Comcast Roundup: NBC deal could be announced next week, Bob Brady fights net neutrality and More

Every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

• The New York Times reports that Comcast could announce a deal to purchase NBC sometime next week. Still, Reuters had reported that Comcast and General Electric were “struggling” to finalize that deal, though it remained “likely.”
• Broadcasting Cable reports that Comcast might be planning to sell off the NBC Network upon purchasing NBC Universal, keeping other components, notably Universal Studios.
• paidContent reports that talks with Vivendi, the French company with some ownership of NBC, are ongoing. But paidContent also reports that former NBC Universal CEO Bob Wright expects Vivendi to negotiate the deal. That blog additionally reports that Comcast executives said repeatedly during their third-quarter earnings call that they would be “disciplined” with any acquisition.

After the jump, Congressman Bob Brady backs a Comcast cause, the company’s third-quarter earnings call and a dozen other Comcast stories worth noting.

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Shop Talk: Community leader focuses on Cadence Rowing performance wristwatch business

The Vo3 is Cadence Rowing's flagship stroke rate watch, the first in an expanding series.

In 2002, Vanja Buvac choose a path that would affect the next seven years of his life.

To create a product he had envisioned as an amateur rower in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he would have to become an engineer to design it or a patent attorney to protect it.

Buvac wanted to make it easier for rowers to track performance and saw an opportunity to create a portable device that could record stroke rate, unlike traditional in-cockpit stroke counters. He had a simple solution: incorporate the technology into a wristwatch. Rowers could wear it as a status symbol or strap the timepiece directly onto an oar.

“I thought, ‘do I hire an engineer to help me concoct this thing, or a patent attorney to help me patent it,” the tall, thin entrepreneur says, seated on a couch in his East Arch Street office, overlooking a spacial view of Center City. “I looked at the price of both. Engineers I could get for $40 an hour, patent attorneys were $300. So I said ‘alright, I better learn patent law instead of engineering,’ he says, laughing.

Cadence Rowing was born.

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How to open a business in the City of Philadelphia, or 15 reasons people move to the suburbs

So you want to open a business in Philadelphia?

A Technically Philly reader recently launched her first venture in the city’s limits and thought the process was agonizing enough and the help non-existent enough to share.

She’s fairly straight-laced, she tells us, so she wanted to open her operation as legitimately and legally as possible. Yes, a good tax-paying business opening up shop in Philadelphia, so I’m sure we all expect the red-carpet treatment from the city.

Except, of course, as you know, the process was laborious and involved so many wrong turns, that we decided to give you all a short hand.

Below, in addition to the 15 steps and more than two months this passionate entrepreneur took to give money to the city, we show you the right way to launch your business in Philadelphia in five (oh my God, we know it won’t actually be easy) steps.

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Philadelphia to get Apple retail store

According to the Philadelphia Metro, Philadelphia is finally going to get an Apple Store.

The store will be located at 1607 Walnut street which is a few doors down from the long-suspected location of 1619 Walnut. Earlier in the year, peices of 1619 crumbled to the street , and so we wonder if the decay led Apple to switch addresses.

The blog Talking Apple predicted the move down the block last month.

The store has not been officially announced, though the plans are set to be presented to the city’s Art Commission tomorrow. It is mandated in the city’s charter that all new architecture and buildings be presented to the Commission which likely means that Apple is looking to heavily renovate the space.

The architechture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson will likely design the new store. The firm’s Philadelphia office refused to offer any information when called for comment.

TrainLogic updated significantly to v2.3, now called RailBandit

The RailBandit transit scheduling application appears in a mock-up on a BlackBerry phone.

RailBandit may look familiar.

Since we reported on the original iteration of the mobile train scheduling software in March - called TrainLogic before it changed its name - the Princeton-based team has been hard at work updating the application. RailBandit’s staff has doubled — to two — and they’ve added a bevy of features and support for more devices.

“We’ve added enhancements to the product that has made it take off,” Barry Engle, RailBandit’s new marketing co-founder tells Technically Philly. “We really want to grow this thing.”

RailBandit now features support for U.S. transit lines in more than a dozen cities, including Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Baltimore and San Francisco. Version 2.3 of the transit software dropped in September, with support for most BlackBerry, Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericsson and LG devices. Windows Mobile support is there with a little customization, if you gotta have it.

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TNT: Study shows two times as many U.S. science, engineering graduates as needed

A new study co-authored by a Rutgers professor shows a steady number of science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates, but a plummeting retention rate of highest-performing students. Source: Study "Steady as She Goes," linked below.

It’s a common refrain of politicians, educational advocates and many business leaders. The output of science and technical graduates in the United States is dangerously behind other countries.

But a new study [PDF], led in part by a Rutgers University professor, posits instead that the last 30 years has seen no significant change in the number of U.S. graduates in so-called STEM — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — fields.

However, this new research shows the highest-achieving students in those majors are increasingly fleeing those fields at a higher rate than in the past.

“It’s a mistake to focus solely on boosting the number of science and math students,” says Harold Salzman, the Rutgers sociologist who teamed with B. Lindsay Lowell, a demographer at Georgetown University on the study. “Employers want more employment readiness, not more employees.”

That comes in contrast to a national dialogue in recent years.

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Event Highlights for November 2 – November 8, 2009

Updated @ 11/2/09 12:20 p.m.: A private event was incorrectly listed here. It has been removed.

Philadelphia Business Journal’s Peter Key nailed it on the head last Thursday when he compared Philadelphia and New York’s tech scenes.

“[Philadelphia] is really a tight-knit group of people [who] are having regular meet-ups,” an outside observer told the veteran tech reporter.

True again this week, as we see the regulars, like PhillyCHI and Philadelphia Linux Users Group, doing their monthly thing. Refresh Philly is still at it, as is First Round Capital, which you’ll see in our highlights after the jump.

As you may have noticed, we here at Technically Philly are trying to get involved too, doing what we can to work with local organizations to help spotlight the future of media. That’s why we’ve partnered with Temple University and others this week for PhIJI, the Philadelphia Initiative for Journalistic Innovation. Excuse us for the shameless self-promotion for an event that’s not free (but is affordable). Truly, we want you to be involved. There’s no better time to help shape the future of media in Philly and beyond, and we can think of no one better to help than our technology community.

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