Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

The City of Los Angeles is looking to deploy Wi-Fi citywide, as part of a muni Wi-Fi project, and as part of the effort have been soliciting opinions on the idea. Conchetta Fabares at the Digital Coast Roundtable forwarded me this and I thought I’d pass it along:

Under the leadership of Mayor Villaraigosa and Councilman Cardenas, the City of Los Angeles (City) Information Technology Agency (ITA) is conducting a comprehensive Feasibility Study to identify opportunities and strategies for developing a citywide municipal wireless network in Los Angeles.  The City is inviting Los Angeles residents, schools, businesses and commuters to participate in a community outreach study and survey to provide input
about potential uses, demands and benefits of a citywide municipal wireless  network in Los Angeles.

We invite you to participate in the City’s study by completing the survey. Click on www.lawifi.lacity.org/survey to complete the survey now.

Findings from the feasibility study along with recommendation actions will be forwarded to the City of Los Angeles Mayor and Council before the end  of the current calendar year.  For more information about this project, meetings, and announcements visit the “LA WiFi Initiative” website at www.lawifi.lacity.org.

For the entrepreneurs and others out there who might be interested, I have a number of passes to the Technology Council’s great venture capital event, VentureNet, that I am giving away. VentureNet is being held on October 5th, and is a great opportunity to rub elbows with venture capitalists, angel investors, and other fellow entrepreneurs–and also listen to some companies pitch. If you’re interested leave a comment below, or email me by EOD next Tuesday (10/2)…

All too often, the venture capitalists and startups gloss over the “other” side of the startup successes, which is the sometimes more frequent failures of new business ventures. It’s all too rare when someone looks at — and tries to learn from — a startup failure. So, it’s interesting to see the latest podcast from local angel investor Frank Peters.

Frank Peters, who is also president of the Tech Coast Angels, has just posted a fascinating podcast which dissects the failure of Media Matchmaker. I spoke to Media Matchmaker back in 2006, and it’s interesting to hear the drama behind how this startup unraveled.

ValueClick saw some some action in the markets today, on rumors that the firm may be acquired by AOL. ValueClick has been subject to rumors of an M&A since May, after a slew of Internet advertising related acquisitions in the industry.

Toni DasGupta, a local angel investor at the Tech Coast Angels, has an interesting post asking whether entepreneurs have ADD.

The popular Demo launch conference is kicking off next week in San Diego, and they’ve just named the companies which will be presenting. Among the local companies there are Agoura Hills-based Clipblast; Hollywood’s FastCall411; Carlsbad-based nCursion; and Los Angeles-based PeopleJam.

We’ve just posted a new article in our startup section, where we are featuring contributed articles from experts on various topics of interest to entrepreneurs.

The article, Selling a Business: Ten Tips For Enterpreneurs,  comes from Scott Edward Walker, a corporate lawyer located in Los Angeles.

Hopefully these articles are useful. In case you missed it, last week’s article was Basic Information About Patents from SoCal IP Law Group.

Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch40 conference is happening today up in San Francisco, here’s the local startups I’ve seen so far on the list:

• mEgo (Los Angeles, social networking)
• DocStoc (Los Angeles, document sharing)
• App2You (La Jolla, hosted software)
• (Updated) Metaplace, aka Areae (San Diego, massively multiplayer software)
• (Updated) Orgoo (Los Angeles, mobile webmail)

Elsewhere on the web in the last week:

• LA’s Docstoc raises a small venture round (VentureBeat)
• Listphile: Lists on Speed (TechCrunch)

For those of you who missed the VC in the OC event Wednesday, Marc Averitt at Okapi VC just posted the slides from NVCA’s Mark Heeson, which details some of the VC activity here.

Anyone who has been using the LinkedIn social networking service (which tends to be people in the venture capital/high tech/business area) might have noticed that Presidential candidate Barack Obama just posted a question to the Small Business section. Just for fun, I checked my own network to see if anyone other candidates were anywhere near linked to people I know:

Linked: Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani

Not linked: Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sam Brownback, Bill Richardson, John Edwards, Christopher Dodd, Tom Tancredo, Duncan Hunter, Mike Huckabee, Chuck Hagel

(btw, congrats to Jon Burke, who publishes the venture focused alarm:clock, for beating out the rest of the world to answer Obama’s question first!)