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Google and Apple Are Opening New Offices In West LA
Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
Even though Los Angeles’ office market faces an uncertain future due to the slowing economy, signs seem to suggest that West L.A. could weather the storm.
For starters, Apple and Google still plan to open new offices in the area — even as much of Big Tech is scaling back their physical footprints nationwide. Earlier this month, Apple's plans to build 536,000 square feet of office space and production space went before the Culver City Planning Commission. The Culver Crossings campus is expected to break ground in early 2023, with an anticipated move-in date of 2026.
“The West L.A. office market is very different from the rest of the county in that it has an abundance of very cool, architecturally distinct real estate that is very attractive to the creatives”,” wrote CBRE’s Vice Chairman Jeffrey Pion in an email. “While many of the tech companies are downsizing in other parts of the country, we are not yet certain how much of that anticipated downsizing will occur in this market but believe the long term outlook for West Los Angeles is very good.”
In addition, a Google spokesperson confirmed to dot.LA that Google has leased the former Westside Pavilion shopping complex in West L.A. and plans to move in sometime in 2023. The company has yet to decide which job functions or divisions will be located in the new West L.A. campus. And Amazon signed a deal to rent a 200,000-square-foot space at the Water Garden this summer as part of a greater Southern California expansion, even as it halted plans to build other offices nationwide.
Nonetheless, the state of L.A.’s office space market remains uncertain as companies also scramble to cut costs due to the slowing economy. J.P. Morgan Asset Management this week put up its 1.4 million square foot Santa Monica office campus for sale — which includes tenants like Amazon and Sony Inc., reported the Commercial Observer.
Still, according to a third-quarter report from CBRE, West L.A.’s office vacancy rate is at 14.5% — roughly four points lower than the average in Greater Los Angeles. “[...] Several tech, media, and entertainment companies leased space this quarter, emphasizing the prevalence of entertainment and technology in Los Angeles and West L.A.,” wrote the authors of the report.
This is all to say that after two years of remote work and hybrid offices, 2022 could be ushering in a vibe shift as more companies reverted to traditional in-office work environments. Nearly 50% of company leaders said they were planning to require workers to return to the office full-time in the next year, according to a Microsoft survey from March. While a sluggish economy has forced some companies to make cuts to their workforce and close offices — many also appear to be staying put or even expanding their corporate real estate portfolios.
The potential shift to in-office work could be further bolstered by the current economic downturn, according to Matthew E. Kahn, Provost Professor of Economics at USC. In an email to dot.LA, Kahn wrote, “During a tech recession, management has the upper-hand in determining the real pay of workers and ordering workers to work on-site — 5 days a week — is a type of pay cut.”
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Amrita Khalid
Amrita Khalid is a tech journalist based in Los Angeles, and has written for Quartz, The Daily Dot, Engadget, Inc. Magazine and number of other publications. She got her start in Washington, D.C., covering Congress for CQ-Roll Call. You can send tips or pitches to amrita@dot.la or reach out to her on Twitter at @askhalid.
https://twitter.com/askhalid
This Week in ‘Raises’: Curri Scoops Up $42M, Mosaic Scores $26M
05:00 AM | June 09, 2023
Image by Joshua Letona
A local logistics platform raised fresh funding to put toward product development, infrastructure and sales and marketing initiatives, while a San Diego-based fintech company closed its Series C funding round to expand its investment in AI which will empower high-growth SMB and mid-market finance leaders.
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Venture Capital
Curri, a Ventura-based logistics platform, raised a $42 million Series B funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
San Diego-based financial platform Mosaic raised a $26 million Series C funding round led by OMERS Ventures.
AHARA, a Los Angeles-based startup focused on providing personalized nutrition suggestions, raised a $10.25 million seed funding round led by Greycroft.
Per an SEC filing, San Diego-based developer of peptide therapeutics designed to assist in the treatment of autoimmune diseases and disorders selectIon raised $5 million in funding.
Miscellaneous
Los Angeles-based Sensydia, a company working on non-invasive cardiac diagnostics, said this morning that it has received $3 million in a NIH grant.
Raises is dot.LA’s weekly feature highlighting venture capital funding news across Southern California’s tech and startup ecosystem. Please send fundraising news to Decerry Donato (decerrydonato@dot.la).
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Decerry Donato
Decerry Donato is a reporter at dot.LA. Prior to that, she was an editorial fellow 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.
Terms of Misuse?: Breaking Down the Data TikTok Collects on Its U.S. Users
09:00 AM | July 19, 2022
TikTok has come under renewed scrutiny over how it handles U.S. data, with some lawmakers calling for an investigation into the Culver City-based company.
What kind of data does TikTok collect? And should we worry about a potential national security threat when Americans’ data is accessed by employees of ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company?
To answer these questions, dot.LA reviewed TikTok’s privacy policy and interviewed Thomas Germain, a technology writer for Consumer Reports who specializes in privacy issues.
What Data TikTok Collects
Like other social media giants, TikTok gobbles up a lot of user information. To start, TikTok receives names, ages, phone numbers and emails when people sign up for the service. The app also knows users’ approximate locations and mobile device identifiers, such as IP addresses.
Germain told dot.LA the most valuable info may come from the way users interact with the video sharing app. TikTok is quite good at figuring out peoples’ interests based on the videos or accounts they’ve previously liked or followed. Those insights are useful for advertisers and—potentially—for spreading political messages, Germain noted.
“This vast trove of data that every social media company has—on what people are interested in, what makes them upset, what makes them happy—is incredibly valuable,” he said.
The company’s privacy policy permits TikTok to collect a wide range of additional data, from consumers’ keystroke patterns to biometric info. However, the company says it doesn’t necessarily take in or store all of this. For example, keystroke patterns may be used solely for anti-fraud and spam purposes, according to TikTok. Regarding biometrics, TikTok said editing features may automatically locate a person’s face to apply an effect, but those features do not uniquely identify individuals.
Why U.S. government officials are concerned
TikTok is owned by Beijing-based tech giant ByteDance and China is an economic and foreign policy rival to the U.S. government. With the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exerting considerable power over the nation’s tech companies, U.S. lawmakers and administration officials contend that TikTok’s Chinese ownership poses a national security risk.
“The CCP has a track record longer than a CVS receipt of conducting business & industrial espionage as well as other actions contrary to U.S. national security, which is what makes it so troubling that [ByteDance] personnel in Beijing are accessing this sensitive and personnel data,” Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr recently said.
TikTok says it has never provided any U.S. user data to the Chinese government, nor would it do so if asked. Additionally, the company recently announced that all of U.S. user traffic is now routed to American software giant Oracle’s servers.
“The TikTok app is not unique in the amount of information it collects, compared to other mobile apps,” the company said.
TikTok is hardly the only company swallowing a lot of data on Americans, from car makers to smart doorbell firms. Consumers’ credit card purchases, contact lists and recent GPS locations are hawked by hundreds, if not thousands, of companies in the so-called data broker industry, Germain noted.
“If the Chinese government wanted it, they could just go out and buy it because it's for sale,” he said. “...I think people, when they're worried about TikTok doing something, they should ask themselves whether they should be worried about American companies doing the same thing.”
Still, Germain said there’s some genuine cause for concern, since China’s government has previously pushed the country’s companies to do its bidding. But to Germain, that concern has less to do with China knowing your phone number and more to do with propaganda.
“The Chinese government could instruct Tiktok to manipulate its algorithm to show people content that promotes the goals of the Chinese government,” Germain said. “That could totally happen and that is something that is of concern. But that does start to move away from questions of data privacy.”
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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.
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