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Los Angeles is an amazing place for technology. With a set of world-class research universities and institutions (including Caltech, USC's Information Sciences Institute, the Claremont Colleges, and UCLA), a long-standing relationship with the aerospace industry (the giants of the past and of the future, now that SpaceX is here), and the visionary power and prototyping capabilities of the Hollywood creative world, the region has everything it needs to dream up and execute on amazing technological products and services.
Of course, these strengths and capabilities are often overlooked, as they don't draw quite the same attention as the media industry. Additionally, there has been a fair amount of press given to several less technical startups in the area, like Shoedazzle, Beachmint, and the one-time tentpole of attention, BetterWorks. These factors often make it easy to think of Los Angeles' technology and startup ecosystem as a being "not as serious" or as technical as those found in the Bay Area. Happily, the reality is that there are many "hard" science and engineering startups in Los Angeles.
Michael Carney did a recent post on a selection of technically-focused and venture-backed companies here in Los Angeles, which helped to paint a broad view the talent and capability located in this town. The article does a good job of showing how diverse the community is, covering private spaceflight, finance, user interface and visualization, media, data, and ad tech. One company in the article, Gravity, specializes in algorithmic personalization.
As big data, machine learning, and recommendation and discovery are incredibly active areas of interest in the technology community at large, it is worthwhile to illustrate how Gravity is just one of many startups in Los Angeles working on delivering value through algorithmic processing of data.
Data For Fun and Profit
There are a number of startups in Los Angeles that offer even more than meets the eye, backing up their simple interfaces with a wealth of algorithmic discovery engineering. Wrapped in the veneer of consumer-friendliness and accessibility, these five startups are building products that are usable by your average smart-phone wielding Los Angelino, hiding the complexity of what they do behind fun and friendly interfaces.
- Opal: A small five-person team incubated by IAC's OkCupid Labs is building out a recommendation and discovery platform that puts data to work for the people who create that data in the first place. Opal accepts social data from users (Facebook, Twitter, and soon many others), combines it with a massive variety of non-social data, maps complex entities together using natural language processing, and then applies a variety of graph traversal algorithms to deliver relevant opportunities (places, activities, people, and things) to users, making sure that they're contextually accessible and actionable. The system also incorporates some machine learning techniques to learn and better model relevance as users interact with the system. The team, located in the Arts District in Downtown Los Angeles, is comprised of local startup veterans, natural language processing specialists, and math and design geeks.
- Bramo: The topic of music discovery has been on many technologists' radars in recent years, as various platforms try to enhance the surfacing of new music and the exploration of existing catalogs. Bramo has taken a very mathematical and graph-oriented approach to the problem, and has built a very elegant discovery and playlisting product that turns all of the music on Soundcloud into a "personal DJ" which is "powered by science." Bramo's core engine models how people listen to music over time, and interleaves new music with known favorites, drawing bridges between discoveries and more familiar territory. It also learns from user's reactions, refining it's recommendations over time. Bramo is anchored out of Los Angeles' West Side.
- Tinder and Let's Date: Two new mobile-centric dating apps have taken root here in Los Angeles, and they both use innovative matching and recommendation technology to bring people together. Tinder, incubated by another of IAC's product development Labs, and founded by LA startup veteran Sean Rad, has focused on an incredibly simple, fast, and addictive interface for its dating app. The product works with interest, social, location, and other data to build out sets of candidate matches, and learns quickly based on the feedback of users. The real genius of the product lies in how well the flow of the experience masks all of the technical complexity and algorithmic magic going on under the hood. The other mobile dating app, Let's Date, is the product of Suicide Girls founder Sean Suhl and his small team. This app plays with a more complex representation of users than Tinder, and encourages users to provide feedback on each and every facet of matches in order to train its machine learning algorithms.
- Ranker: Driven out of Los Angeles' mid-city area, Ranker is an impressive crowd-sourced data platform. Users create ranked lists of everything and anything imaginable, correlating data together within Ranker, and embedding its data across the social web. This provides a fun social experience that many people seem addicted to, and also a fast-growing and highly-linked set of data points. Ranker is able to deliver insight into opinions and trends, making it a valuable barometer for the attention and sentiment of the online public.
More than Just Fun at the Beach
There are a number of additional startups in LA specializing in these data-centric technologies, but which focus on less consumer-oriented products. For instance, Nova Spivack's real-time social intelligence company, Bottlenose, provides analytics insights and predictive intelligence on top of social data. GradientX is a relatively new ad-tech startup, founded by a who's who of alumni of other Los Angeles ad-tech startups. Companies like Jukebox Television have been working to provide personally customized video content, bringing algorithmic recommendation capabilities to LA's strong video content industry.
Where We Were and Where We're Going
Of course, Los Angeles has a long history of startups relying on hard math and science to produce value. Gil Elbaz's Applied Semantics, the progenitor of AdSense, is a shining example of a wildly successful Los Angeles startup in this domain. Most others, while fascinating and promising in their approaches, have yielded mixed levels of success. Some, like ValueClick, have been relatively financially successful, while others, like MusicIP, created incredible media recommendation and discovery tools which proved to be a bit too early into the market to be successful.
Technologies and techniques have continued to evolve, and access to data of all types is easier than ever. These new generations of tech-based LA startups is poised to make some major advances and wins with their products, pushing both Los Angeles and the state of what's possible with data ever further.
The author, Rand Fitzpatrick, is Chief Product Officer at OkCupid Labs, and works on Opal.
