The state of the economy may be a big question mark but one thing’s for sure: L.A. tech is hot. Westwood-based Elevator Labs received $20 million in funding this week in another example of investors putting money into innovative Los Angeles-based startups (just last week Santa Monica-based BetterWorks received an $8 million investment).

Elevator Labs plans to use the investment to launch new businesses its currently incubating in addition to its existing portfolio: Hello Music, Wilshire Media Group, and Fat Cloud. Managing partner Zack Zalon discussed how his years as president of Virgin Digital influenced his approach, why Elevator Labs is an “invention company” and why he’s excited about the growth and innovation in L.A.’s tech community.

“It’s about time that people stand up and start taking notice because this is the next generation of entrepreneurial leaders here in Los Angeles that are ready to emerge,” said Zalon.

Originally posted at LAist.

UPDATE: Watch video of the panel below.

For both businesses and consumers, geolocation apps and services are a dime a dozen these days. But many of these apps and tools serve to benefit both when used consistently and correctly. Much like social media itself, geolocation is a two-way entity.

“Geolocation makes it easier for consumers to get the services they want nearby and for local businesses to reach the consumers in their area,” Eli Portnoy, CEO of Culver City-based mobile marketing startup Thinknear told me matter-of-factly.

As consumers become increasingly engaged with smartphones and other mobile devices, geolocation will have a growing influence on commerce. For most businesses and services, location — and circumstance — means everything. More than one-third of U.S. adults (35 percent) are smartphone users according to a July 2011 Pew Internet report. Consumers are always on the hunt for quality goods and services at reasonable prices. As consumers grow accustomed to the “smart” aspect of always-connected, GPS-enabled mobile devices, the bargains appear at their fingertips and it only becomes a matter of convenience. As consumers discover the power of smartphones beyond texts, emails and phone calls, shopping habits change.

In the same Pew survey, 25 percent of smartphone owners indicated a preference for using the internet on their phone rather than their computer. This is likely not just a matter of convenience, it’s based on better circumstantial results. The top search results for “yogurt” on a home or office computer likely yield the Wikipedia entry, and links to the Dannon and Yoplait websites. But the same search from a smartphone directs the user to the nearest fro-yo shop. Geolocation is a win-win: consumers can find what they want and need at their fingertips while businesses can acquire new regulars by dangling their goods and services right in front of the smartphone user around the corner.

Geoloco & Business:

Do you see a map and a location listing for your business when you search Google? If not, you can list all physical locations on Google for free: www.google.com/placesforbusiness.

Gowalla, Foursquare, YP, Yelp…. Help!?! Forget about your business for a minute and try out each of these services via their mobile apps as a consumer. There are many tools, including these, which make it easier for consumers to get what they want. Search for your business on these applications? Is it there? Is the listing accurate? Not everything in the world is automated (yet) and so it’s never a surprise when new stores replace old ones but the old listing remains.

Your business (if it relies on a physical location) may only have one physical location but by making sure it’s populated and using any and all geolocation services at its disposal, you are doing the best you can to bring your offering to potential consumers on their terms. Foursquare may have more users than Gowalla but your next customer might discover you through Gowalla. Either way, these serendipitous, location-based discoveries often lead users to return and more importantly to share their experience with others via social media and word of mouth.

I was honored to be a panelist at this month’s Social Media Club Los Angeles event on geolocation, a topic I’ve been obsessed with for quite some time (it’s the subject of my Master’s Thesis). I wrote this post in advance of the July 26 SMCLA event.

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via ParisLemon.

If it can’t find a solution, Google should kill YouTube
Speaking to The New Yorker, Schmidt said that it “seemed obvious” that Google should be able to generate “significant amounts of money” from YouTube, but so far, it has no idea what to do.

Could YouTube become hub for feature films and TV shows?

Mark Cuban: Hulu is Kicking YouTube’s Ass:
Hulu is crushing YouTube in revenue per video and revenue per user primarily because “Hulu has the right to sell advertising in and around every single video on its site…. It can package and sell any way that might make its customers happy.”

Ken Auletta interviews Eric Schmidt, the chairman and C.E.O. of Google, in San Francisco on June 11, 2008.

Personally, I’ll sit through hundreds of 15 second ads on Hulu just so I can watch TV for free — now including full-length episodes of Daily Show and Colbert!

We have confirmed through sources that Buzznet now fully owns Stereogum. Not sure how this plays into the new funding, but the financing may be used in making some other music and entertainment related content acquisitions and possibly rollups, our sources say.

UPDATE: Mashable is reporting that Buzznet has also acquired QLoud, the Steve Case-backed music network seen on Facebook and elsewhere.

Anyone who is a fan of indie-music blog Stereogum, like myself, understands the value of such a blog. You visit Stereogum regularly. It lives in my RSS newsreader, and STILL I find myself clicking out to the Web site on a regular basis to listen to clips, etc. It’s not merely an mp3-blog, nor a music gossip/news site, and it’s certainly not a multi-thick-rimmed-specs-authored review site like Pitchfork.

So why would the three owners of Stereogum, including founder and former VH1 Web producer Scott Lapatine, flip the company to “social media” site BuzzNet?

All indie-cred nonsense aside, it just seems baffling that Lapatine and his two investors would hand over ownership of their zero-overhead site (valued at $5 million) to BuzzNet. BuzzNet‘s traffic has clearly ramped up traffic in the past year and last May picked up $6M in funding on reports of 8 million active users,

Dow Jones owns the Wall Street Journal, among other things, and Murdoch’s News Corp. bends the rules of media ownership with it’s massive stable of multiple media in practically every English speaking market worldwide. Just who does that include? It’s all on this list.

The Bancroft family (which controls Dow Jones), along with practically the entire staff of the Wall Street Journal, currently oppose News Corp.’s offer, while others — like analyst Mort Zuckerman — are calling Murdoch “brilliant.”

Shares of Dow Jones jumped over 50% to just shy of Murdoch’s offering price of $60/share in Tuesday trading. Other publicly traded newspaper company’s saw prices surge as well.

But the offer raises numerous red flags, writes Mark @ News Corpse including News Corp.’s plans to launch a Fox Business Channel to compete with the likes of CNBC.

It may seem insulting to WSJ writers to be threatened with ownership by the likes of the mogul who has turned the likes of the New York Post into practically a supermarket tabloid. But more important and influential could be the residual effect of Murdoch’s lofty valuation of Dow Jones on the struggling (by Wall Street standards) newspaper industry.

Yahoo announced the acquisition of RightMedia — it had already been a “strategic 20 percent investment” — a wise, counterplay to Google’s recent $3.1B acquisition of DoubleClick. Doesn’t seem to be a hasty reactionary move as Right Media’s Exchange system could be a boon to Yahoo’s publisher network and it’s new Adwords-like search advertising platform code-named Panama. Yahoo CEO Terry Semel’s optimistic blog post is here. New York Times gets a jump on the story here. A conference call will take place Monday morning and surely the industry-watchers will have more deets and analysis.

This conference sold out to 500 + weeksk ago and features a day of panels featuring industry heavies (see list). Currently a panel including Jimmy Guterman and John Battelle are discussing branding, marketing and Web content, involking that marketing is meant to be a conversation which is why it’s a natural for social media.

My reports will be posted at LAist. I’ll be interviewing Mike Davidson, CEO of Newsvine (which re-launched this week) momentarily. Live flickr photostream from the event below.

UPDATE: several videos at LAist via Revver.

My colleagues and feel acutely futile arguing that rampant job-cutting at newspapers not only lowers the quality of the rag, but shrinks profits in the long run (we’re months from graduating, J-school, so give us a break), Finally, there’s a study to back us up.

The upside for papers to hire, hire, hire:

“If you invest in the newsroom, do you make more money? The answer is yes,” Esther Thorson, an advertising professor and associate dean for graduate studies at the University of Missouri’s School of Journalism, said in a statement.

Reuters discloses the ugliness of the recent management of the news media industry that is (I pray) at its nadir.

According to job outplacement tracking firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of planned job cuts in the U.S. media sector surged 88 percent to 17,809 last year.

Since the start of 2007, Time Warner Inc.’s Time Inc. said it would cut 289 jobs, and the New York Times Co. announced plans to shed 125 jobs and close foreign bureaus for its Boston Globe newspaper.

“Until recently, people have been doing it because the results looked good to investors on Wall Street, but it’s… ignoring the long-term aspects,” said marketing professor and study co-author Murali Mantrala.

The study (which I can find no mention of on the Missouri site) will be published in April’s Journal of Marketing

David Geffen netted a record $140 million for the sale of Jackson Pollock’s “No. 5, 1948,” according to the New York Times.

Uber-wealthy Mexican, David Martinez laid down the biggest wad of cash ever paid for a painting in history.

So, as suggested in Crain’s Chicago Business, is Geffen gonna make a move to save the increasingly more affordable Los Angeles Times?

Hmmmm…