Nicole Brewer: How I joined the Philadelphia technology community

This is a guest post by Nicole Brewer, a reporter for CBS 3 and CW Philly, as part of our Guest Contributor Week. Want to have an op-ed or feature you’ve written to appear on TP, now or in the future? Drop us a line.

To be honest, I entered Philly’s tech scene by accident.

From a young age, I enjoyed technology as a hobby, and as an aspiring journalist, I relished in the advent of social media. However, I never imagined it would define my career or revolutionize the broadcasting industry quite the way it has.

To that end, it was simply a matter of timing. With the success of its newly re-launched website in 2005, CBS3 had seen its website grow year-over-year in both traffic and engagement metrics. But, the company was eager to stay ahead of the digital curve and willing to try something new.

Fresh off my first freelance gig at the Consumer Electronics Show, I was too.

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Links: Four new female heads of regional Fortune 500 firms and more

• Venmo Wants Its Users to Trust Each Other [New York Times] — The Rittenhouse-based mobile payment service gets the treatment from the Bits blog.
• How a new transportation bill could help solve Philadelphia’s transit woes [PlanPhilly] — Mr. Nutter goes to Washington
• Female CEO to lead Penn Mutual Insurance Co. [Inquirer] — The fourth female to recently take over a Fortune 500 company in the region
• SEPTA slowly moving forward with City Hall station rebuild [PlanPhilly]
• Philly Inc.: BIO to bring big biotech convention back to Philly [Inquirer]
• Unemployment down slightly but not even within range of ’07 [Philadelphia Business Journal]

Every Friday morning, we make sure you didn t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Volpe and Koenig, P.C. — Since 1987, intellectual property boutique law firm Volpe and Koenig has provided guidance on matters relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, e-commerce, technology joint ventures, non-disclosure agreements, technology acquisitions, licensing and litigation. Whatever your intellectual property law issue… Volpe and Koenig bring law to your ideas.

Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce – The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to promoting growth and economic development, advocating for sound public policy, and serving its members with outstanding programs and benefits. GPCC is the premier advocate of the region’s business community, representing members in 11 counties across three states with one voice.

Brolik Productions Customers visit your website and immediately judge your company. Will they stay or will they go? Brolik delivers innovative design, original content and a tasteful product that equals long-term loyalty for your brand and sour grapes for the competition.

Caffeine Fish – Caffeine Fish develops the Trainboard iPhone app and offers iPhone development consulting in the Philadelphia area.

NextFab Studio — NextFab is a membership-based, high-tech workshop and prototyping center. Our facility provides comfortable, clean, and safe workspaces with hand tools, 3D printers, computer controlled machine tools, software, and electronics workbenches. Expert instructors and a community of collaborators are on hand to help you problem-solve and achieve your vision. NextFab Studio has everything necessary for you to invent, repair, create, and innovate!

Springboard Media – Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer based in Center City and now, in Exton. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500 when you’re ready to upgrade.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

[UPDATED] Comcast Roundup: merger would make NBC ‘robust,’ Q3 profit falls 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 ane-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

Updated 10/28/10 @ 10:23 p.m. with a variety of new stories

DEFINITE READS

• Zalaznick Says Comcast Takeover Would Make NBC `Robust’ [Washington Post] — Video of Lauren Zalaznick, head of NBC Universal Inc.’s women and lifestyle division, saying just that.
• Comcast Loses More Subscribers Than Expected, but Its Earnings Top Estimates [New York Times]
• Is Comcast’s Xfinity TV a Trojan Horse? [Gigaom] H/T Philly Tech News

Below, Comcast says its ‘disappearing subscribers’ aren’t ‘cord cutters’ and more.

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Does the VC industry need document standards?: Guest Post

This is a guest post by Christopher McDemus of MCD Law Partners a law firm specializing in startups and technology businesses, as part of our Guest Contributor Week. Want to have an op-ed or feature you’ve written to appear on TP, now or in the future? Drop us a line.

Disclosure: MCD Law Partners was a sponsor of our last Switch tech demo event.

The topic of standardized angel or venture financing documents is is an old topic, for sure.  Most recently, Brad Feld weighed in on this issue back in March 2010 by valiantly offering to take on the task of drafting standardized financing documents, but following a post by his partner Jason Mendelson (along with probably millions of emails from the disparate groups wanting to help), Brad decided to set aside the idea.

I am not sure how much another opinion adds to this discussion, but it’s a topic I still view worthy of debate as I think it will re-surface again and again in the future.

People in the start-up community have long called for a set of standard financing documents – a set of financing documents whose structure and substance were widely viewed as acceptable to both the entrepreneur as well as the financier (e.g., angel, super-angel, early stage venture fund) and that fulfilled each side’s legal/business needs.  Why standardize financing documents versus any other corporate set of documents?

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Ignite Philly 6: Philly gets sustainable

From left: Johnny Bilotta, Joe Walsh and Jake O'Brien of The Ship It Society

Sustainability was the name of the game in every sense of the word at Ignite Philly 6. Most presenters spoke of modest but long-term goals for their projects and the city, and many presentations involved environmentalism, though most were just looking to improve our fair city.

Now on its sixth edition, the Ignite process is familiar to most of us: presenters get five minutes and 20 slides to present on any idea they’d like. The event raised $1,000 for former presenter West Philly Tool Library (printed on a giant wooden check) thanks to the ticket proceeds of a sold out Johnny Brendas.

Below, we give out some awards including Best Entrance, Best Dressed and Best Overall:

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Hispanic community’s distance from the web will affect voting Nov. 2: Guest Post

Hispanic voters and their use of the web will both have an impact on Tuesday's election, says Tek Lado magazine Editor Liz Spikol.

This is a guest post by Liz Spikol, Editor of bilingual Tek Lado magazine, as part of our Guest Contributor Week. Want to have an op-ed or feature you’ve written to appear on TP, now or in the future? Drop us a line.

One way you can tell it’s election time: Latinos are in the news.

President Obama is reaching out, first by highlighting Latino kids at the White House’s first science fair, and then—one day later—revealing a broad plan to encourage educational achievement among Latino children. He’s also suggested, in ways big and small, that voting on Nov. 2nd should be a priority for the Hispanic community.

He’s not wrong to push for those votes, particularly in such a hotly contested battle.

CBS News reports that in some states, the battles may be decided by Latinos —and Latinos tend to vote Democratic. The country’s fastest growing minority has a lot of power, and Obama knows it.
Right now about 19 million Latinos nationally are eligible to vote.

There are implications on both sides of the aisle for Latinos, and to understand where each party stands can be of significant value when pulling a lever behind that flimsy blue curtain.

Understanding that those 19 million voters don’t necessarily vote in lockstep, how Latinos get their information about each party — on the web or through mobile devices — can be just as crucial to that understanding.

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Startup Roundup: Viddler launches Subscriptions; Vuzit serves millions

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated newsletter or RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

Viddler has introduced Subscriptions, a new service that allows content creators to charge for their video content. According to a blog post, “you don’t have to worry about handling payments or restricting access—just point your customers to your subscriptions store, and we’ll handle the rest.”

Document serving platform Vuzit is serving 500,000 documents each month and its got the infrastructure to handle it. Processing capability has been increased by over 400 percent and processing speeds by 300 percent, the company reports.
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VC roundup: Comcast makes the all star team & who is Loffles.com?

Welcome to the VC Roundup, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

Number of deals by local VC’s: 3
Number of investments in local companies: 1

DEFINITE READS

Keeping an eye on SEC filings, we’ve noticed that locally based Loffles.com is looking to raise $500,000. No word on what the company does so let’s just hope its not another Groupon clone. The company’s Facebook page features the tagline “Click. Watch. Win”

MK Capital has invested $3 million in Poptent, the local company that aims to crowdsource video. The company has said that it plans on opening a new office in California.

Comcast Interactive Capital is among the all-star list of investors in a new fund targeting social tech startups.

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Introducing the TP Directory

Earlier this year 25 people gathered at UArts for Tecnically Philly’s very own Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl, a chance for those folks to help us think about new ways to make the business sustainable. We received lots of advice which we’ve made actionable, but chief among the recommendations was the desire for a directory, a place where readers can get additional information about the companies and people that we cover each day.

That said, after more than six months of architecting and developing the project, we’re proud to announce the first iteration of the Technically Philly Directory. This new tool has two purposes:

1. To help readers better understand the history and context about the companies, people and place that make up the Philadelphia tech community, similar to TechCrunch’s Crunchbase.
2. To offer an easy portal to find all the technology resources Philly has to offer. Want a list of local investors? You got it. Most popular companies? Sure. We plan on creating more of these lists, but our current directory page offers a sampling of where we are heading.

Most directory pages are simple: a photo, description and previous news content to help readers “catch up” on a person or company. However, we will be shortly announcing a new advertising model that will allow people and business to control the contents of their directory page for maximum visibility. For some examples of these detailed entries, see entries for Bill Green and Chariot Solutions (a thank you for being our first ever advertiser).

Also you’ll notice that each news post on Technically Philly now has small icons on the left sidebar. These are the people, companies and places tagged in each story. For example the “People” in this story include Bill Green. The “Companies” section includes Technically Philly and Chariot Solutions while the “Places” includes Fishtown. Click to browse the directory pages for each entry.

This is a small first step, an effort we hope to expand along with our coverage with features such as a search function. Go ahead and poke around! We’d love to hear your feedback.