Art And Entertainment

Last week, an obscure Venice-based startup disclosed in regulatory filings that it had raised nearly $10 million in funding and is seeking to raise $5 million more. Beyond a scarcely detailed website and several online job postings, little has been publicly disclosed about the company, known as Artema Labs.

And after dot.LA reached out to Artema Labs this week for comment about its newly raised funds, it soon took down its website. The company did not respond to multiple requests to participate in this article.

Here’s what is known about Artema Labs: Based out of a posh residence in Venice, the startup appears to be focused around the blockchain-enabled realm of Web3. Several job listings indicate that the company is working primarily around NFTs and the entertainment sector, such as a project manager role that asks for experience managing clients “especially in the creative and entertainment industries.” There are also

When Netflix releases its new interactive show, “Trivia Quest,” on Friday, Netflix executive Andy Weil hopes that viewers will find themselves thinking about video games.

The 30-episode quiz show isn’t one of the streaming giant’s expanding roster of mobile games, but it’s easy to draw the connection. In “Trivia Quest,” viewers accumulate points and rescue kidnapped characters by correctly answering trivia questions. Users can watch the show—or “play the game,” to put it another way—on their phones and tablets, in addition to TVs and computers. Weil, Netflix’s vice president of comedy and interactive, wants the new show to bring attention to the company’s fledgling games portfolio.

“I think creating some awareness that your Netflix subscription doesn’t just come with amazing television and movies—it comes with mobile games—I think would be a great byproduct of ‘Trivia Quest,’” Weil told dot. LA on Thursday.

Netflix, the streaming market leader with roughly 222

The Rattle opened a studio in Silver Lake last year, which it operates as something between a startup accelerator, art co-op, coworking space and venture studio. Its goal is to rethink the way musicians and artists are compensated for creating something new or groundbreaking.

“In the music economy, artists are treated like writers of music for some label or publisher, so that the grown-ups can go and sort it out afterwards,” said Chris Howard, CEO of The Rattle. “We wanted to see if we could translate the principles of startups and entrepreneurship to artists.”

This week, the Los Angeles and U.K.-based creative collective announced its first investments into Los Angeles-based companies.

The Rattle CEO Chris Howard

As the pandemic shut down, cancelled and delayed events people had been looking forward to, Wave co-founder and CEO Adam Arrigo saw an opportunity.

His company was founded in 2016 at a time when brands like Oculus and PlayStation were looking to bring virtual reality into the mainstream. Not knowing how ready people would be, Arrigo and his team were conservative with the company’s money.

“We basically didn’t spend any money because we weren’t sure how quickly people were going to strap these things to their heads… And we were kind of right because VR sort of petered out,” said Arrigo.

Instead, the company worked on something that he characterizes as a “metaphor for a live performance.” Arrigo, a game designer and a musician, realized the music industry needed a tech boost to help keep artists connected with their fans during the pandemic.

Wave provided artists the ability to perform