One nice thing to see in Southern California is the number of second-generation companies — those started by the founders of previously successful startups– who are building their businesses. Although that’s long been a Silicon Valley dynamic, it was quite rare until recently to find companies whose founders previously started up companies, sold them, or [...]
Earlier this week, FunnyOrDie — the comedy site affiliated with Will Ferrell, and which has offices in Los Angeles — released a new parody video of Paris Hilton in a spoof political campaign ad. Apparently, it was a big hit — the company said today that it has received over 6.2 million views of the [...]
Earlier this week, Internet Brands acquired twelve more web sites for the firm’s stable of web properties, bringing the firm’s total number of web sites up to 200. It’s an increasingly common strategy you are seeing out of Southern California companies: companies which are buying up small web sites, and selling advertising against those web [...]
One thing I haven’t seen in awhile (well, at least since Amp’d Mobile went under) is one of those “our-company-died-sell-off-our-assets-please” auctions. Looks like Favrille, the San Diego-based biotech firm, now has its facilities and equipment on sale. It’s not a surprise — the firm announced in July that it was pretty much cutting all of [...]
I’ve been sitting in a few meetings lately where the dilemma of the local universities of getting technology developed there into industry has surfaced a few times: finding entrepreneurs. There’s an amazing amount of research happening at local universities — Caltech, USC, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UCSD, UC Irvine, etc. — but there’s not a [...]
A small footnote in the failure of the SpaceX Falcon launch this weekend: it was not only a failure for Elon Musk’s high visibility space flight operation, it also meant that the ashes of 208 people — included James Doohan, “Scotty” from Star Trek — did not reach orbit. Part of the Falcon payload was [...]
I was chuckling this morning a bit when I saw how many bloggers posted stuff at 2am on Sunday evening. If you follow the many technology blog news sites (aside from our own) you’ll notice some strange posting schedules where folks are posting news stories at all sorts of odd hours of the morning, plus [...]
Thoughts and commentary from Benjamin F. Kuo, publisher of socalTECH.com.
