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on LA Startups & Tech
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Despite what American news cycles (fail to) say, the crisis in Ukraine is not over. This is clear to University of Southern California’s Innovation in Engineering and Design for Global Challenges program, which is looking to make an impact by giving students firsthand experience in international crises zones to create their own startup solutions.
Created in 2018 by four USC professors– Burcin Becerik-Gerber, David Jason Gerber, Brad Cracchiola and Daniel Druhora– the course has since blossomed into a minor at the university. The program allows students to build startups based on the needs witnessed firsthand in international crises zones.
Left to right: Daniel Druhora, David Jason Gerber, Burcin Becerik-Gerber, and Brad Cracchiola. Courtesy of Dan Druhora
In the past, the first few classes–which the program refers to as “cohorts”-- focused on the global refugee crisis and the pandemic. Previous years startups to come out of the program include: Frontida Records, a digital database that stores medical records for refugees; Tent, a low-cost dwelling solution for those living in vulnerable makeshift housing, and Firefly, a sustainable clothing brand that makes durable clothing designed specifically for emergency responders.
The students won’t be able to visit Ukraine for obvious safety reasons, so instructors chose Romania for the cohort’s weeklong immersive program. According to the BBC, as of July 4th, there are approximately 83,321 Ukrainian refugees in Romania.
The first visit is focused on immersing the students in the environment, building relationships with people on the ground that are experiencing the trauma of displacement.
“We are big believers that you can't solve these problems from a Google search,” Cracchiola told dot.LA. “You have to experience it firsthand and talk to people, and spend as much time as possible to really get this true systems perspective on these challenges.”
Once the students return back to campus after their visit, they will then form teams to create solutions for the challenges they saw impacted the refugees and those in crisis face.
During the second semester, the students will visit a second time to test out their prototype with people in the crisis zone. Cracchiola added that the second trip will help validate that what they're building is actually going to have a positive impact and help people.
“Ultimately, we hope to inspire other students, other universities, other programs to follow our model and let this kind of idea catch fire, and maybe pull more resources and more talent into this sort of thinking,” Cracchiola said.
Decerry Donato is dot.LA's Editorial Fellow. Prior to that, she was an editorial intern at the company. Decerry received her bachelor's degree in literary journalism from the University of California, Irvine. She continues to write stories to inform the community about issues or events that take place in the L.A. area. On the weekends, she can be found hiking in the Angeles National forest or sifting through racks at your local thrift store.
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
The rivalry between TikTok and YouTube gets a lot of attention lately, but don’t forget about Instagram.
The Meta-owned photo sharing platform remains one of the top downloaded apps, according to Apptopia, which collects and analyzes app data. Although the most popular creators these days are largely coming from YouTube and TikTok, Instagram is still producing stars, said Evan Birtton, founder of Santa Monica-based Famous Birthdays.
“I think that it's hard for creators to get engagement on Instagram because there's no For You Page, per se,” Britton said, referring to TikTok’s recommendation feed that can help videos go viral. “But that said, Instagram is still enormous, and creators are breaking out on Instagram. And when creators get significant Instagram engagement, it's very meaningful because there's no For You Page.”
With that in mind, Famous Birthdays provided dot.LA with its latest list of creators that have recently seen a surge in popularity. The company, which launched a decade ago as a sort of Wikipedia-for-internet personalities, ranks online influencers based on activity on its platform, which it says is visited by tens of millions of users monthly. Using that data, Famous Birthdays identified 10 Instagram stars who jumped high in its rankings during June. In these cases, fans are not only watching and commenting on their videos, but are now taking time to look up their bios on Famous Birthdays.
The list, for example, includes DJ and fashion influencer Zack Bia, who attended the University of Southern California and served as creative director for a Los Angeles-based hospitality company called The h.Wood Group, according to his Famous Birthdays bio. Bia’s ranking rose from No. 2,907 on June 1 to No. 2,075 as of Tuesday.
Another creator named Sofia, who uses the Instagram handle @sofiacastillo_ to post modeling and travel photos, saw her Famous Birthdays ranking leap from No. 155,879 to No. 46,318 as of Tuesday. That happened at a time when she added nearly 31,000 followers, according to Social Blade, a social media analytics tracker.
The rankings—largely driven by search queries on Famous Birthdays’ website—are an indicator of fan engagement and a real-time measure of popularity and culture, Britton has said. The company sells its data insights to social media platforms, talent agencies and brands looking for clues about influencers on the rise.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is among the many companies trying to cut into Culver City-based TikTok’s dominance in the short-form video space. Instagram launched Reels in 2020 to similarly let creators make short videos edited with music and effects.
But the rising stars identified by Famous Birthdays are largely getting Instagram engagement the old-school way: by posting photos to their profiles. Unlike TikTok’s For You Page, fans have to follow creators on Instagram to see their pictures.
“It means that the creators have a strong connection with their fans on Instagram,” Britton said.
Here are 10 Instagram stars who had breakout months in June, according to Famous Birthdays (list sorted by highest jump in ranking):
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Anthony Katz didn’t mean to become an entrepreneur. But a chance meeting with Kobe Bryant in 2011 turned his “art project” into a game-changer for his career and the world of sports tech.
On this episode of PCH Driven, Katz talks about his journey from high school history teacher and basketball coach to founding Hyperice.
Katz says he loves being on the court himself, but as he aged, he found recovering from aches and pains took longer than what he was used to.
Not wanting to let go of his love for playing basketball, Katz researched what professionals used to recover and soon began to ice his joints in the same way as pro-players— with bags of ice saran-wrapped to his legs.
But Katz found the method pro-players’ used was too messy. Instead, he cut neoprene and put medical bags of ice inside. His interesting approach caught the eye of Kobe Bryant’s trainer — and a friend of Katz’s — who told him that Bryant wanted to see his “ice project.”
“The first time I met him, it was just like, ‘Whoa’. I didn’t really feel I had anything worthy really showing him. It was just this thing I was trying to do,” Katz says. But Bryant saw promise in Katz’s ice project.
“Let me use it for a while and I’ll give you some feedback,” Bryant suggested.
And so, Katz became, in his words, an “accidental adventurer entrepreneur.” With a laundry list of feedback on how to improve the product from Bryant, Katz moved the ball forward.
“I have to make this product perfect for [Bryant], because I knew if I made it for him, that’d be good enough for everybody else. Because his standards were super high, and his focus on what he would use was really high,” Katz says. “He’s like, ‘Well it took you a while, but, you know, you actually got here'.”
Bryant was all in. Meanwhile, Katz “literally hustled” to get the product to big-time athletes like LeBron James.
Eventually, Katz began to research medical devices used for recovery, and says they were “big, expensive devices you would never want in your home.” With this in mind, he turned his attention to designing another Hyperice product that was portable, modern-looking, and provided quick relief during recovery. He took elements from these “super outdated” machines like their use of vibrational frequencies and implemented them into foam rollers.
“I think I'm an opportunist in that I got a window into an industry that was outdated, that wasn't speaking to the athlete. It was medical device companies making rehabilitation products when athletes really wanted recovery products,” says Katz. “And so I just listened and was able to put a team around me that figured out how to make some really great products that [are] now just table stakes in every training room in the world.”
Today, Hyperice can be found on top-tier athletes including Naomi Osaka, Patrick Mahomes and Amanda Nunes.
Subscribe to PCH Driven on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, iHeart, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.
dot.LA Engagement & Production Intern Jojo Macaluso contributed to this post.
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
Social media companies are often accused of hosting harmful content, but it’s very hard to successfully sue them. A federal law known as Section 230 largely protects the platforms from legal responsibility for hate speech, slander and misinformation created by its users.
But a new lawsuit blaming TikTok for the deaths of two children is taking a different approach. Rather than accuse the company of failing to moderate content, the complaint claims TikTok is a dangerous and defective product.
The suit, filed last week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, takes aim at the video sharing app’s recommendation algorithm, alleging that it served up videos depicting the deadly “Blackout Challenge,” in which people choke themselves to achieve a euphoric feeling. Two children—8-year-old Lalani Erika Walton and 9-year-old Arriani Jaileen Arroyo—died last year after allegedly trying the "blackout challenge," the suit said.
“We believe that there is a fundamental flaw in the design of the algorithm that directs these children to this horrific thing,” Matthew Bergman, the lawyer for the children's families, told dot.LA. Bergman is the founding attorney for the Social Media Victims Law Center, a self-described legal resource for parents of children harmed by social media.
Section 230 has long been an obstacle for social media’s opponents. "You can't sue Facebook. You have no recourse,” U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, said last year after Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen detailed Instagram’s toxic effect on young girls. The federal law’s defenders contend that Section 230 is what allows websites like YouTube and Craigslist to host user-generated content. It would be infeasible for companies to block all the objectionable posts from their massive user bases, the argument goes.
The strategy of bypassing that debate altogether by focusing on apps’ designs and features has gained steam lately. In May, an appellate panel ruled that Santa Monica-based Snap can’t dodge a lawsuit alleging that a Snapchat speed filter—which superimposed users’ speeds on top of photos and videos—played a role in a deadly car crash at 113 mph. The judges said Section 230 didn’t apply to the case because the lawsuit did not seek to hold Snap liable as a publisher.
Similarly, California lawmakers are advancing a bill that would leave social media companies open to lawsuits alleging their apps have addicted children. Proponents of the bill take issue with product features such as likes, comments and push notifications that grab users’ attention, with the ultimate goal of showing them ads.
“A product liability claim is separate and distinct from suing a company for posting third party content or publishing third party content, which we know has been unfruitful in many ways, for many years, as a vehicle to hold these companies accountable,” Bergman said.
Representatives for Culver City-based TikTok did not return a request for comment. In a previous statement about another TikTok user’s death, a company spokesperson noted the “disturbing” blackout challenge predates TikTok, pointing to a 2008 warning from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about deadly choking games. The spokesperson claimed the challenge “has never been a TikTok trend.” The app currently doesn’t produce any search results for “blackout challenge” or a related hashtag.
It’s too early to tell whether product liability claims will be more successful against social media companies. “We're realistic here. This is a long fight,” Bergman said. In the meantime, his suit against TikTok takes pains to note what it is not about: the users posting the dangerous challenge videos.
“Plaintiffs are not alleging that TikTok is liable for what third parties said or did [on the platform],” the suit said. “but for what TikTok did or did not do.”
Christian Hetrick is dot.LA's Entertainment Tech Reporter. He was formerly a business reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer and reported on New Jersey politics for the Observer and the Press of Atlantic City.
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