A new ride-share service is taking care of a very modern, very urban, very L.A. problem: shuttling your children around the city in the middle of the busy workweek.

Begun by three local mothers, HopSkipDrive carefully vets drivers who help ferry children, aged 7-17, to dance class, football practice, and the French tutor. Since most school days end about 3 p.m.—about the time most office workers get their second wind—the service is an invaluable tool for modern families. Local mom Kirsten Hanson-Press told the L.A. Times that the mobile app-enabled service has helped save her sanity (and job, likely), a claim that doesn’t seem hyperbolic for anyone who’s had to get across town during rush hour.

HopSkipDrive mostly follows the Uber and Lyft model, except the drivers are very carefully screened with a 15-point certification process. Aside from background checks and vehicle inspections, all drivers must show five years of experience caring for children. The drivers must also be prepared to sign children out of practice or school, as well as exchange passwords with their passengers to ensure their drivers are who they say they are.

Another difference between Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar is that HopSkipDrive requires advanced planning (something parents know well). Rides must be booked a day in advance, but can be set up weeks in advance. Prices seem fair; between $12 and $20 for ride packages that offer beater incentives when bought in bulk.

This is one of those, why didn’t they think of this before? innovations that make modern life a little more bearable. More, please.

New Volkswagen vehicles will be synched with the VW Car-Net app, allowing drivers to access their vehicle through the new Apple Watch, the carmaker announced Tuesday.

VW’s app will enable their customers to keep an eye on their car when they’re away from it, remotely lock doors and open windows, and locate cars that have fallen into the black hole known as the Westside Pavilion parking garage (assuming you can get a signal, of course). If you’re at Coachella, for instance, you can have the lights and horns go off to make it even easier.

Fuel counts will also be accessible on the watch, as will charging levels for electric vehicles like the e-Golf. Meanwhile, helicopter parents can also keep track of where, and how fast, their cars go when they’re not behind the wheel.

BMW and Porsche have also announced collaborations with Apple Watch, but Volkswagen is the first non-luxury brand to offer Watch-enabled features. Hyundai and Ford are hot on VW heels, though.

Before launching into a really strong, heartfelt discussion about such important issues as governing with technology, race relations, traffic, homelessness, youth employment, and civic engagement at Fast Company’s Creative Counter-Conference in Playa Vista on Thursday, Mayor Garcetti took a moment to weigh in on another, super duper serious matter: what the New York Times’ Style section thinks about Los Angeles. At the start of his scheduled talk with Fast Company editor Robert Safian, Garcetti asked any ex-New Yorkers to raise a hand and then brought up last week’s Los Angeles and Its Booming Creative Class Lures New Yorkers-Gate, saying he had thought “Facebook was going to meltdown” after the divisive article went viral with Angelenos (and started inspiring Bingo cards) over the weekend. Clearly, said the mayor to those who had left New York for L.A., you’re on the right side of the debate.

Oh, and he had a quip for Silicon Valley, too: “That’s, like, sooooo 2013.”

Forget subways and synching traffic lights: Mayor Garcetti is turning to Silicon Valley to help end congestion in L.A.

The mayor’s office announced today they’re partnering with the Goldhirsh Foundation, a local grantmaker, to create a year-long transportation technology advisor position at the Los Angeles Department of Transportation. The fellow will work under LADOT’s new general manager Seleta Reynolds, as well as the department’s chief technology officer Peter Marx.

What exactly this person will do is not clear, but Reynolds indicates, via press release, that the job will encompass managing carshare and rideshare services (Uber, Lyft, etc.), implementing an effective bike share (coming next year), and planning for the arrival of self-driving cars.

Marx also provides some clues, via press release, as to other fellow responsibilities: “Los Angeles has long been associated with advancing transportation. We’re seeing technologies today that will dramatically change how we move around our City. We see technologies emerging everywhere we look, whether it is using a tablet on the subway, charging an electric vehicle from a streetlight, using a smartphone to find a route, or riding in an connected autonomous vehicle. L.A. will continue to lead in thinking through how a City moves around most efficiently, most sustainably, and most enjoyably.”

The mayor is no stranger to embracing tech. He already allowed Uber and Lyft to pick up people at LAX, and announced the city is partnering with Waze to disseminate traffic info.

Since self-driving cars began appearing on California streets about six years ago, at least four accidents have been reported, according to a widely circulated Associated Press report. Google, which is leading the charge on autonomous cars, came out hard in defense of their technology, though they admitted there were even more accidents than the AP reported.

“Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” Google’s driverless car executive Chris Urmson wrote in a statement.

That number is pretty good, especially considering these cars are dealing with human drivers who can be distracted or lack the response time that the technology has. Most of the accidents involved autonomous cars being rear-ended or broadsided by human drivers.

Three of the crashes reported by the AP involved Google’s Lexus SUVs, which are equipped with the self-driving technology; the other involved an autonomous car developed by parts supplier Delphi Automotive. Current law still requires a human being be behind the wheel to take over in case the technology fails, though the autonomous cars logged crashes while they were driving themselves and when humans were in control.

In his 27 years as a Disney Imagineer, Bob Gurr was known for doing the impossible: He designed a submarine fleet, the cars of Autopia, and the Monorail that soars above the park on a single beam. With the opening of Tomorrowland in 1955, Gurr shaped a vision of the future (1986 to be exact) that still feels out of reach. Six decades after Gurr began creating ride vehicles for the theme park, director Brad Bird tapped him to dream up a mysterious object that would appear in Bird’s sci-fi adventure Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney (in theaters May 22).

The art of illusion is what inadvertently inspired Gurr’s career. As a teen in North Hollywood, he was taken with the imagination and technical brilliance he saw at the Burbank airport during World War II. To keep the planes safe from enemy attack, canopies made of camouflage netting and prop foliage were erected to cover acres of Lockheed aircraft, simulating a rural community when seen from above. “It was a thrilling place,” Gurr says. “I liked to go snoop. I wanted to know how they were built, why they were built, and what I could learn from them.”

After graduating from Art Center College of Design, Gurr moved to Dearborn, Michigan, and worked as a car stylist for the Ford Motor Company. He returned to L.A. a year later. By then he had already published the illustrated book How to Draw the Cars of Tomorrow. His blue-sky thinking caught the attention of WED Enterprises, Walt Disney’s private R&D lab, which was building Disneyland. Gurr would go on to create signature Disneyland attractions, from the PeopleMover to the animatronic Abraham Lincoln.

Both Gurr and Walt believed groundbreaking structures (like the Monorail) would eventually exist beyond the park. “Walt would bring people to see the advantages of a clean and simple transportation system,” Gurr says. “It was puzzling how cities weren’t interested in his vision of the future. The mind-set of a civic manager is never the mind of a creative futurist.”

Gurr still lives in the Valley and is inspired by today’s innovators such as Elon Musk and Richard Branson. He travels around the world lecturing on design, is an avid mountain biker, and has made a documentary film about Burning Man. The Department of Defense tapped Gurr to motivate kids into studying technology, engineering, and math.

“I’m 84, which means I have a 75-year view looking back,” Gurr says. “Right after World War II everything seemed like a great big beautiful tomorrow. I come from the era of radio with two knobs, and today I edit on Final Cut Pro. That’s a giant technological jump.”

Gurr’s Mighty Machines

Photograph courtesy Bob Gurr

Photograph courtesy Bob Gurr

Photograph courtesy Bob Gurr

Potholes aren’t just the bane of Angelenos’ existences; they’re a menace in Panama City. Advertising agency P4 Ogilvy & Mather came up with a brilliant conceit, Jalopnik reports, where they placed tweeting sensors on top of the craters, which sent out a missive to city officials every time a vehicle ran over them.

El Hueco Twitero (The Tweeting Pothole) tweeted directly to Panama’s department of public works, alerting them of the sketchy roads. Ogilvy knew it had to add a little spice of bizarre humor for this idea to really catch on.

Via Google translate: “I am retaining fluid, that’s not good for my figure. @MOPdePanama Rains make me worse, please do something!”

Another: “When MOPdePanama repairs me , I will draw more attention than Caitlyn Jenner Kardashian. Kanye is going to want to park on me.”

Ogilvy teamed up with a local TV station, which encouraged locals to tweet and reweet the public works department. The end result: more patched potholes and fewer damaged vehicles. We anxiously await L.A.’s version, The Tweeting Canyon, any day now.

Amy Duan’s first post went out on June 15, 2011. She had only recently learned about Weibo, a Twitter-like microblogging platform that is based in China but used widely among Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in the United States. Duan’s roommate had taken her to Tasty Garden in Alhambra, the first Chinese restaurant she had visited since leaving Shanghai the year before to pursue a master’s in communications at USC. That’s where she met a coterie of other Chinese students who share a common interest. “It was as simple as, ‘Oh, do you like to eat? Are you new to the States? Do you want to join our chihuo group?’ ” says Duan. Chihuo is slang for “foodie” in Mandarin, Duan’s native language. She wanted to let her fellow L.A. greenhorns and restaurant junkies know about what they were missing, so she fired off this Weibo message, written in Chinese: “For my first Weibo tweet I want to talk about one of the first Cantonese restaurants in L.A., Tasty Garden…. It’s opened until 4:00am, a good place for friends to get a late-night meal. Specialties: Almond Shrimp, Curry Pots, and their noodles and porridge are righteous, too.”

Simple as it was, the post received 14 replies and 20 retweets. Four years and nearly 12,000 tweets later, Duan has built one of the most popular food streams/Web sites/social media phenomena for L.A.’s Chinese diaspora and, in the process, landed herself a career.

Duan’s feed—named, appropriately enough, Chihuo (吃货)—has more than 190,000 followers, who may retweet a Chihuo (pronounced sort of like CHEE-hoo-oh) post a few hundred times in a single day. Chihuo’s fans are mostly recent transplants from China (with some from Taiwan and Hong Kong) who want to know where to grab a bite. Duan and her team post about anything that appeals to their stomachs, whether it’s brunch at the Alcove in Los Feliz or a snack they bought at a Korean supermarket or ways to hack a bowl of instant ramen. But given that she writes in Chinese, it’s her insights into Chinese restaurants that drive traffic. “The most popular foods I tweet about are very common Chinese dishes,” says Duan, a 27-year-old with long, straight hair and a way of seeming understated even when she’s in a bright pink dress. “[Non-Chinese people] don’t know about the street food, what we had after school, what we ate every day in China.” Seeking a taste of home, Duan and her Chihuo followers found a community.

The Chinese have scores of proverbs centered on sustenance, going back to Confucius. The word population in Chinese means “human mouths”; a good, secure job is known colloquially as a “metal rice bowl”; and there’s an expression from the Han dynasty—“An emperor’s priority is his people, and the people’s priority is to be fed”—that these days is used to convey, basically, how much Chinese people love to eat.

Duan was passionate enough about restaurants back in China to read the newspaper every Monday for its weekly dining column. She wrote a blog, too, before establishing Chihuo. But never did she think her two hobbies would become a livelihood, which is what happened when Duan resigned from an international marketing company in Torrance last August to work on Chihuo full-time. “Chihuo is my dream job,” Duan says. “I am so lucky that I can make it my career.” She draws a small salary, working ten hours a day, sometimes as many as seven days a week. About ten volunteers scattered around the country assist her (gratis) with graphic design, programming, and reviews. Some are friends from USC. Others began as Chihuo readers. In September Chihuo started a Bay Area edition on Weibo, and by March expanded it to Seattle, New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago (staffed by one volunteer in each city). Like Twitter, Weibo has a limit of 140 characters, but in Chinese each character represents a word, so that’s a comparatively lengthy 140 words per post. Duan takes advantage of the space to write the way young Chinese people speak—informally, to the point, and with plenty of vernacular expressions and emojis. Of course there are tons of photos, too.

Most fans come to Chihuo for its coverage of the San Gabriel Valley, where Chinese and Chinese Americans make up more than half the population in several cities. The influx began in earnest in the 1970s, when well-heeled immigrants—primarily from Taiwan but also Hong Kong and China—began to settle in Monterey Park, earning it the moniker “Little Taipei.” The growing diaspora muscled its way eastward into San Gabriel, Hacienda Heights, Chino, and Rowland Heights. Eventually those from China would become one of the largest immigrant groups in the nation. By 2010, about 1.71 million people from the mainland were living in the United States, compared with 358,000 from Taiwan, according to the most recent U.S. Census data. Restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley have reflected that shift.

“The food there initially was Taiwanese,” says Yong Chen, a history professor at UC Irvine and the author of the 2014 book Chop Suey, USA, about the history of Chinese food in America. “Over time that changed. Now…almost all of the main regions [in China] are represented in the San Gabriel Valley.” As foreign money floods the area, more and more mom-and-pop restaurants find themselves going up against well-financed chains with origins overseas. Hai Di Lao, a hot pot outfit that offers services like manicures for queuing customers in China (the wait is notorious), opened an Arcadia outpost in 2013. In October the Taiwan-based bakery 85C unveiled its 15th stateside location, in Old Pasadena. Practically next door is a branch of Little Sheep, the hot pot chain founded in Mongolia that Yum! Brands (owner of Pizza Hut and KFC) acquired in 2011. And Bake Code, another Taiwan concern, cut the ribbon in San Gabriel this past April.

“The restaurants I went to four years ago,” says Duan, “people would tell me that they were famous. Those places have all closed.” It’s cutthroat, but that’s also what makes the San Gabriel Valley so compelling to her. “The L.A. area,” she says, “has the most competitive Chinese-food scene in America.”

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Duan makes no claim to be a connoisseur of every variety of Chinese cuisine, but she is a student of all things fiery. Lately she has been clocking time eating Sichuan cuisine, the indisputable regional style of the moment. There’s been an explosion of restaurants in the San Gabriel Valley specializing in it after the success of Chengdu Taste, the spot on Valley Boulevard in Alhambra with a perpetual swarm of people lined up outside. Duan wants to tap into that interest.

On an early afternoon about 20 miles east of downtown, I meet her in Rowland Heights at a Sichuan restaurant called Qiwei Kitchen (a name that works less well when translated from Chinese: “curious taste”). The restaurant, a Grand Opening banner still flapping over the doorway, specializes in “dry pot”—a stir-fry consisting of a meat (including frog and rabbit), veggies and herbs (bean sprouts, cilantro), plus whatever else is available (one dry pot features Spam)—prepared in the signature spicy Sichuan flavor known as mala. Think hot pot minus the broth. In places like Chongqing and Sichuan, it’s a dish of convenience most moms can make. Qiwei Kitchen has invited Duan for a sampling. Usually she tries to dine anonymously. When she’s asked to visit a restaurant, she discloses as much in the write-up and brings along other people for their take.

This time around she’s accompanied by two Chihuo readers who won a contest in which followers were asked to write a brief pitch on why Duan should dine with them. One of the winners, Millie Chen, a voluble mother of two kids, earned her place because she knows Wuhan food, which Qiwei Kitchen serves, too. Since moving with her family to the United States from Wuhan two years ago, Chen has come to rely on Chihuo to help navigate her adopted home. “We don’t know anything about Chinese restaurants here and had no idea where to go,” she tells me as plates arrive. “Chihuo makes it easier for us. The reviews are pertinent and pretty well written.” The other winner (she asked to remain anonymous) is a Sichuan-born twentysomething who boasts of having tried every restaurant in Rowland Heights.

As with other Chihuo readers, they’re not just young but Web savvy and financially comfortable, unlike first-generation Chinese immigrants of yore. Duan also gets a lot of attention from the hundreds of thousands of tourists and foreign students from China who visit the L.A. area. L.A. sees more tourists from China than any other country, and they’re hungry to explore. “They get out of the car, they go to things, they want to have experiences,” says Clayton Dube, executive director of the U.S.-China Institute at USC and a longtime China observer. Traditional Chinese media, such as radio stations and newspapers, have a different—well, stodgier—sensibility, geared more to “older immigrants,” Dube says. The newer generation wants to be catered to, which presents an attractive market opportunity. If Chihuo has a Chinese-language competitor, it’s WaCowLA, a Web site and free monthly magazine (“WaCow,” a slang term that originated in Taiwan, translates to “holy fuck” in Mandarin) focusing on grub, shopping, and pop culture (it has offshoots in New York and San Francisco as well).

In between bites at Qiwei Kitchen, Duan and her guests lob questions at one another: Is the fish fresh? (“Yes,” they all agree.) Is the spiciness too one-note? (“No, it has a nice complexity to it,” says Duan.) Is the re gan mian—a common breakfast noodle served with sesame paste in Wuhan—authentic? (“Not quite,” Chen, the Chihuo reader says, but it exceeds her expectations.) How about the preserved duck tongues? (They could be spicier). At the end of the meal Duan tells the pair to e-mail her what they think of the dishes; she’ll wind up quoting them in the review.

Duan says Chihuo is breaking even, without elaborating on the numbers. Most of its revenue comes from ad sales, with sponsorship from local businesses making up the rest. In March she launched a simplified Chinese-based Web site (the-chihuo.com) offering restaurant news, recipes, things to do, and better photography. The reviews, though, remain bite-size, since about 70 percent of Chihuo traffic is via smartphone. “In the beginning they were much longer. But…our culture is so much about instant gratification. Our readers—even me—want to know what’s good right off the bat,” says Duan, who plans to publish a Chinese-restaurant ranking by year’s end.

Naturally in a multiplatform world, she doesn’t want to stop there. Duan is launching a smartphone app in June, and she is staging events through Chihuo. For China’s so-called Singles’ Day, on November 11, Chihuo organized a speed-dating event at a café in the City of Industry. Eventually she wants to organize a street festival à la 626 Night Market, the popular outdoor Chinese-food fair that started in 2012 in Arcadia before expanding to downtown Los Angeles and Costa Mesa. But first Duan has set her sights on creating an English version of the Web site. Which is to say, she is working all angles to become the last word on Chinese food.

Tesla’s chief executive, Elon Musk, had no shortage of big reveals at the electric car company’s shareholders meeting on Tuesday, the L.A. Times reports. Most newsworthy is Musk’s claim that a gaggle of Model S owners will have their vehicles upgraded to feature hands-free driving… in just a few weeks.

The feature will be legal since the driver will need to remain in control of everything but the steering (and that can easily be taken over in a jiffy). This new option will free up drivers’ hands, though texting and phone calls will remain a no-no, since drivers need to keep attention on the road.

The hands-free option is a precursor to Tesla’s self-driving cars, which Musk believes will be available in three years.

“There will be a fully operational autopilot with everything that is needed for someone to go to sleep and wake up at their destination,” Musk said. “But this is an extremely difficult engineering project.”

Drivers won’t have to wait as long for the Model X, Tesla’s long-awaited SUV. Thanks to the electric engineering that places the electric battery on the center bottom of the vehicle, the SUV should be nearly immune to rollover and, thus, one of the safest on the road, according to Musk.

In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced a plan last year to outfit 7,000 members of the LAPD with body cameras. Although such a step had been in the works for years, now the LAPD is testing 860 Taser AXON wearable recording devices in four divisions. The goal: to establish greater accountability for officers and civilians alike. Here, a focus on the tech.

1) The Lens
Each camera has a 130-degree, wide-angle lens with retina technology that allows for better resolution in low light and increased visibility at night. The LAPD looked at high-definition cameras but decided the longer upload times and larger memory and storage requirements weren’t worth it. This model is priced at $399.

2) The Placement
Designed with the LAPD’s various uniform styles in mind, the camera comes with several body attachment options, including a belt, a holster harness, and a buttonhole. Officers are wearing the cameras clipped to their shirts, front and center.

3) The Record Button
In its default setting, the camera constantly records and rerecords in a 30-second loop, even before an officer presses the button. Though California is a two-party consent state, permission isn’t required when gathering criminal evidence.

4) The On/Off Switch
Battery power typically lasts 12 hours (about the length of an officer’s shift), then gets recharged in a docking station at police headquarters for approximately four hours. There’s also an adapter for a squad car’s cigarette lighter. Once the battery dies (in about five years), the camera is replaced.

5) The Memory
The camera has an 8GB hard drive. Depending on the quality of the video it is set to record, it can shoot continuously for 4 to 13 hours. Video is encrypted and uploaded from the docking station to Taser’s cloud storage, a subscription service that will cost the LAPD slightly less than $100 a month per camera.

6) The Casing
The outer shell of the camera is made of rugged plastic, and the camera can hold up in high heat, humidity, and rain. Though reliable, these gadgets won’t put smartphones out of business. Video shot by nearby witnesses is considered valid evidence, and because the LAPD won’t make its footage public, the images that bystanders capture likely will be the primary material the public is permitted to see.

Google is engineering self-driving cars, so why can’t Lexus build Marty McFly’s favorite way to get around? The luxury carmaker released a video on Tuesday showing a hoverboard floating above the ground.

The short clip only features the actual hoverboard for a few seconds, with it floating just an inch or two above what seems to be a skatepark. Emblazoned with the Lexus logo, it billows smoke and a skateboarder teasingly directs a foot onto the board just as the video, via Mashable, ends.

Lexus has scant information on its site about the hoverboard, but there is some. They seem to be calling it the Slide, and describe it thus: “Wrapped in a design that is uniquely Lexus, the Hoverboard features the iconic Lexus spindle grille signature shape, using materials found in the luxury car brand, from the high tech to the natural bamboo.”

According to USA Today, the Slide does actually work, but in a controlled environment. There are magnets embedded in the concrete that sits below the hoverboard featured in the Lexus video. So, it’s not quite Back to the Future II, but we’re getting there.

This isn’t our first hoverboard tease; last year we saw Moby and Tony Hawk riding one in DTLA, though we’ve heard little about that concept (from a company called HUVr Corp.) since then.

Just as gas prices are surging upward, the cheap gas-finder GasBuddy just reached 50 million downloads.

GasBuddy uses self-reported gas prices to help drivers find the cheapest stations in the area. As we all know, that can mean the difference between $10 to $20 at a fill up; cost comparison is more important than ever now that the average price for a gallon in California has jumped dramatically—about 75 cents in less than a week’s time, according to GasBuddy.

The GasBudy app and website began five years ago and now offer detailed and constantly updated comparisons (the average cost of gas in L.A. is 4.297/gallon as of Thursday morning), graphs, maps, and all kinds of helpful info, like how the cost of crude oil affects the price of gas (“Gasoline is refined from crude oil, and the cost of that crude oil sets a floor for the wholesale price of gasoline.”)

In honor of the 50 millionth download, GasBuddy is giving away $100 gas gift cards to users throughout the U.S. and Canada who report gas prices via the app. Get more info here.

“I never felt like there was much to lose.” That’s how Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, chalked up his meteoric rise in the entertainment industry when the media executive sat down to discuss his career—and his competition—with Giselle Fernandez this summer.

Over the past 15 years Sarandos has helped transform Netflix from a DVD rental service to an Internet television network with award-winning programming. He cut deals to launch House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black, giving cable networks a run for subscribers and making binge-watching a thing. Just one reward? Critical acclaim. Netflix nabbed 34 Emmy Award nominations this year, a company record. With success, Sarandos’ ambition is growing; he says 13 original shows are going into production in 2015 and seven will debut before the year’s end.

In this rare on-camera Q&A, Sarandos opens up about reimagining Hollywood’s traditional TV business model; hiring comedian Chelsea Handler; refusing to reveal ratings for the network’s shows; being in power couple with his wife, former U.S. ambassador Nicole Avant; and what’s next for Netflix. Take a look.

TED SARANDOS ON…

HOUSE OF CARDS

CRANKY COMPETITORS

NORMAN LEAR

TED TURNER

TRUSTING HIS GUT

PLUS: Watch his extended Big Shots episode.

You’ve seen them fly through fireworks, across perfect PCH beaches, and over East L.A., but today, drones are descending on this magazine’s home turf. This afternoon, July 28, a deluge of hover cams will levitate around 5900 Wilshire Boulevard—or so an office memorandum says.

It’d be reasonable to think they’ll be up there getting a bird’s eye view of LACMA’s Urban Light, but that’s not the mission. The Ratkovich Company, who owns our 32-story tower, has deployed them to update their stash of marketing images. Fans of the food truck army lining the south side of Wilshire needn’t worry—the drones will fly no lower than 20 feet, so go ahead and enjoy those tacos in peace.

For many Angelenos, especially those in their teens, 20s, and 30s, there’s life before and after Uber. Rideshare apps like Uber have enabled bar flies and night owls to untether from their cars and drink like they live in Brooklyn.

Even though Uber has had no shortage of controversy, there’s no denying the opportunity it has afforded and the change its wrought in this sprawling city. Videomaker Shirin Najafi acknowledged this seismic shift, added a heavy dose of comedy, good acting, and steady camerawork and created, “Before and After Uber.”

The five-minute video chronicles three female friends and their wild misadventures on an Uber-enabled night—a short prologue shows how much slower life was before the advent of the app. Check it out below.

Kasey Edwards met Becka Klauber Richter 12 years ago, when the UCSB freshmen both moved into their dorms a day early. In the time since, they’ve gone on to become best friends, “work wives,” and co-foster parents of two children. They entered the tech scene with Helpr, an on-demand childcare app launching with select users this October. The experience inspired their latest joint venture, Female Founders LA (#FFLA), a networking group they created along with the women founders of several other tech companies (Mend, The Dinner Party, Nail Snaps and First Seating) in order to share resources and compare notes about the difficulties—and excitement—of start-up life. FFLA meets monthly over dinner to discuss and solve entrepreneurial challenges.

In September, Edwards and Klauber Richter will be hosting an event promoting gender equality in the tech sector in conjunction with the Mayor’s office.

We asked them to answer our L.A. Woman questionnaire.

Place of birth:

KE: Long Beach.

BK: South suburbs of Chicago.

How has Los Angeles factored into your success:

BK: It’s the Wild West, especially coming from Chicago. Chicago has long-standing institutions and we don’t have that feeling here and I love that. It feels a lot more inclusive of everyone. And then obviously this bourgeoning tech scene in LA has been awesome.

How has living and working here been challenging:

KE: In tech, your evaluation is discounted a little bit compared to Silicon Valley. But I think it’s an exciting place to be. A lot of people are invested in seeing the tech scene really become something that is like Silicon Valley, but it’s own thing.

How female-friendly is your field:

KE: With tech, the numbers and data don’t necessarily support the power we feel as female CEOs. With the support of our collaborators and colleagues in FFLA, we’re trying to offer an alternative narrative about how women experience the field.

Why did you co-found FFLA:

KE: I met Ellen [Huerta] through a mutual friend and she was this kind of rock star who had left Google. I was really inspired by her. We were talking about how there were not a lot of places where you could meet other women founders who were willing to talk frankly about what the experience was like in a start-up.

Most kickass moment to date:

KE: We had been running this boutique agency, University Sitters, for many years when Lyft and Uber were becoming really big. We thought, “Wait a second, we are an on-demand service. Why are we not taking the chance to be bigger?” So we went to South by Southwest and got really excited about the opportunity to turn our lives from just providing childcare to more being tech-focused.

Where do you go from here:

BK: We really want FFLA to be multigenerational so that we can pass the torch, and we’ve talked about how cool it would be to start a VC fund amongst the founders.

After a lengthy trial run, the LAPD’s new body cameras are here to stay. On Monday, the first 250 of the initial 860 cameras were rolled out for officers in the Mission Division of the San Fernando Valley. Police Commissioner Steve Soboroff has been advocating putting a camera on every cop for years now, so we got him on the phone to talk about seeing his goal come to fruition and ask about his expectations for the future.

We spoke with you about your desire to see LAPD officers equipped with cameras back in January of 2014. Are you happy with how the roll out went this week?
I’m very happy. We’re the first big city to do it and we’re the first real diverse city to do it. So the results that we’re going to be monitoring here have an enormous interest in the law enforcement world. The smaller city pilot [programs] have had up to a 90 percent decrease in officer-related complaints and 50 percent less use of force. Those are monster numbers. If we have similar results, it will be earthshaking.  If we transpose those numbers to our budgets—for litigation, for overtime, for lawsuits, for court cases—the savings in lives, and the savings in time, and the savings in dollars are just huge. It could be $30 or $40 million per year.

After just one day of use, how is law enforcement responding?
Well, the guys have learned to love them. At the beginning, law enforcement was for body cameras—that doesn’t mean L.A. officers were—and the ACLU was for body cameras, but both were for them to protect people on different sides of the camera. We worked through all that and came up with a policy that probably doesn’t make anybody happy, but that’s what happens when you have to middle-ground on 20 issues: you get one or two that people don’t agree on.

A common criticism is that the public doesn’t have access to the footage the cameras record.
No, they don’t. A judge would have access to it. A court may have access to it. There’s privacy issues for bystanders, and many of the judges don’t want to taint any evidence. The commission voted on the policy that it’s up to the police chief. There may be cases where the chief of police says, this should be released to the public for public safety reasons, whether the officer is right or wrong.

There were 20 issues; we worked out 18 of them. The other issue that people talk about is, can the officer see the video before they write the report. Now, if there’s a categorical use of force or things like that, then they won’t, but in most cases they will have the right, so that their reports are accurate.

Are there any lingering issues regarding the cameras that need to be addressed?
Part of the policy dictates when the cameras go on and when they go off. A lot of the things that happen to officers happen in a tenth of a second, and it’s really hard to react. It’s all about training. I think it’ll take a little bit of time for officers, as part of their normal thing, to flip that camera on and flip it off, just really get the feel of it. But nothing other than that.

So what’s your next long term goal?
Fifty percent of the people [in Los Angeles] have financial issues, substance issues, homeless issues, mental issues. And until we start caring about those people, instead of turning it over the cops, it’s just not going to work.

It’s hard to be poor. It’s hard for a kid not to have a playground, not to have two parents at home, to have 65 kids in their class, to grow up around gangs. The frustrating thing is, we have the service providers in Los Angeles. They’re phenomenal. We have medical service providers for the mentally ill and the homeless. We have mentoring service providers like Big Brothers. We have Boys & Girls Clubs. They are incredibly efficient and incredibly underfunded. I would like to see the upper 10 to 20 percent of people at the top economically show a little more empathy for the 50 percent at the bottom—financially, from their hearts, and as they teach life lessons to their children. That’s going to be my crusade. I’m not going to be applying to any country clubs in the next few years.

If you’re heading to the L.A. County Fair—or any county fair, really—there are certain things you probably expect to see. Fried twinkies, maybe. Or corn dogs. Perhaps a booth, inside of which you can throw sharp objects at moving targets in order to win a stuffed bear.

But at this month’s event, which will be held at the Fairplex in Pomona from September 4 – 27, attendees will encounter something distinctly un-fair-like. For the third year in a row, the fair’s producers teamed up with exhibit design company Stage Nine to put together a high-tech indoor installation, injecting the otherwise down-home fair with a patently modern flair. This year, the fair is hosting the world premiere of POPnology, a 10,000 square-foot traveling technological exhibit. POPnology illuminates the ways in which technology and culture have merged to revolutionize our daily lives (remember when you needed a separate video recorder, camera and phone?). Here are three things you can expect to see at the installation (and that you should probably try to avoid dripping your corn dog ketchup on):

Virtual Reality
Next year, the first consumer virtual reality headset—called Oculus Rift—will hit shelves. In advance of its mainstream launch, Oculus was made available to a small handful of companies, including Stage Nine. At next weekend’s fair, visitors can try out an Oculus headset and experience two different virtual reality scenarios. In one, you’re floating through space dodging asteroids. In the other, you’re riding a speeding elevator outside of a skyscraper—an elevator that has no walls.

Robot Arms and Dinosaur Eggs
The scientists at POPnology have designed several remotely controlled robot arms, two with three fingers each and one with five. One of the arms picks up blocks, and another—in true Jurassic Park past meets not-so-distant-future form—picks up dinosaur eggs. The program even features a dinosaur parent who gets mad as you remove its spawn.

The DeLorean
Yes, THE DeLorean. Well—one of them. Five versions of the famous car were built for the filming of Back to the Future 2, in which our heroes head backwards in time in order to fix a very muddled present. The DeLorean will likely appeal to the 30-plus set, but kids might be interested to know that the film’s “future” happens to be set in the year 2015. The filmmakers “were predicting what year 2015 would look like” when they made the movie in 1989, says Michael Converse, one of the fair’s producers. “The fax machine was a big deal then, so they thought, ‘everyone will have a fax machine. Maybe we’ll pull paper off our wrists or something.’ Well…it just didn’t happen that way.”

Podcasts, aka every Angeleno’s highway travel buddy, have been around for over a decade, but they have exploded in popularity in the last two years (thanks in large part to Serial, which in the fall of 2014 became the fastest podcast to reach 5 million streams or downloads in iTunes history). This weekend, celebrate the medium at the fourth annual Los Angeles Podcast Festival at the Sofitel Hotel. Jam-packed with many of the most popular podcasters—Marc Maron, Todd Glass, Leonard Maltin, Aisha Tyler— the festival, presented by Audible, has something for every comedy nerd. The weekend also features events for aspiring podcasters, including a panel on crowdfunding (Saturday) and the Squarespace Podcast Lab, where you can record your own podcast live from the Fest (BYO recording gear). If you can’t make it to Beverly Hills this weekend, you can buy a $25 ticket to watch a video live stream. Here are five podcasts not to miss at this year’s Fest (in order of appearance):

Doug Loves Movies
September 18, Beverly Ballroom, 7p.m. – 9 p.m.
Comedian and weed-enthusiast Doug Benson (Super High Me, Getting Doug With High) kicks off the Fest with his celluloid podcast. Expect lively comedian guests playing film-related games.

The Indoor Kids
September 19, Hollywood & Sunset, 12 p.m. – 2 p.m.
Hilarious husband-and-wife duo Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon discuss all things video game-related (and more). When not podcasting, they can be found at Meltdown Comics running the show The Meltdown with Jonah and Kumail.

WTF with Marc Maron
September 19, Beverly Ballroom, 7p.m. – 9 p.m.
No list of podcasts is complete without comedian Marc Maron’s legendary show, usually hosted from the garage of his house in Highland Park. Past guests have included Sarah Silverman, Margaret Cho, Adam Carolla, and President Barack Obama.

The Mental Illness Happy Hour
September 19, Beverly III, 9p.m. – 11 p.m.
Comedian Paul Gilmarten talks openly with guests about a range of mental health issues like anxiety and depression. The weekly show, which has received numerous accolades, is one of the top-rated self-help podcasts on iTunes.

Girl on Guy with Aisha Tyler
September 20, Beverly III, 2p.m. – 4 p.m.
Host Aisha Tyler (The Talk, Archer, Talk Soup) conducts fun and thoughtful interviews with a range of actors, comedians, writers and musicians.

It’s not a good time to be a Volkswagen owner or employee right now. Days after the German company admitted that 11 million of its diesel cars were equipped with software that allowed it to cheat emissions tests, the company’s CEO is gone and the stock is in the toilet.

But the business scandal that’s shaking the planet had some humble beginnings. Engineer Daniel Carder and a small research team at the University of Washington tested VW emissions during a $50,000 study in the winter of 2012 and spring of 2013. Carder, described as an “unassuming 45-year-old” by Reuters, drove the cars through L.A., and up and down the West Coast. What they found was stunning:

“(We) saw huge discrepancies,” Carder told the news agency. “There was one vehicle with 15 to 35 times the emissions levels and another vehicle with 10 to 20 times the emissions levels.”

The team, which initiated the study after similar findings were uncovered in Europe, made their research public a year and a half ago and VW officials actually questioned their findings. Initially, VW said the discrepancies were glitches but finally admitted wrongdoing on Monday after the EPA presented evidence of the “defeat devices,” which were used to fake the emissions tests.

While Carder believes the fix to the problems won’t be that technically complicated—it will likely equate to a drop in fuel efficiency—the cost to VW will be enormous. The EPA believes 500,000 American vehicles will need to be recalled, and includes Jettas, Golfs, Beetles, Passats, SportsWagens, and Audi A3s.