Thursday, February 11, 2016Hulu Gains Streaming Rights To 12 Monkeys, Battlestar GalacticaSanta Monica-based streaming television provider Hulu said Thursday that it has locked down the exclusive streaming rights to Syfy's 12 MONKEY, in a deal with NBCUniversal, in addition to gaining rights to Battlestar Galactica and Saved by the Bell, and adds more episodes from Bob the Builder, Thomas and Friends and Barney. Financial details of the deal were not announced. The company said the shows will be available starting February 24th, on its No Commercial and Limited Commercial subscriptio (More info...)
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.XYZ Hits 2 Million RegistrationsLos Angeles-based domain name registrar XYZ says it has just passed 2,000,000 registrations on its domain extension, just over a year after reaching the 1M registrations mark in June of 2015. The company, led by startup veteran Daniel Negari, said that over 700,000 of its registrations so far have been in China. The company said some of the highlights of the new domains include Starship.xyz, the robot delivery firm founded by Skype co-founder Janus Friis, Crowding.xyz, a Mexican crowdfunding sit (More info...)
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Larry Ellison To Keynote USC CommencementLarry Ellison, the founder and Chairman of Oracle, has been named the speaker for the University of Southern California commencement, the school said on Thursday. The commencement will be held on May 13th. Ellison founded Oracle in 1977, and was CEO until 2014, when he shifted to Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer. USC has regularly tapped figures from the technology world for its commencement; in 2014, the university had Elon Musk, Steve Ballmer, and Marc Benioff as commencement sp (More info...)
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Scopely's Eytan Elbaz Launches New Publishing Firm, Render MediaEytan Elbaz, the co-founder of gaming developer Scopely, and one of the founders of Applied Semantics, which is now Google AdSense, said he has launched a new company in Los Angeles called Render Media. Elbaz said the new company was launched with Vic Belongoff, and will focus on digital media publishing. The new company will own existing news sites Opposing Views and America News, as well as food publishing site Food Please and a video site called Watch This. The new venture says it has also n (More info...)
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Study: More Americans Using Online Dating Apps, SitesA new study, released today by the Pew Research Center, says that more American adults are using online dating sites or mobile apps than ever before. The study, which did not track exactly what mobile apps and sites users have been flocking to, said that 18- to 24-year olds has increase nearly threefold, with usage by 55- to 64-year-old users doubling since 2013. The study said 15% of adults have used online dating sites or apps; with 9% having used dating apps. The Pew study called the move to (More info...)
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Viant, Owner of Specific Media and MySpace, Acquired By Time Inc.Irvine-based Viant, the parent company of Specific Media and Myspace, has been acquired by publisher Time Inc., the companies said this morning. Financial details of the asset deal were not announced. Time said the buy will help it participate in the performance advertising segment. Viant, which is led by Tim Vanderhook, was founded in 1999 as Specific Media, and acquired Myspace back in 2011.
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Noramay Cadena, Make In LA: Accelerating Hardware Startups
One of the big advantages of starting up a new company in the region in recent years has been a large number of startup accelerators, who have been driving a lot of the new startups in the area. One of those accelerators—focused exclusively on hardware—is Make In LA (www.makeinla.com). We caught up with co-founder and General Manager Noramay Cadena to learn more about the accelerator.
What exactly is a hardware accelerator?
Noramay Cadena: Hardware accelerators, as my mom might say, (More info...)
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ViaSat's New Ultra High Speed Satellites To Support 4K Video StreamingCarlsbad-based satellite operator ViaSat's new satellite platform, the ViaSat-3, which it announced earlier this week, will support 4K video streaming, and more than 100 Megabits per second residential Internet, according to the firm. The first two, new ViaSat-3 satellites--planned to launch in 2019--will have more bandwdith than all of the approximately 400 commercial communications satellites in space today, combined, according to the company. ViaSat and Boeing Satellite Systems are currently (More info...)
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BlackLine Tops 1300 CustomersLos Angeles-based finance and accounting automation software developer BlackLine reports this morning that it added 393 new customers in 2015 and now has over 1300 customers around the world. The company said that among the new clients it added during the year were Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Malaysia Airlines, Roku and Trivago. BlackLine said that among the biggest area of growth for the company were mid-market companies, in addition to its existing large enterprise base.
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Qualcomm Targets Wearables With New SoCSan Diego-based Qualcomm said today that it has rolled out a new systems-on-a-chip (SoC) platform, specifically aimed at the wearable market. Qualcomm said that its subsidiary, Qualcomm Technologies, has launched the Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear, specifically aimed at use in wearables. The SoC is available in Bluetooth/Wi-Fi and 4G/LTE/3G versions. Qualcomm said its Snapdragon 400 processor already is being used by most available Android Wear smartwatches.
posted on Thursday, February 11, 2016(Full story)