was recently interviewed for an article that appeared in Fast Company titled, “ Why you should start a business in LA .” 8221;  If you’re interested in the topic it’s worth a read, but I thought I’d elaborate on the topic since it comes up all the time. LA was a leader in lead generation (LowerMyBills), comparison shopping (PriceGrabber, Shopzilla), social networking (MySpace … I know, I know – Los Angeles.  People People either love it our hate it.  All

Individuals use social networking sites such as LinkedIn and Plaxo as career-advancing tools, even more useful in a down economy. Top officers of some of the leading social media websites and tools (including Facebook, MySpace and Yammer) will be on the Panel, and there will be panelists from the worlds of media sharing platforms (Pringo), online advertising (Stun Media) and law (Greenberg Glusker), the latter to highlight risks relating to such issues as corporate blogging and privacy. Speakers: * Jason Oberfest, Senior Vice President, Business Development of MySpace

RSS ); Why You Should Start a Company in... Los Angeles By: Laura Rich February 26, 2010

I’m pretty focused on this platform in my startup life ( SocialGuides and FeedTrace ) I keep up on this stream to see what my friends and family are up to – see peoples pictures and silly notes.  Clearly Clearly important, but not my most important stream. LinkedIn – business stream (sort of) and opportunity network. I don’t really pay attention to the updates or think of a stream here because there are too many ‘Bob is now connected Oh yes.  Today, Today, Google launched Buzz.  I

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a small panel discussion between Jason Green (General Partner at Emergence Capital and investor in companies such as DoubleClick, aQuantive, and Ask Jeeves) and Reid Hoffman (Founder of LinkedIn, EVP at Paypal, and angel investor in over 60 startups such as Facebook, IronPort, Flickr, and Digg). During the panel, the question of market vs team in venture/angel investing came up. Jason was in the “team” camp while Reid was more in “market” camp – but these are very broad generalizations and both emphasized the importance of both in any investment they make.

Our interview today is with Santa Monica-based OneCubicle (www.onecubicle.com), a new startup we ran across recently, which is looking to provide a more professional social networking site for younger people. We caught up with the firm's CEO, Gregg Champion--who formerly was Vice President of Programming and Development at Mania TV--to learn more about the company, its business, as well as its fundraising plans. What What is Onecubicle? Gregg Gregg Champion: OneCubicle.com is a social business network for people on their first, second, and third jobs.

Rob Farrow is one of the co-founders of Chi.mp , a new startup which is getting set to launch a service to allow users to manage their profiles across the many sites on the Internet. Why did you start Chi.mp, and what does it provide? Rob With so many social networks, and dominant sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace, how do you fit in, and why is there need for another social The firm recently relocated its headquarters from Hawaii, and we talked with Rob about why someone might need the service, how it's different from the scores of social networking sites on the web, and what problem it's trying to solve.

Patterson was working on at UC Irvine and applied it to the world of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking sites. Don Patterson: The phenomenon of Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter has caught the imagination, but the function that these services serve for people has been around for a long time. What we were looking at, when this first started taking off, was using instant messaging lines and really trying to see how people were For today's interview, we connected with George Ruan and Dr. Don Patterson, the co-founders of Irvine-based Quub (www.quub.com), which