $0.42 billion in Orange County. The region had a total of 124 deals logged by Dow Jones VentureSource, split between 75 in Los Angeles, 29 in San Diego, and 20 in Orange County.

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SpaceX Plans 10 Percent Workforce Reduction

L.A. Business Journal

Approximately 10 percent of Hawthorne-based Space Exploration Technologies Corp.’s estimated 6,000 employees will be laid off.

Hawthorne 127
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Make More, Work Less – Create A Veblen Brand

InfoChachkie

A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. This Louis Vuitton / Supreme boxed logo t-shirt recently sold for $1,750. The shirt was produced by Supreme, which originally sold it for $485. You may think that this item is an anomaly, but it is not. A Louis Vuitton / Supreme hoodie resold for $7,500. Other Supreme apparel sells in the aftermarket for hundreds more than their retail prices, including box logo hoodies which typically sell for between $500 – $1,000.

Demand 160
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Can You Ask for Office Rent Relief? How to Manage Your Lease During COVID-19

Office leases are one of companies’ largest expenses, and if your whole team is working from home with no clear end in sight, you may be wondering what to do about your lease.

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Investors, your board, and you: Who controls strategy?

Berkonomics

You’re building a company from your vision and a passion, and lots of people are going to tell you that you have this or that wrong, and that it just won’t work. Business plans rarely survive market contact. The truth is that very, very few early business plans survive in a form completely recognizable when looking back a few years. But even with massive changes, the vision and passion usually don’t diminish in the process of morphing a business plan into a profitable business.

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Baby Boomers May Be Your Biggest Startup Competitors

Startup Professionals Musings

Contrary to what you might guess, the highest rate of entrepreneurial growth over the last few years is not Gen-Y upstarts, but Boomers over the age of 50, now called encore entrepreneurs. In fact, according to the latest Index of Startup Activity by the Kauffman Foundation and recent press reports , these Baby Boomers are actually driving a new entrepreneurship boom.

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More Trending

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Interview With Caradoc Ehrenhalt, EV Safe Charging

socalTECH

In a world where more and more drivers are moving to electric vehicles, where is EV charging today? To better understand exactly where EV technology is today, we caught up with Caradoc Ehrenhalt , the CEO and founder of a Los Angeles startup, EV Safe Charge (www.evsafecharge.com), to chat a bit about his view of where EV charging technology today. EV Safe Charge rents out EV chargers for events, in addition to having its own business installing charging stations.

Startup 243
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Nfusz Inc. Enters Partnership With Instapage

L.A. Business Journal

Hollywood-headquartered sales intelligence software outfit Nfusz Inc. announced Jan. 11 it entered a strategic partnership with Instapage Inc.

Hollywood 189
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SaaS Is Dead, Long Live Software

InfoChachkie

A version of this article previously appeared in Forbes. During the first half of the last century, numerous fortunes were made electrifying devices that were previously manual. Because electrification was new, the qualifying term “electric” was an important distinction when describing these newfangled gadgets. However, the adjective “electric” was eventually dropped when all the devices in a product category utilized the technology.

SaaS 113
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Merck And The Future of Immuno-Oncology: A Chat With Roger Perlmutter

Xconomy

Cancer immunotherapy is, in a word, tantalizing. It might save the life of someone at death’s door and keep the cancer at bay for years. Or it might not work at all. There’s no telling what a patient will experience. “There’s a real poverty of understanding of how the machine that is us works,” says Roger Perlmutter, the executive vice president of pharmaceutical giant Merck (NYSE: MRK ) and the head of its research division, Merck Research Laboratories.

Research 111
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The Average Startup Overnight Success Takes Six Years

Startup Professionals Musings

Every startup founder knows implicitly that startup success is a long hard road. Yet we always dream that we are the exception to the rule. So once in a while it’s good to look at some facts to temper our imagination. I was reading an old article written by marketing guru Seth Godin a while back where he mentions that “it takes about six years of hard work to become an overnight success”.

Startup 111
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Consolidation is coming to gaming, and Jam City raises $145 million to capitalize on it

TechCrunch LA

A slew of banks are coming together to back a new roll-up strategy for the Los Angeles-based mobile gaming studio, Jam City and giving the company $145 million in new funding to carry that out. There’s no word on whether the new money is in equity or debt, but what is certain is that JPMorgan Chase Bank, Bank of America Merrill Lynch and syndicate partners including Silicon Valley Bank, SunTrust Bank and CIT Bank are all involved in the deal.

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WhiteFox Defense: Solving The Drone Incursion Problem, with Luke Fox

socalTECH

For all of the positive uses of drone aircraft, there are many negatives, including issues around privacy, safety, and particularly, securityas demonstrated by the recent drone incursions at such airports like Gatwick, Heathrow, and Newark. Those airport drone incursions shut down Gatwick over the course of three days, which caused major delays at Heathrow and Newark.

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Santa Monica E-sports Company Files $25 Million IPO

L.A. Business Journal

Super League Gaming Inc., a Santa Monica company that organizes amateur e-sports competitions, filed a $25 million initial public offering with the Securities and Exchange Commission Jan. 4.

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Opinion: Nvidia’s Business As Usual Strategy Can Cost Them Dearly

Inverted Software

Nvidia was recently hit with multiple class action lawsuits following this year’s cryptocurrency crash. Nvidia, if you didn’t know is the largest maker of GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit). GPUs are designed for graphics and image processing and are extremely good at math calculations, in fact, their highly parallel structure makes them more efficient than general-purpose CPUs for algorithms that process large blocks of data in parallel.

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New Year to Bring New Data Security Threats, Cyber Investor Warns

Xconomy

Bob Ackerman is one of the venture capitalists whose funding has long fed the growth of the burgeoning cybersecurity industry. So, you might imagine that his outlook on data protection for 2019 would be more optimistic than in past years, because businesses now take advantage of a broad choice of security services to protect themselves. Ackerman (pictured) is founder and managing director of San Francisco-based VC firm AllegisCyber , and co-founder of Fulton, MD-based DataTribe , which helps lau

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5 Keys To Starting A New Venture In Your Local Town

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Wikipedia From the advice I hear these days, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to be in Silicon Valley, Boston, New York, or one of the few other financial hubs around the world. What does that mean for the rest of us, who reside or grew up in the thousands of small towns that cover most of the landscape? Is entrepreneurship ever viable or recommended in a small town?

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With its Greenlots acquisition, Shell is moving from gas stations to charging stations

TechCrunch LA

In a bid to show that it’s getting ready for the electrification of American roads, Royal Dutch Shell is buying Greenlots , a Los Angeles-based developer of electric vehicle charging and energy management technologies. Shell, which is making the acquisition through its Shell New Energies US subsidiary, snatched the company from Energy Impact Partners, a cleantech-focused investment firm.

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OpenX Snags New CFO From Fandango

socalTECH

Los Angeles-based OpenX said on Tuesday that it has named a new CFO. According to OpenX, Rob Leff, formerly the CFO of Fandango, will join the company to lead its global finance team. Leff has been at Fandango for more than a decade, according to OpenX, overseeing all aspects of financial strategy including mergers & acquisitions, predictive analytics, data science and more at Fandango.

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Parsons Acquires Imaging, Mapping and Data Analytics Firm OGSystems

L.A. Business Journal

Pasadena-based engineering and security consulting firm Parsons Corp. announced Jan. 8 that it has acquired OGSystems, an imaging, mapping and data analytics company based in Chantilly, Va., for an undisclosed sum.

Pasadena 113
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6 Services from Telecom Infrastructure Companies in SoCal that Help Carriers Scale

Southern California Edison Blog

The telecommunications industry is under increasing pressure as customers demand high speeds and data transport, as well as implementing big data initiatives for their businesses. To keep up with demands, carriers are investing billions of dollar in infrastructure and service enhancements to help them grow. For your carrier business to grow and scale you need to: Improve the quality of service you provide.

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America Should Welcome Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Xconomy

When I came to America in 1987, as a wide-eyed University of Texas grad student, I arrived with just a suitcase and a few hundred dollars — money that my mother, back in India, had scraped together by selling her beloved jewelry collection. Three decades later, I’m a successful biomedical researcher and serial entrepreneur with more than 120 patents to my name, and eight successful businesses under my belt.

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10 Tips For Rising Above The Crowd In Your Business

Startup Professionals Musings

Everyone knows that that startups are risky, but they also expect that the job will be exciting and potentially very lucrative (think early employees at Facebook and Google). Yet we have all heard stories about the high turnover, unstructured work environment, lower base pay, and unpredictable expectations from the top. Assuming you are lucky enough to get hired, what can you do to survive, and even stand out above the rest in this environment?

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Going long on LA, India, AI and tech infrastructure March Capital raises $300 million

TechCrunch LA

March Capital Partners , the Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, has raised $300 million for its latest fund. It’s another indicator that the Los Angeles technology ecosystem is coming of age, but also a sign that March’s core investment strategies — to invest in companies applying artificial intelligence to business use cases and investing in the next wave transforming computing infrastructure — are paying off. “We have two major areas and a couple of minor are

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Reflections On 2018: Matt Stodder, Startup Boost LA

socalTECH

During the holiday season, our tradition over the last few years has been to post reflections on the past year and some predictions for 2019 from Southern California's technology industry. Here's the contribution by Matt Stodder of StartupBoost LA (our apologies to Matt for the late post, our fault, not his!). What was the biggest lesson you learned this year?

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Westwood Satellite Data Storage Outfit Raises $100 Million

L.A. Business Journal

Cloud Constellation Corp., based in Westwood, finalized a $100 million Series B equity round Dec. 20, led by HCH Group Company Ltd., a subsidiary of Chinese consumer electronics conglomerate Haier Group.

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Does Your Business Need a Dedicated Internet Connection?

Southern California Edison Blog

Technology and network connections are becoming increasingly important for businesses. Once general tools used to manage daily operations, they’re now major sources of competitive advantage. Today, the right network connection can increase productivity, mitigate risk, and improve security. But despite increasingly high-speed and high-bandwidth business internet options, many organizations still struggle with their connections.

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LunaDNA Health Data Platform to Merge with Genetic Alliance Database

Xconomy

LunaDNA, a startup that is offering individuals company stock in exchange for personal genomic and health information in a bid to build a database that could help advance scientific research, is merging its research platform with the Genetic Alliance’s Platform for Engaging Everyone Responsibly (PEER). The Genetic Alliance is a longstanding nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C.

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5 Phases of Leadership Growth Lead To Company Success

Startup Professionals Musings

Most of you aspiring entrepreneurs have no idea how dramatically your own role has to evolve as you develop a solution, start a business, and expect it to scale into a successful self-managed company. You may have a strong product development background, but typically have minimal experience in hiring and leading team members and groups, or managing financials.

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Dreaming of Mars, the startup Relativity Space gets its first launch site on Earth

TechCrunch LA

3D-printing the first rocket on Mars. That’s the goal Tim Ellis and Jordan Noone set for themselves when they founded Los Angeles-based Relativity Space in 2015. At the time they were working from a WeWork in Seattle, during the darkest winter in Seattle history, where Ellis was wrapping up a stint at Blue Origin. The two had met in college at USC in their jet propulsion lab.

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IDrive Takes On Remote Help Desk Services

socalTECH

Los Angeles-based IDrive Online Backup , which provides cloud backup and storage services, has launched a new, remote help desk service, which it is offering up to MSPs and IT specialists. According to IDrive its new remote access solution, RemotePC HelpDesk, provides on-demate remote support, letting IT administrators manage and monitor all service requests and manage their technicians from a single dashboard.

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Silicon Beach Report Jan. 3: $100 Million for SpaceBelt Data Storage

L.A. Business Journal

AT&T earthquake app available for download; LA Times malware ID’d; Westwood data storage firm raises $100 million.

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Carrier Network Infrastructure: How to Find Local Vendors to Expand Your Capacity

Southern California Edison Blog

The telecom industry is rapidly transforming. Customers are demanding denser coverage and higher speeds in expanding areas. To keep pace, carriers are making strategic infrastructure investments to expand and improve coverage. T-Mobile and Sprint, for example, invested billions of dollars in 2017 to bring 5G service to customers in the US by 2019.¹.

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Pensa, AI-Enabled Drones Maker for Inventory Monitoring, Raises $5M

Xconomy

Austin —The grocery store shelf has yet to be plugged into the increasingly digital food supply chain. Instead, inventory is typically tallied by employees by hand in a slow and laborious process. “It’s one big black hole with groceries, not knowing what is exactly on the retail shelf and available for sale,” says Richard Schwartz, president and CEO of Pensa Systems in Austin.

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How To Take Your Business Idea From Dream To Reality

Startup Professionals Musings

Image via Pixabay In my role as a new business advisor and occasional investor, I hear lots of people talking about their dreams of “someday” starting and running a new venture. They can talk with passion about their innovative new idea, and ask lots of questions, but never seem to really get started. The challenge we all have as business founders is to move from the idea stage to a real business.

Ideas 99
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FabFitFun raises $80 million for its growing lifestyle brand

TechCrunch LA

Nine years after launching its online magazine, and three years after diversifying into the subscription box business , FabFitFun has raised $80 million in a growth round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from its previous investors Upfront Ventures and NEA. . The Los Angeles-based company has steadily expanded its retail and lifestyle empire through subscription boxes, video… and even an augmented reality app.