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Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
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Lifestyle influencer Ashley Cummins first got access to TikTok Shop in March. But she hesitated to test the new feature, which lets influencers sell products from their curated storefront linked to their profile.
“I was a little sketched out by it at first, just because it seemed so different from what TikTok usually does,” Cummins says.
It wasn’t until a few weeks later, when a shapewear brand reached out to her to promote one of their products, that Cummins decided to give it a try. In her first video using the new feature, Cummins informed viewers that they can buy the brown shapewear bodysuit she’s wearing by clicking the shopping bag icon above her username.
“You can shop directly from videos,” Cummins said to her audience. Every time someone buys the bodysuit from her storefront, she earns $6—the commission rate set by the maker of the body suit.
“I would say that the turnover for people actually buying from videos I've posted is so much higher than any other platform that I've used to link products,” Cummins says.
Until now, most influencers have built out storefronts with sites like Amazon and the shopping app LTK. But according to Cummins, the commission is much lower on other platforms, ranging from a few cents to a few dollars, compared to TikTok Shop.
But it took TikTok quite a while to make its shopping platform a practical option for American influencers. TikTok Shop was first launched in the U.K. in late 2021 but was quickly overrun by internal issues that led to a mass staff exodus. Influencers were also unimpressed, citing low payments and poor-quality products as they left the program. The turbulence led some to believe that TikTok would abandon plans to expand to other markets.
But despite the poor results overseas, TikTok pushed forward with the feature in the U.S. TikTok launched Shop for businesses in November, and expanded its availability in February. In a bid to attract buyers, TikTok is subsidizing 30% discounts and free shipping for shoppers.
Cummins has seen a significant increase in brand availability since she first started using TikTok Shop. However, she still wishes that more well-known companies will offer commissions for influencers. Individual brands can set up their own storefronts for people to shop from. But only a limited number of companies offer a commission for influencers who promote products in their own storefronts. Still, even when Cummins promotes lesser-known brands in her videos, she’s noticed they receive higher views than her other recent videos. Cummins attributes this success to the fact that TikTok is pushing more TikTok Shop videos to the For You Page.
But just because TikTok wants people to see these videos doesn’t mean that viewers are always impressed. Lifestyle influencer Julia Belkin found that responses to her videos about Free People discounts and reusable cups were largely negative.
“I've gotten a lot of like, ‘Oh, she's getting commissioned,’ comments,” Belkin says. “That seems to make people very angry, even though they're not the ones paying for it.”
Belkin goes on to explain that since each video that shows a TikTok Shop product is tagged by the platform as “eligible for commission,” her viewers are more aware of when she’s earning money from an affiliate deal. Other affiliate links, such as Amazon’s, are not flagged, meaning viewers might not know that creators are earning a commission from their purchase.
Belkin attributes this unease to TikTok Shop’s newness and expects viewers to become accustomed to it as more influencers use the feature. That said, negative comments aside, Belkin has seen clear results. Both her TikTok Shop videos have received millions of views and she’s sold more than 300 pieces of merchandise.
“In-app integration is always going to be as favorable as possible for conversion rates because it lowers the fatigue of having to look for the deal yourself, or having to look at the link in the bio and follow a million steps to click it,” Belkin says.
From the creator’s side, TikTok Shop is also a simple way for lifestyle influencers like Belkin and Cummins to continue to recommend products. Cummins has already built out her storefront with neutral-toned clothing and items that she’s previously suggested. Only, now, she’s earning a commission.
Ultimately, Cummins thinks the new feature “gives creators an opportunity to earn more money directly on a social media platform than any other platform.”
Kristin Snyder is dot.LA's 2022/23 Editorial Fellow. She previously interned with Tiger Oak Media and led the arts section for UCLA's Daily Bruin.
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.
Black founders have historically been at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing funding. Only 2% of VC dollars each year reach the hands of black founders and in 2022, they saw even less with a 45% decrease in funding.
Nex Cubed, a San Diego-based early stage accelerator is looking to change those percentages by prioritizing Black and diverse founders with its HBCU Founders Fund accelerator program.
“We've been investing since 2017,” Managing Director Mike Ma said, “primarily in fintech and digital health and we have always prided ourselves on looking at diverse and minority founders. 60% of our founders of that portfolio at a time have been women and underrepresented founders.”
Earlier this week, the venture firm announced the eight startups that will be participating in the accelerator program. They include: white-label social network solution AllPeep, patented mobile technology BE$TOW, e-learning and gaming platform Enrichly, online network GRADIFY, mobile cost estimator Guilde, insurtech company SoleSafe, loan management platform Spendebt and healthcare staff solutions Transition. 
Enrichly founder Margo Jordan
Enrichly founder Margo Jordan is one of the entrepreneurs selected into the program and “as a Black woman founder who graduated from an HBCU, I've long known that traditional Silicon Valley investors often underestimate us,” she said.
“So imagine my astonishment when I discovered a fund created specifically for people like me,” Jordan continued. “Finally, the world is beginning to recognize the vast talent pool that HBCUs produce. We're not just creating tech startups, we're building unicorns and it's high time we received the support, resources, and tools to accelerate our growth. This fund makes me feel seen, valued, and respected. I'm thrilled to be part of a community that celebrates diversity and champions underrepresented voices in the tech industry.”
SoleSafe founder Phil Terrill
Ma said they received an overwhelming interest with a grand total of 275 applicants for this cohort. Another entrepreneur that solidified a spot in the Spring 2023 cohort is SoleSafe founder and Tuskegee University Alumnus Phil Terrill who is humbled and energized for the opportunity.
“As a founder, every day is a new opportunity to tell your story and make an impact in your space,” Terrill said. “A critical element is having investor partners that you want to join the journey. The cherry on top was knowing I would be alongside other incredible founders that come from great HBCUs like me.”
Terrill understands that being a founder is hard, but “being a diverse or HBCU (likely meaning the founders are black, brown, or from the African Diaspora) is even more difficult when it comes to raising capital,” he said. “When you see a fund "walk the walk" by investing dollars and resources into this community of founders is a clear example of impact while investing done right.”
Unlike other accelerators that last 10 or 12 weeks, HBCU Founders Fund accelerator is a sixteen week program that is customized for each startup. Each company will receive up to $400,000 in funding and the program culminates in an in-person showcase pitch event that will take place in Silicon Valley.
“We painstakingly handcraft the programming for each one of our companies,” Ma told dot.LA. “I handpick the advisors, and by the way our advisors are paid and compensated. They bring industry expertise. So if you're a health care company, I'm not going to assign you a fintech advisor.”
The advisors that were hired to guide the eight startups through the duration of the program include Rocket Lab director Merline Saintil, Juvo Ventures co-founder Maia Sharpley, Raydiant head of AI and innovation Trevor Sumner, Baypine operating partner Farhan Siddiqi and former Airbnb and Google business executive Nathalie Walton among many others.
Ma added, “Secondly, they've had to have been a founder themselves, or some CXO to understand the empathy that this group is going through and then either through exit or another fortune 500 job to know what it feels like to work in a large enterprise or a large government so that they can bring a broad swath of experience and functional expertise.”
Nex will continue to run its programming in a hybrid fashion.
“We’ve been doing hybrid since 2017,” he said. “That's just how we operate and is one of our centers of excellence. One of our core beliefs is that virtual is great, but in person really helps sustain some of those relationships and amplifies them more vibrantly.”
In addition to the Founders Fund, Nex Cubed is also offering a free pre-accelerator program for HBCU students who are at the idea stage, but who are not quite ‘venture-ready’ through its HBCU Founders Initiative (HBCUFI) nonprofit. Ma said their nonprofit arm launched in 2020 and has continued to provide valuable resources to support and help aspiring founders reach their goals. In the last three years, over 600 students and alumni from over 75 HBCUs have participated in HBCUFI.
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.
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
More than six million U.S. adults are currently living with heart failure. By 2030, that number is expected to climb to nearly 8 million.
Currently, the way to test for heart failure is a painstaking process known as cardiac catheterization.
Simply put, the procedure involves inserting a tiny tube into a blood vessel in someone’s arm or leg and injecting a dye that’s visible to an X-ray. Pressure and flow of blood in the heart are measured, and the photos taken via X-ray show where the heart or arteries are damaged or blocked. Hazards of the process include strokes or heart attacks, tearing arterial lining or blood clots.
The process is also “really expensive, it takes up to tens of thousands of dollars to do it, and it’s invasive,” explained Anthony Arnold, CEO of Westwood-based Sensydia. Which is why Arnold is developing and testing an alternative approach. Sensydia’s Cardiac Performance System (CPS) uses biosensors and artificial intelligence to scan for irregularities in a person’s heart. The biotech company just raised $8 million to continue development on its technology.
“These are very exquisitely sensitive biosensors, microphones, in essence, and the data they collect is a tremendous amount of data, Arnold said “My engineers tell me that from those four sensors and 10 heartbeats, we may have 30,000 discrete, identifiable features that happen in everybody’s heartbeat.”
Arnold noted that it’d be impossible for a human to sort through all that data in a timely manner. But once the AI has made its conclusions, a qualified doctor makes the final diagnosis. “It’s not just a needle in a haystack, sometimes we need a combination of three or four needles,” referring to the data points in a reading that could lead to a patient’s heart failure diagnosis.
Then, according to Arnold, “you train the computer on what you’re looking for and let it help you sniff out the features and classifiers that are the right ones to correlate. It can be immensely more efficient [and] eventually we see this being done in the cloud.”
The technology was designated a breakthrough device by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in January 2022. “There was a time when it was very hard for startups to deal with FDA, but I'd say for quite a while FDA has been relatively startup-friendly,” Arnold added. Alongside going towards device development, Arnold said some of the funding will be used to attain full FDA certification by 2024.
Sensydia’s May 9 raise was led by Orlando Health Ventures. New York-based Colle Capital Partners and Utah-based Frontier Venture Capital also joined. Arnold said Sensydia has raised $17.5 million since its launch in 2015.
While AI is a hot topic now, Arnold said that the plan at Sensydia was always to incorporate machine learning into its sensors. “It was always an AI play,” he said.
In fact, the company was originally part of UCLA’s Technology Transfer program, which exists to back and develop startups led by entrepreneurs from the university. Sensydia founder and chief medical officer Dr. Aman Mahajan was the chair of UCLA’s medical center until 2018, when he began working for the University of Pittsburgh.
Arnold said that once the devices are certified Sensydia plans to sell them to emergency rooms, hospitals and specialist physician offices, as well as to primary care physicians with older patients. Eventually, the goal is for the CPS to be in mainstream pharmacies like Walgreens, just as blood pressure monitors are.
“We haven't even scratched the surface of what we can do with AI in healthcare,” Arnold said. “ I think the broader applications will be to comb through masses of data from multiple health systems – [and] insurers are probably uniquely suited to do this – to really uncover paradigm-shifting ways to treat patients.”
Samson Amore is a reporter for dot.LA. He holds a degree in journalism from Emerson College and previously covered technology and entertainment for TheWrap and reported on the SoCal startup scene for the Los Angeles Business Journal. Send tips or pitches to samsonamore@dot.la and find him on Twitter @Samsonamore.
Back in April, image hosting site Imgur – a popular option for users of Reddit and similar forums seeking to post memes or photos – announced a sweeping change to its Terms of Service. As of May 15, the site will no longer host “nudity, pornography, & sexually explicit content,” and it also plans to purge “old, unused, and inactive content” that’s not tied to an active user account. Though some of the terminology in Imgur’s blog post – like “old” and “inactive” – leaves them lots of wiggle room to decide what gets to stay on the site, and they have even allowed a general exception for “artistic nudity,” the overall message is clear: the site plans to rid itself of NSFW content.
No one would deny that Imgur is perfectly within its right to host or not host whatever content it pleases. But the fact remains that, as of May 15, a large chunk of content that has been available on the platform for the entire internet to view and enjoy will simply disappear. In this particular case, most people will likely not notice that anything has happened to old pornographic images from Imgur, many of them uploaded years ago by people who have long since moved on.
Still, the situation points to a much larger issue that has loomed over the internet for its entire life cycle, and seems to still have no immediate answer or solution. Will useful or worthwhile content that’s on the internet always remain available? And if so, whose job is it to preserve and maintain this vast and unruly collection of information and data?
Over time, internet users come to rely on resources like Imgur, to think of them as something of a digital filing cabinet that you can always return to, open up, and find exactly what you need. But websites are not furniture; they’re the public faces of living, active businesses and organizations, and like everything else, they are ephemeral.
Twitter, for example, launched in 2006 and now sits on a massive compendium of real-time data and information about basically every aspect of human life for the last 15 years or so. Despite its utility as a resource and research tool, we now get daily reminders that all of this information is privately owned by a relatively unpredictable man who could do with it whatever he pleases. The Library of Congress used to archive all tweets but gave up in 2017. Now they only hang on to tweets of significant national importance. WhyNow notes that, on just about any big Wikipedia page, jumping down to the footnotes and references leads to a bevy of broken links, either totally dead or pointing to something different than they did when the article was first written.
In the case of Imgur, the Something Awful community has actually jumped in to respond. Forums like Something Awful, which goes back over 2 decades at this point, have been down this road many times before, with services like Flickr, ImageShack, and others once filling the role now occupied by Imgur before they also changed their terms of service or went out of business. So once members of that storied and controversial internet forum heard the announcement about the Imgur purge, they snapped into action and organized a massive project – dubbed the Great Imgur Download Caper – to preserve the image hosting site’s complete library.
This is something of a special case, though. Imgur’s library contains almost entirely still images or brief video clips, which are easy for a big group of interested users to divvy up, download, and personally store. As well, Something Awful is a devoted community, made up of a self-selected group with a particular interest in shocking, sexy, or memeable images. It’s only natural they’d want to preserve the Imgur collection for all times, even if other people are more than happy to see that particular archive go away. (The Verge notes that some on social media have cracked jokes about finally being free of their adolescent Imgur accounts.)
For internet sites and communities with a less passionate following, or with content that’s more time-consuming or cumbersome to download and preserve, casual internet community organization may not be enough to save them from permanent deletion.
Most streaming video platforms don’t provide users with any ability to fully download shows, let alone storing them permanently on a third-party device. While previous generations had physical media releases to fall back on, a lot of films and shows simply don’t get DVD or Blu-Ray releases any more, particularly if they’re widely available on streaming services. So when a streaming platform goes away, often its entire programming library disappears as well. That’s what happened to NBCU’s subscription-based comedy platform, Seeso, the K-pop focused livestreaming app V Live, and the streaming platform launched by Fullscreen Media.
I actually made one of those streaming shows for Fullscreen that disappeared from the internet forever save for the first episode which lives on as a YouTube clip.
To that end, mobile-exclusive streaming service Quibi also folded very quickly, but they worked out a deal to push a lot of their most popular content over to Roku Channel. Some of those Quibi shows have actually lived on in their new home; “Die Hart” and “The Most Dangerous Game” got renewed for second seasons.
The situation got some extra scrutiny earlier this year, when a federal judge ruled in favor of book publishers over the nonprofit Internet Archive, in what could ultimately prove a landmark decision. Four publishing houses – Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House – sued the Internet Archive for “mass copyright infringement.”
The Archive – whose stated goal is providing “universal access to all knowledge” – does not pay to license books from publishers, but practices what it calls “controlled digital lending.” (Under this system, the owner of a book scans their physical copy and then lends out the scanned versions.) They argued that this counted as fair use, but U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl of the Southern District of New York disagreed. The Internet Archive plans to appeal the ruling; in a statement, founder Brewster Kahle argued that “libraries are more than the customer service departments for corporate database products.”
If the ruling stands, it could prove devastating to widespread efforts to preserve internet content. Preservationists rely on non-profits like the Internet Archive (which also runs the popular “Wayback Machine” website showcasing classic internet content) specifically because they aren’t privately-owned companies. A paid subscription platform can’t take over Imgur’s content and claim it for its own; there are copyright issues and legal liabilities to worry about. So for now, this is primarily the domain of libraries, museums, and other community-based organizations. But if they’re under threat of lawsuit for downloading and providing access to copywritten material, it could potentially stymie all their efforts.
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