July LA Fintech Event

Sign Up HERE

LA Fintech & Crypto213 Angel/VC Panel

Come mix and mingle with other Financial Technologist’s Tuesday July 30th. Learn about the newest and fastest changes going on in financial technology. Finance is undergoing a massive change some call the “financial paradigm” or “crypto wars”. Laws from 1930-1940 (old right?) are getting broken down with technological innovation in finance. Find partners, talk about your project, bounce ideas, discover LA Fintech.

Agenda:

7pm Mix Mingle Network.

7:30pm Angle/VC Fintech Panel:

We will get some insight on the fintech landscape from industry investor veterans.

– Clocktower Ventures with Adriana Saman. Adriana focuses on deal sourcing, diligence, and execution. Prior to Clocktower, Adriana was a Strategy Associate in Chase’s Digital Payments team where she worked closely with all consumer-related payment products to develop consolidated roadmaps, business cases, and strategic initiatives. Before joining Digital Payments, she worked at J.P. Morgan as an Investment Banking Analyst focusing on M&A transactions across Latin America.

– Jackson St Capital LLC with Hasan Diwan. Director of Analytics at a nascent Bay Area angel fund.

– Nordic Eye Venture Capital with Richard Sussman. A pioneer of transformative business investment, Richard Sussman is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned investor whose acumen for unicorn discovery is unparalleled. In his current role as Managing Partner for Nordic Eye, Sussman scouts the very best technology companies in the United States for Venture Capital acceleration to fast-track, exponentially profitable exits. His most recent success story is Weblife, a Santa Monica-based cyber security company that grew revenue from $350K to $6M in only 11 months and sold for $66M to Proofpoint (NASDAQ: PFPT), turning a $3M investment at a 30% equity stake into a $21M return for his firm.

– Pasadena Angels with Bob Gringrich. Bob was originally a PhD in Physics (Quantum Computation). He has worked in Quantitative Finance for about 16 years. Beginning in angel investing, he joined Pasadena Angels 5 years ago. He has invested in a variety of companies, but primarily looks in the technology and fintech space.

– Stage Venture Partners with Rob Vickery. Rob is a Co-Founder of Stage Venture Partners, which is a venture capital fund that invests in enterprise software and SAAS startups. Stage is a differentiated venture capital fund focused on the seed stage of the technology and invests entrepreneurs pursuing new frontiers.

– Startup Mavericks with Garrett Gilbertson. Garrett is the founder of Startup Mavericks (SUM) an early stage growth consultancy and the Chair of the Band of Angels Los Angeles SiG. Garrett is an entrepreneur, angel investor (Band and TCA), board member, and Afghan War veteran. He has cross-functional leadership and investment experience running startups, seed funds and family offices. Garrett is also an alumnus of Harvard Business School’s Executive Education Program in Venture Capital and Private Equity, BS.C. United States Air Force Academy and M.SC. Pepperdine.

– Unicorn Venture Partners with Dave Lin. Dave Lin is an experienced entrepreneur, operator, advisor and investor of early-stage companies. He is the Co-Managing Partner of Unicorn Venture Partners and a managing partner of Lin Ventures, a family office and advisory firm. Unicorn Venture Partners recent investments include eSalon, Coinbase, Lime, HomeLister and PowerUser. Lin Venture’s representative clients and investments include: Ad Hoc Labs, eSalon, PPG, Shell Ventures and Slack. Prior to Lin Ventures, Dave served in various roles at Maker Studios, OfferBuys.com, GRP Partners (now Upfront Ventures), PriceGrabber, Montgomery & Co and UBS. Dave is a proud alumnus of UCLA and The Wharton School.

– Moderator Jeff Martinez of LA Fintech, Oxford BioChronometrics, and Treveri Capital.

8pm+ Continue Mix Mingle Network.

June LA Fintech

TICKETS HERE

Come mix and mingle with other Financial Technologist’s Tuesday June 25th. Learn about the newest and fastest changes going on in financial technology. Finance is undergoing a massive change some call the “financial paradigm” or “crypto wars”. Laws from 1930-1940 (old right?) are getting broken down with technological innovation in finance. Find partners, talk about your project, bounce ideas, discover LA Fintech.

Agenda:

7pm Mix Mingle Network.

7:30pm Demo by Daniel Riceberg Founder & CEO of BlockPark . BlockPark is an investment platform comprised of multiple real estate assets on Blockchain aligning the interest of owners and tenants to build thriving communities. Keep up with the action and follow @theBlockPark now!

8pm+ Continue Mix Mingle Network.

Music industry targets troll farms distorting streaming revenues

Anna Nicolaou in New York
Record labels join tech groups to tackle ‘industrial-scale’ deployment
of fake users

A music industry hit parade including Spotify, Amazon and Universal is
moving to stifle an emerging threat to the sector’s business model: fake streams.

Digital streaming has revived an industry battered by the illegal
download explosion early in the dotcom era, generating tens of billions of dollars for record labels. But a growing army of online bots posing as human listeners is distorting the distribution of these revenues, inflating listening figures for certain tracks to earn higher royalty payments and chart placings.

A coalition of 21 technology groups, record labels and music publishers on Thursday agreed a “code of best practices”, in the first collective push by the biggest players in music to combat stream manipulation.

The group, which also includes Warner Music and Sony Music, warned that “industrial-scale” impersonation of users by “troll farms” was
distorting perceptions of what music is popular, according to the
document seen by the Financial Times, and vowed to thwart such
manipulation by weeding out the bots from the music fans.

The streaming boom has given rise to a cottage industry of services
offering artists and labels the chance to buy their way to success. A
Google search for “buy Spotify streams” yielded 124m results, with sites
such as “spotistar.com” offering 1,000 Spotify plays for $6.

“A lot of managers do this stuff to try and either help their artists
get a good start or, if they are in a race for number one . . . buy
extra streams,” said one label executive. “Some labels view it as a
marketing expense.”

While there is no definitive data to show the scale of the problem,
music industry insiders say streaming manipulation is widespread. Louis
Posen, founder of California-based label Hopeless Records, told an industry conference this week that 3-4 per cent of all streams were
“illegitimate”, costing the industry $300m a year.

Norway is investigating streaming figures at Tidal, the music service
owned by rapper Jay-Z, over whether streams for Beyoncé, Kanye West and others have been inflated by tens of millions of plays. Tidal has denied any wrongdoing and its lawyer has said the platform is “not under
suspicion” in the case.

Jordan Bromley, an entertainment lawyer for Manatt, Phelps & Phillips
who represents acts including The Eagles, believes stream manipulation
amounts to fraud. However, he cautioned that it would be “a lot of work” to bring a class-action lawsuit. “They don’t have the data at their disposal to know how many streams have been purchased, or what that dollar amount equates to. And then in order to get the actual damages, you would need to get all the artists on board as plaintiffs.”

Some music executives say Spotify has not invested sufficiently in
technology to block the bots. Spotify has previously addressed the
issue, stating during an earnings report last year that it works to remove “fake” users. But the company cautioned that “some such users may
remain in our reported metrics because of the limitations of our ability
to identify their accounts”.

Stream manipulation is not the only way the music industry’s revenues are distorted. Spotify has already cracked on a new form of “payola” in which record labels pay for their music to be included in widely
followed streaming playlists.

https://www.ft.com/content/371b7b96-92e1-11e9-aea1-2b1d33ac3271