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Rivian Recalls Basically Every Vehicle It Has Ever Made
David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
On Friday evening, Rivian Automotive announced a recall on nearly every single vehicle it has produced so far.
According to documentation filed with the Nation Transportation and Highway Safety Administration, “The fastener connecting the front upper control arm and steering knuckle may have been improperly tightened … A loose steering knuckle fastener could separate, causing a loss of vehicle control and increasing the risk of a crash.”
The recall affects 12,212 total vehicles spanning the R1S, R1T and delivery van platforms. In layman's terms, the car’s suspension system has a loose bolt that can make the ride harsher or even result in a loss of steering control for the driver.
While undoubtedly bad news for the EV hopeful, the company has stated that there have been no reported injuries due to the defect. The fix for the problem–essentially just tightening the bolt–also appears to be simple and relatively cheap for Rivian to execute.
For context, recalls are relatively commonplace in the automotive industry. Though it’s also worth mentioning that EV startups have been particularly susceptible to them due to the sheer quantity of new technology and engineering in each car. To that end, Toyota also recently had to pause production on its new EV, the bz4x, over safety concerns related to the wheels coming loose. The Chevy Bolt has also faced its share of recall issues.
Nonetheless, this is Rivian’s third recall since May of this year. The company has previously had issues with airbags and seat belt anchors that required maintenance. Whether these three issues represent a concerning pattern or just normal growing pains for a company that only delivered its first vehicle 13 months ago remains to be seen, but the latest recall has taken its toll on the company’s stock, which is down nearly 8.5% by early afternoon Monday.
David Shultz
David Shultz reports on clean technology and electric vehicles, among other industries, for dot.LA. His writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, Nautilus and many other publications.
Why Women’s Purchasing Power Is a Huge Advantage for Female-Led Leagues
05:00 AM | June 12, 2023
Samson Amore
According to a Forbes report last April, both the viewership and dollars behind women’s sports at a collegiate and professional level are growing.
In 2022, the first 32 games of the NCAA tournament had record attendance levels, breaking records set back in 2004, and largely driven by the new and rapidly growing women’s NCAA tournament. WNBA openers this year saw a 21% spike in attendance, with some teams including the LA Sparks reporting triple-digit ticket sales growth, about 121% over 2022’s total. In 2023, the average size of an LA Sparks crowd swelled to 10,396 people, up from 4,701 people.
Women make up half the population, but “also 50% of the folks that are walking into the stadium at Dodger Stadium, or your NFL fans are just about 50% women,” noted Erin Storck, a panelist and senior analyst at Los Angeles-based Elysian Park Ventures.
Storck added that in heterosexual households, women generally manage most of the family’s money, giving them huge purchasing power, a potential advantage for female-run leagues. “There's an untapped revenue opportunity,” she noted.
In the soccer world, Los Angeles-based women’s soccer team Angel City FC has put in the work to become a household name, not just in LA County but across the nation. At an LA Tech Week panel hosted by Athlete Strategies about investing in sports, Angel City head of strategy and chief of staff Kari Fleischauer said that years before launching the women’s National Women’s Soccer League team, Angel City FC was pounding the pavement letting people know about the excitement ladies soccer can bring. She noted community is key, and that fostering a sense of engagement and safety at the team’s home venue, BMO stadium (formerly Banc of California Stadium), is one reason fans keep coming back.
Adding free metro rides to BMO stadium and private rooms for nursing fans to breastfeed or fans on the spectrum to avoid sensory overload, were just some of the ways ACFC tried to include its community in the concept of its stadium, Fleischauer said. She noted, though, that roughly 46% of Angel City fans are “straight white dudes hanging out with their bros.”
“Particularly [on] the woman's side, I'd like to think we do a better job of making sure that there's spaces for everyone,” Fleischauer told the audience. “One thing we realize is accessibility is a huge thing.”
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
Metaverse Gaming Studio Plai Labs Launches First Blockchain Game
04:00 AM | January 23, 2023
Plai Labs
Two leaders of Culver City-based mobile gaming outfit Jam City recently defected to start their own venture, a metaverse gaming studio by the name of Plai Labs.
Pronounced “play,” the Web3 gaming company is led by Jam City’s co-founders Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb.
DeWolfe previously held the role of CEO at Jam City, and Whitcomb was CTO. The two were responsible for kickstarting the rise of social networking when they launched MySpace together back in 2003, and ran the company for about six years before selling it to News Corp. for $580 million. Now, their latest venture is bringing together all the buzzwords the tech investing community loves to hear – Web3, generative AI, blockchain, gaming and NFTs.
The parting of ways with Jam City was amicable, both sides said. “As standalone businesses, each company is better positioned with enhanced flexibility to pursue avenues of growth,” Jam City’s new CEO Josh Yguado said in an email. “Chris is a serial entrepreneur who has been at the forefront of every evolution of the web, and I look forward to seeing how he and Aber shape Web3 with Plai Labs.”
In an interview with dot.LA, CEO DeWolfe said Plai Labs is the fourth startup he’s founded with Whitcomb, but the first that’s focused exclusively on Web3.
The company’s first product is a metaverse called Massina, which is home to its first blockchain game, “Champions Ascension.” The game, currently being built by a team of 50 people, is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG). With elements that remind of Activision Blizzard’s hit “World of Warcraft,” the game allows players to choose a variety of character classes and the ability to battle it out in a large-scale colosseum arena, go on quests, build and compete in custom dungeons and trade digital items.
What makes “Champions Ascension'' unique is that players can choose to own their characters in the form of an NFT. Plai Labs sold its first NFT batch in February 2022, and early adopters who bought the NFTs were granted access to a beta version of the game last September.
Referred to as “Champions,” the NFTs are currently selling on Opensea for as much as 55 ETH (over $90,000), but on average they mint for around .7 ETH (around $1,150). There’s also an NFT collection of pets for your Champion, which are cute alien-looking creatures that have their own unique skills and traits.
Right now, you have to own an NFT to participate in the game. Plai plans to offer more Champions in an auction next week with additional plans to open the platform up to players who are interested in experiencing the world without owning an NFT, spokesman Josh Brooks told dot.LA.
In addition, DeWolfe told dot.LA that the plan is for Plai to build out an artificial intelligence backed by generative AI (like ChatGPT or Midjourney) that allows users to create and upload their own digital assets to the game. “For example, their own dungeon crawling [and] their own characters within the games,” DeWolfe explained. “We kind of see our mission as reinventing social from the ground up… Instead of having this massive group of people creating content every day, it's a bit like MySpace, or like Roblox, where your community is creating content.”
Plai Labs is backed by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which led a $32 million seed round that closed Jan. 13. In a blog post, a16z investors Andrew Chen, Robin Guo and Arianna Simpson said they invested in the company because they “believe that the future of social networks begins with games.”
DeWolfe told dot.LA, “the investment from a16z validates our vision and validates everything that we've been working on for the last year and a half.”
Though it’s still early days for Plai and “Champions Ascension,” the Discord set up for early-adopting NFT buyers has over 230 users and the game’s YouTube page has nearly 7,900 subscribers.
“It's a big, audacious project but people are loving it. The retention for the folks that are in the world is off the charts,” DeWolfe said. “The folks that are in the world are also owners and the floor price of all the NFTs has gone up by 30%, versus the rest of the NFT world [where] there wasn't any real utility with those entities.”
DeWolfe drew a distinction between Plai Labs’ NFTs, which have a clear utility, and other NFT projects that have seen their worth wildly fluctuate because they don’t generate value from a specific use case.
That said, the gaming community remains divided on blockchain games, partly because it’s still a developing genre. Attempts by big studios like Square Enix, EA or Ubisoft to create play-to-earn games on the blockchain have been met with derision and dismissed as a cash-grab.
To that end, DeWolfe said he believes that his and Whitcomb’s track record of building quality titles at Jam City like “Cookie Jam” and “Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery,” along with their expertise in creating communities online will allow Plai Labs to sprint where others have stumbled. “Along the way we’ve learned a lot about social, gaming and Web3,” DeWolfe said. “It was always our thesis from the very beginning that Web3 had to deliver something that the previous web didn't, which was utility, ownership and portability.”
Editor’s note: Jam City and CEO Josh Yguado are investors in dot.LA.
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Samson Amore
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
https://twitter.com/samsonamore
samsonamore@dot.la
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