Web site developers find their niche here.Entertainment industry drives big portion of growth A new segment of the high-tech industry is emerging in Los Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. County. Exact numbers are not available, but in recent months several companies that design and create commercial World Wide Web sites on the Internet have opened in the L.A. area. Pockets of such activity are centered in Venice, West Los Angeles
"We've been following the development of this, and it seems that right now it's growing pretty fast," said Steve MacDonald Steve Macdonald is a filk musician (singer/songwriter) from Michigan, who also appears at Renaissance Faires as "Gallamor the Bard". He served for several years as the Pegasus Award Evangelista, and was responsible for many changes in the award process that led to much greater , deputy director of L.A.'s Business Team, a creation of Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan Richard J. Riordan (born May 1, 1930) is a Republican politician from California, U.S. who served as the California Secretary of Education from 2003–2005 and as Mayor of Los Angeles from 1993–2001. Riordan ran for Governor of California unsuccessfully in 2002. to assist businesses in the city. "We keep hearing about these types of companies opening up, and it seems like a lot of them are here because of the entertainment industry." As might be expected, Web site developers are generally populated by young, computer-minded individuals but they also employ a fair number of people with backgrounds in marketing. "You'll find a lot of companies are like ours," said Debra Shatford, who with her husband Will started Focused Presence in the Winnetka section of Los Angeles last June. "One person will have a sales and marketing background and the other will have a technical and computer background." People in the business said there is plenty of work to go around, as commercial enterprises turn to the Internet to promote and advertise their wares and services. But they also said the current growth eventually will slow down. "I'd say the numbers (of companies creating Web sites) are going to keep growing for the next year or so, but then you'll start seeing a weeding-out process," said John McGloughlin, vice president of WebVision Inc. in Torrance. "Some companies will fall by the wayside and others will consolidate." Creative hybrid Web site creators are a cross between an advertising agency and computer software maker. What they do is design a site on the World Wide Web for commercial enterprises that want to tout their products or themselves on the Internet. The World Wide Web is a station on the Internet, the Internet, the, international computer network linking together thousands of individual networks at military and government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, industrial and financial corporations of all sizes, and commercial enterprises global computer communications network The transmission channels interconnecting all client and server stations as well as all supporting hardware and software. . A commercial enterprise might want to have a Web site to advertise its products, or entertain and inform Internet users. Web sites can be thousands of screens long. Web site creators could not say if the greater Los Angeles area The Greater Los Angeles Area, or the Southland, is the agglomeration of urbanized area around the city of Los Angeles, California, United States. There are two "official" definitions—the Los Angeles metropolitan area consisting only of the Los Angeles and Orange is becoming an industry hotbed hotbed, low, glass-covered frame structure for starting tender plants. It differs from a cold frame only in that the soil is heated—either artificially as by underground electric wiring or steampipes, or naturally with partially fermented stable manure, which , but agreed the local segment of the business is being driven primarily by the entertainment industry. Other parts of the country where there seems to be an explosion of Web site creators of all sorts include New York City New York City: see New York, city. New York City City (pop., 2000: 8,008,278), southeastern New York, at the mouth of the Hudson River. The largest city in the U.S. and the Silicon Valley in Northern California Northern California, sometimes referred to as NorCal, is the northern portion of the U.S. state of California. The region contains the San Francisco Bay Area, the state capital, Sacramento; as well as the substantial natural beauty of the redwood forests, the northern , people in the business said. The entertainment industry is creating Web sites to entertain Internet users and promote television shows, movies, video and computer games, and musical recordings. One company specializing in creating entertainment-related Web sites is DirectNet, a Los Angeles-based company that started operations about one year ago. "A lot of our business comes from the entertainment industry. This is where the entertainment industry is, and a lot of the industry is using the Web," said Mark Kelly
Mark Kelly , president of DirectNet. Last year DirectNet developed a Web site to promote the movie "Mortal Kombat Mortal Kombat (commonly abbreviated as MK) is a popular series of fighting games created originally by the Midway Manufacturing Company. Mortal Kombat ," and helped create a site for the movie "Showgirls." Financial considerations People involved in creating Web sites said their businesses are making money, as more commercial enterprises seek to get a presence on the Web. To create a Web site can take anywhere from a few weeks to six months, and cost between $10,000 and hundreds of thousands of dollars, they said. A primary reason so many people are getting into the business, sources said, is that it doesn't take a lot of start-up capital. For a $30,000 investment in computer equipment and software, people can get into the business, said Web site creators. All the Web site creators that have opened in recent months employ only a few people and are private operations funded by individuals. But people in the business said the way things are going, more employees likely will be hired. For instance, Kelly said DirectNet currently employs eight people, but that number could grow to about 20 over the next few months. Revenues this year at Direct-Net could increase to $5 million from less than $500,000 last year, said Kelly. |
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