photo by Jacy Wojcik

"I want to start a dating app for people over fifty. I know a lot of hot guys over fifty," one woman pitched to a small group last night.

She was in the right place to get feedback, at the Dating and Social Networks Startup Showcase and Digital Dating Etiquette Panel, hosted by Kevin Winston, Founder and CEO of the tech networking group Digital LA. The event was held at ROC, a shared office space in Santa Monica that's home to many digital startups and entrepreneurs. The event attracted industry professionals of all ages and a solid split of genders to pitch their startup companies, as well as a panel of experts to discuss social media startup tips and online dating etiquette, just in time for everyone's favorite holiday.

Digital dating is getting a makeover. No more trolling profiles, looking at photos of people they took ten years ago during their "super hot college years." Gone are the days of reading a laundry list of interests and slugging through tedious paragraphs when you really just want to know if there is anyway you may have a coveted "connection." The startups and experts on this panel are moving online dating to a more natural place -- you may not be meeting these people in person for the first time but goddammit it is going to be as close to that as possible.

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Wendy Gilmartin

Google headquarters

See also:
*More tech stories from L.A. Weekly
*Fugly Buildings: Our Series on the Most Hideous Buildings in L.A.

Since the arrival of Google in Venice last year, westside beach communities like Santa Monica, Playa Vista and others have seen an influx of tech companies, startups, investors and software businesses of all kinds burst into the neighborhood now dubbed "Silicon Beach."

As they scramble to get a piece of what many think will be the next big boomtown, companies are snatching up all the commercial real estate they can find. But this is L.A. and appearances mean everything.

LA Weekly explains what a handful of companies' choices in office buildings -- essentially their outward projection to the world -- says about their style in general.

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Loot Crate

A gamer box in all its glory.

See also:
*10 Best Arcades in L.A.
*L.A. Startup Club, Offering Counsel and Commiseration for Silicon Beach

Birchbox for geeks. Dollar Shave Club for techies. Gamer swag. Interested? Meet Loot Crate, a Hollywood-based startup that's a subscription service for boxes of tech and video game-themed stuff.

For less than $20 a month (shipping and handling included) you get six to eight hand-picked items, like energy gum, game-controller grips, posters, stickers and gift cards. Swag includes items like Captain America cologne and Super Mario energy drinks. Think the finer things in a gamer's life.

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Cris Dobbins

L.A. Startup Club founders Daniel Hengeveld and Micki Krimmel outside of their offices at the Idyllic Nerd Commune in downtown's Arts District.

Would you contribute 10 bucks to get an adult webcomix series featuring voiceovers from real porn stars off the ground? How about $5 for a stainless steel buttplug project? Ben Tao and Eric Lai, founders of Offbeatr, an adult version of crowd-funding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, seem to think you might.

There's only one problem. Who will hold onto the money while the buttplug company waits to see whether it can raise the full amount it needs? Crowd-funding sites take donations under the condition that your credit card will be charged only if the project being funded reaches its goal, but PayPal, American Express and Amazon Payments all refuse to process orders on adult material.

What's a struggling startup to do? Why, consult and exchange information with the competition, of course!

Every other Monday evening at the Idyllic Nerd Commune (INC), a co-working loft space in the downtown Arts District, the L.A. Startup Club, a collective consisting of the leaders of seven new tech companies, gathers over take-out to vent about the challenges their businesses face, to offer each other honest feedback and goal accountability and to share tangible resources, such as the contact info for a good Java designer or a comprehensive list of deep-pocketed investors. Startups involved range from the L.A. branch of a D.C.-based solar utility company to a service that saves parents from tedious shopping trips by sending a customizable box of children's clothing every month, started by Sean Percival, featured in LA Weekly's 2009 People issue as founder of L.A. tech blog lalawag.

The intimate, leaderless club is the brainchild of startup veterans Micki Krimmel and Daniel Hengeveld, who aim to find a happy medium between the superficial schmoozing of networking events and the top-down mentorship and forfeiture of equity at startup incubators and accelerators, all of which provide support and advice for fledgling companies in the newly thriving Silicon Beach tech scene in Santa Monica and Venice.

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If you're a college student or recent graduate and you haven't done an internship already, chances are, you're screwed. Totes screwed.

What you should have done, and what you should be doing instead of waking up at noon to play Call of Duty: Black Ops or marathoning Mad Men, is grabbing your future by the, um, rice balls.

Fortunately for your lazy ass, novel ways of getting internships are all the rage now, including Los Angeles-based Intern Sushi. The company's "intern life-cycle management" program at internsushi.com promises to provide the pole on which your fabulous flag can fly -- in the process, helping the right employers (read: television, advertising, films) find you.

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Courtesy of ScoreBig

After working in ticketing and marketing for the National Basketball Association, Adam Kanner recognized that the league had a problem: too few butts. Butts in the seats, that is.

"The challenge of live entertainment industry is unsold ticket inventory," Kanner explains. "That inventory is perishable, and filling those seats every night is challenging."

Overall, live entertainment -- concerts, sports events, theater -- is an industry with $25 billion in profits, but around 40 percent of seats go empty.

The flipside to that problem: It has gotten tougher to obtain reasonably priced tickets to events. The casual fan was being priced out of events.

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Aydogon Ozcan

Aydogon Ozcan has developed an attachment to a cellphone that could save people's lives.

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Nearly 6 billion people in the world use cellphones -- and about 70 percent of those users live in developing countries.

Those statistics gave UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogon Ozcan an idea. "The cellphone is the ultimate Swiss Army knife tool -- rarely used to talk but doing many other functions," he says. As cellphones become more cost-effective, he explains, they will be used for more tasks, even functions that for a century have been relegated to laboratories with bulky and expensive equipment.

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Courtesy of RingADoc

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

It's Sunday afternoon, and you've got chest pain. It could be the four Pink's chili dogs you hoovered at 3 a.m. after a night of mezcal and Tecate, or it might be something worse. Your primary-care physician is off on Catalina for the weekend, and you're leery of astronomical emergency-room costs. You've checked every medical website -- even Wikipedia -- to no avail. You need a doctor, but what kind? Where?

Cue RingADoc, the startup telemedicine service that bridges the gap between your paranoia and your primary-care physician. RingADoc soothes your burning question (or burning organ -- eww!) by providing on-call doctors 24 hours a day via phone, smartphone or tablet. Through a phone call or digital face time, you can renew a prescription, double-check your symptoms and get some peace of mind.

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Courtesy Harold Lee

Harold Lee

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

Harold Lee was a guitar player who dropped out of music school and found himself handling the marketing for a guitar store chain while he worked toward a business degree. One night, he watched his wife play Guitar Hero and have a great time.

"I just started thinking, why not use a real guitar instead of a piece of plastic?" Lee recalls. An idea was born: to make a mobile instructor that would work with any guitar -- and make learning an instrument more like learning a game.

Lee and his team faced a huge hurdle, though, and it had to do with pitch detection.

"Pitch detection for one note at a time is not that difficult -- guitar tuners can do it, and so can your ear," says Lee. "But the tricky part comes when more than one pitch at one time comes from the same instrument, like a guitar." That's called polyphonic pitch detection, and after scouring the research world for an expert in it, Lee and the company's co-founder, Tyson Butler, found Roger Dannenberg, head of the computer music department at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Screenshots courtesy of Starcast

The "best performances" screen on Starcast

Startups is a new column about new companies, big ideas and bold discoveries happening in the L.A. area.

OK, fine, maybe you've got the chops and you've got the looks, but you've missed the fame boat five times over. Your clean-cut mug and obvious talent got you out of Skokie, but you're still slinging pizza shooters six nights a week at TGI Mulligans in Studio City. Why won't anyone let you become the new flash in the Hollywood frying pan? Why doesn't anyone notice your raw talent and chiseled visage? You're destined to be the modern reincarnation of Cary Grant, clearly, if only someone would notice.

Cue StarcastAuditions.com, the Internet-based casting startup that will get you noticed -- if, of course, you deserve to be. Starcast is not a bunch of guys on a couch mocking videos of your craft for their own entertainment. It is serious business.

Founded by Gary Beer, the man behind cable TV's Smithsonian Channel and Sundance Channel, Starcast takes your craft as seriously as possible. The setup is pretty simple -- you log on and pay a nominal fee (right now it's about $10 and supposedly won't go much higher [Update: it's now free]). Then you pick a professionally crafted script, videotape yourself performing it, and voilà! Your video will be seen by legitimate high-level casting agents, reviewing Starcast footage in hopes of finding the next Tom Cruise. If you're truly gifted, they may rate you as one of their "Best Performances," marking you for further attention.

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