Benjamin Kuo’s Blog

I spent most of the morning/part of the afternoon at AlwaysOn Hollywood. AlwaysOn is Tony Perkin’s (former Red Herring founder) new venture, and his AlwaysOn Hollywood event focuses in on some of the trends bringing the technology world together with media/Hollywood.

What I find interesting is the difference in crowd you get attending an event like this–primarily a Northern California crowd, with a few folks from Hollywood mixed in, and a few (but very few) people from the technology/startup side of Southern California.

I spent a few minutes talking with Justin Kan, of Justin.tv (for those not familiar with Justin.tv, Justin is wearing a web camera 24/7 broadcasting basically his entire life) and Kevin Rose of Digg addressed the user revolt the company is facing after trying to remove a HD-DVD hack from the popular user-generated news site.

Some of the local executives on upcoming panels: Adam Lilling, CEO of Biggerboat is on a panel later today; Dmitry Shapiro of Veoh is scheduled for a session tonight;  Greg Kostello of VMIX Media is on a session Thursday, as is Steven Starr, of Revver. Frank Creer of Zone Ventures, and Richard Rosenblatt of Demand Media were also on panels at the conference earlier.

Matt Marshall of VentureBeat, took note of Southern California’s rise in venture capital activity yesterday in a post on his venture-focused publication for Silicon Valley. Marshall (formerly of the San Jose Mercury News) is closely followed by venture capitalists in the Bay Area for his commentary on the market.

There’s a strange thing I’ve been seeing in the last few months, which is finding out the number of technology industry executives at notable Silicon Valley or other technology firms, moving into, or who live in the Los Angeles area. This week, the LA Times reported that Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon.com) has apparently purchased a home in Beverly Hills. I’ve run into Richard Wolpert, former Chief Strategy Officer of RealNetworks, and now asssociated with venture firm Accel Partners, several times in Los Angeles–he lives in Westlake Village. Elon Musk, founder of PayPal and currently chairman of Tesla Motors and SolarCity (two Silicon Valley startups), lives in Bel Air. Another ex-Paypal exec, David O. Sacks, runs Geni.com (a Los Angeles startup) and lives in Beverly Hills. And I’ve mentioned before how embattled Yahoo CEO Terry Semel commutes from Bel Air every week to Yahoo headquarters in Silicon Valley.

Is there anyone else out there I’m missing?

Update: At one point, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch was living in Newport Beach, I don’t know if he’s still there (though if you check the web registration information for Techcrunch.com, it’s still Arrington’s apartment in Manhattan Beach…).