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Wheels Pulls Out of Culver City and West Hollywood
Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
Last month, Helbiz announced that it had officially acquired Wheels, the West Hollywood-based startup founded by Joshua and Jonathan Viner, co-founders of Wag. But in Los Angeles, there were already signs that things were in flux.
In early August, Culver City announced that Wheels would no longer be operating within its boundaries. Then in September, Wheels also ceased operations in West Hollywood, pending adoption of sidewalk detection technology.
In the past, Wheels has prided itself on being the only shared e-scooter or e-bike operator to serve riders across the greater L.A. metro area — including the city of L.A., Santa Monica, Culver City and West Hollywood. There are 88 municipalities in L.A. County and each one controls its own shared micromobility program with different rules, regulations and fees. Beverly Hills does not allow scooters to operate or park within its boundaries, while the city of L.A. has six different operators competing for space in lucrative zones like Downtown and Venice (Lyft is out as of mid-November).
In a September city council meeting, West Hollywood announced a new sidewalk detection requirement for its three operators, Bird, Lime and Wheels. While all three have geofencing technology, sidewalk detection is more precise and meant to deter riders from riding on the sidewalk.
“[Wheels] didn't want to roll it out if it was going to be off by a couple of feet,” said Coby Wagman, parking operations supervisor for West Hollywood. “That could be the difference between someone on the street, a bike lane or a sidewalk.”
Once Wheels can demonstrate to the city that they have the technology, the company will be allowed to rejoin the Dockless Mobility Pilot Program.
But in Culver City, things are less certain.
According to Ryan Hund, a transportation planner for the Culver City Transportation Department, the city is currently evaluating their shared micromobility program to determine whether they will accept new applications.
“In order to operate in Culver City,” he said via email, “Wheels would have to go through the same RFQ [request for qualification] process as any other potential operators.”
Currently, Bird is the only operator in Culver City’s shared micromobility program.
In an emailed statement to dot.LA, Wheels CEO Marco McCottry said that Wheels is planning to return to both cities eventually.
"We’ve had to make tough decisions in our business and operating in Culver City doesn’t make sense for us at this time. We hope to work with [the] city to relaunch in the future. We look forward to returning to West Hollywood as they recently added a sidewalk detection requirement for operators which we will be demoing soon."
These strategic moves come at a rocky moment for shared micromobility. Bird just announced that it overstated revenue for the last two years, causing its stock to plummet. The company says it might not have enough cash to continue operations. Earlier this month, Lyft laid off 13% of its employees and last week it pulled all e-bikes and e-scooters from Santa Monica and L.A.
In an email, Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, said that Santa Monica’s future shared micromobility program is the one to watch as companies start to drop out of the market.
“Investors subsidized scooter operations for years,” he said. “Though some of this investment went into technology, most went into unprofitable competition because the company wanted to [be] the last standing.”
Santa Monica will begin recruiting two operators for a three-to-five year term in January 2023.
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Maylin Tu
Maylin Tu is a freelance writer who lives in L.A. She writes about scooters, bikes and micro-mobility. Find her hovering by the cheese at your next local tech mixer.
Spencer Dinwiddie’s Web3 Social Media App Just Raised $26M
06:00 AM | June 07, 2022
Image courtesy of Calaxy
Calaxy, a Web3 social media app co-founded by NBA player Spencer Dinwiddie, has raised $26 million in new funding, the company announced Tuesday.
The HBAR Foundation and blockchain gaming company Animoca Brands co-led the raise, with participation from Ethereum scaling platform Polygon. The fresh funding brings Calaxy’s total raised to just shy of $34 million following a $7.5 million seed round last year.
Los Angeles-based Calaxy lets creators sell their own crypto tokens to fans, who can redeem the tokens for exclusive content, video messages and other forms of access to those creators. The company has essentially attached Web3 technology to validated creator economy models like Patreon, Cameo and OnlyFans, Calaxy co-founder and CEO Solo Ceesay told dot.LA, with the idea of getting people to use crypto in a way that’s familiar.
New Calaxy CEO Solo Ceesay.
Photo courtesy of Solo Ceesay
“It's meant to be quite intuitive,” Ceesay said. “It's meant to be something that doesn't feel like you're opening a brokerage account and investing in a creators’ cryptocurrency.”
For example, the creator tokens on Calaxy are initially priced one-to-one with U.S. currency—so buying 20 of Dinwiddie’s coins on the platform would cost a user $20. Eventually, the company will allow creators to opt into dynamic pricing, “but we want to make sure that journey is walked when the creator's fan base is ready,” Ceesay noted. Calaxy operates on Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed ledger technology that is an alternative to blockchain.
Dallas Mavericks guard Dinwiddie has established himself as one of the NBA’s earliest adopters of cryptocurrency—having notably converted a $34 million contract extension with the Brooklyn Nets in 2018 into a digital investment vehicle.
After initially serving as Calaxy’s CEO, Dinwiddie has now moved into an executive chair role at the startup; Ceesay, a former investment banker who became Calaxy’s chief operating officer in 2020, is succeeding Dinwiddie as CEO.
The 15-person company’s app is expected to emerge from beta testing this summer. Calaxy says it has lined up around 200 creators, celebrities and influencers for its platform, including Dallas Cowboys running back Ezekiel Elliot, Los Angeles Lakers center Dwight Howard and singer Teyana Taylor.
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Christian Hetrick
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.
J.J. Abrams on Diversity in Star Wars, Bad Robot: 'I Can't Tell You How Much it's Benefited Our Business'
01:46 PM | January 30, 2020
Filmmaker J.J. Abrams and his wife Katie McGrath examined the production company they founded -- Bad Robot -- and realized it was mostly white. Mostly male. And the duo set out to change how they recruit new employees.
Abrams and McGrath mandated that the pool of people they interview for jobs be more representative of the population. Now over 50 percent of the staff is female and over 40 percent are people of color, according to McGrath. "I can't tell you how much it's benefited our business," said Abrams.
When he was asked to direct "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," Abrams said he felt a responsibility to cast actors who were as diverse as possible. The four leads include someone who is Latinx, a Nigerian-Londoner, a white woman, and one white man. "I'm not preaching, but we'll bring our values as much as we can to a project," said Abrams.
McGrath was one of the founders of the Time's Up movement that started in 2018 after the dethroning of producer Harvey Weinstein rocked Hollywood. She implored an audience comprised largely of white males at The Upfront Summit to do more to improve diversity at their own companies."This is not complicated," said McGrath. "You have tactics for every other business outcome you want to reach, so have one for this."
McGrath noted that by 2050, the U.S. will be a minority-majority country. Not having a workforce that represents the demographics of consumers is bad for business. "You're just going to miss a ton of sh**," she added.
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Ben Bergman
Ben Bergman is the newsroom's senior finance reporter. Previously he was a senior business reporter and host at KPCC, a senior producer at Gimlet Media, a producer at NPR's Morning Edition, and produced two investigative documentaries for KCET. He has been a frequent on-air contributor to business coverage on NPR and Marketplace and has written for The New York Times and Columbia Journalism Review. Ben was a 2017-2018 Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Economic and Business Journalism at Columbia Business School. In his free time, he enjoys skiing, playing poker, and cheering on The Seattle Seahawks.
https://twitter.com/thebenbergman
ben@dot.la
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