Comcast Roundup: Will Keith Olbermann be silenced, home security 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.

DEFINITE READS

• An Award, Criticism and Perils for Comcast [New York Times] MSNBC Host Keith Olbermann is openly and regularly critical of, for example, Fox News Host Bill O’Reilly. Will things change when Comcast takes ownership of MSNBC, considering the company’s relationship with Fox and its owner News Corp.?
• Comcast-NBC Universal merger review hits FCC speed bump [Washington Post] — The FCC wants more information by Oct. 18.
• Alms for the Rich and Powerful [New York Times] — Comcast donates money to nonprofits supported from key legislators

Below, how the drop of net neutrality in Congress affects Comcast, offering home security and more.

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Startup Roundup: Stephen Starr goes cashless with XIPWIRE

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

A big local win for XIPWIRE: the company announced by email that Stephen Starr’s Pod restaurant is accepting payments from the mobile payment platform. Customers can pay for their meals at the restaurant with their mobile phones.

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Switch is today! Catch the livestream at SwitchPhilly.com

The fun starts at 6 p.m. We thank the University of the Arts and the Corzo Center for graciously hosting us at the Gershman Hall’s Levitt Auditorium.

Some notes for those attending:

• Tickets will be available at the door for $11, though we’d love you if you used Ticketleap to keep things simple.
• The First Round Capital livestream will be broadcasting from SwitchPhilly.com.
• Doors open at 5:30 p.m. The event will start at 6. There are no assigned seats. The earlier you are, the better seat you will have.
• Don’t forget the Genacast Happy Hour after the event at Tavern on Broad.
• We will be giving Phillies updates.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center,MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Corzo Center for the Creative Arts, and University of the Arts.

VC Roundup: Philly gets love from The Deal Magazine

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.

DEFINITE READS

Philly’s under-the-radar-but-robust tech sector gets the cover story treatment in The Deal Magazine. The story pays special attention to the life sciences and tell us all what we already know: we have lots of talent and need to plug the brain drain. We also need to brag a bit more. The story has mysteriously been pulled so here’s a link to the Google cache.

Also, the magazine put together a video package on the Science Center, below, with special attention paid to its land dispute with the city.

As we posted yesterday, MyDunkTank’s Blake Jennelle called out several members of the Philadelphia investment community at Young Involved Philadelphia’s State of Young Philly event last Friday.

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New Café Proves Seniors Can Be ‘Techies’

Members of the Philadelphia Senior Center help themselves to snacks at a VIP ceremony on Sept. 24.

This story is completed in partnership with Temple University’s journalism capstone class Philadelphia Neighborhoods. Students Tracy Galloway and Maria Zankey will cover technology issues through December.

Luvenia Black, 88, says the Philadelphia Senior Center is like her second home.

She wakes up every day and rushes to get to get to the Senior Center at Broad and Lombard streets “like it’s her job,” and has been doing so for 22 years. She participates in classes and even serves on the center’s eco-active Green Team.

But there’s one thing Black doesn’t do – use a computer.

“My daughter has tried to get me to do do it,” Black said, “but I just say I’m not interested. I don’t have a computer at home.”

Still, Black said she “promises to try a computer soon,” thanks to the Senior Center’s new GreenBean Internet Café, which officially opened Sept. 20 and held a VIP celebration on Sept. 24 for seniors.

The opening of the café, which also featured renovations to the center’s dining hall, unveiled 10 new laptop computers with Wi-Fi access to accommodate to the 55-and-older seniors who congregate in the cafeteria for more than 45,000 meals a year.

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Switch preview: Josh Marcus on the future of CommonSpace from Azavea

Many in Philadelphia’s technology community already know about CommonSpace. Josh Marcus wants you to know how the online mapping application came to be.

Marcus, 34, the lead developer for the project from Callowhill-based GIS development company Azavea, will be presenting CommonSpace at Switch, the demo event Technically Philly is hosting tomorrow, Wednesday, Oct. 6.

(Admittedly, we’re on shaky editorial ground here — we recently called CommonSpace one of the 10 coolest interactive maps of Philadelphia.)

Marcus expects much of the audience may have at least heard of the tool, which was developed in partnership with nonprofit technology consultant NPower, the Sustainable Business Network and a handful of other partners, including funding from the William Penn Foundation. So he’ll chart the path of why it looks the way it does and seek feedback on where it should go.

“It’s an opportunity for folks to shape a project trying to promote locally-owned Philly businesses and Philly as a great place for a sustainable lifestyle,” Marcus tells Technically Philly. “And we will sweeten the opportunity by announcing four $100 gift certificates to locally-owned Philadelphia restaurants to folks who give us feedback on our site.”

To Marcus, a long-time West Philly resident near Clark Park — “I am in ‘Squirrel Hill’,” he says, “although that’s not an actual neighborhood name I would normally use” — the project is a case study trying to answer two questions.

“Sure, we have cutting edge technology here in Philadelphia, but how do we build compelling applications with it, and how do we use it to promote our social goal of creating an economically and environmentally sustainable Philadelphia?” Marcus says, preparing to hit you with his firm’s new tag line. “And now is the time for next-generation location based services that go beyond simply putting dots on a map.”

Come get inspired by Apostrophe and four other Philly innovators at Switch on October 6th at the Levitt Auditorium. Get your tickets today.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center,MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Corzo Center for the Creative Arts, and University of the Arts.

Switch preview: P’unk Ave’s Apostrophe

When we first started to ask around about the companies that should present at Switch, nearly everyone told us to check out this Apostrophe thing the guys at P’unk Ave are working on.

It turns out that Apostrophe is one of the premier content management systems built on the PHP symphony framework. The CMS is the latest baby from South Philly’s P’unk Ave, the same group that brought you Junto and Ignite Philly.

Apostrophe is meant to make website editing easy, especially for people with not much of a technical background. After logginging in, users can browse their site like normal and edit text and images from the frontend view.

The CMS is currently being used by Duke, Franklin and Marshall and the Philadelphia YMCA. The South Philly web development shop has promised us that it will be showing off the Apostrophe 1.5 for the first time at Switch, which includes additional features such better media management.

Come get inspired by Apostrophe and four other Philly innovators at Switch on October 6th at the Levitt Auditorium. Get your tickets today.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center,MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Corzo Center for the Creative Arts, and University of the Arts.

Nutter, Street to Young Involved Philadelphia: cheerlead, be more aggressive

Young Involved Philadelphia Chair Claire Robertson-Kraft introducing Mayor Nutter at the State of Young Philly showcase event on Fri. Oct. 1, 2010 held at WHYY. Photo by Sean Blanda.

Philadelphia’s young and involved cohort need to take greater hold of the future of the city for it to outperform even the region’s highest expectations, according to a slew of speakers hosted Friday by Young Involved Philadelphia.

The role of the region’s investment community in that future was also called into question during the night.

The social and speaking event was the showcase event of the State of Young Philly series, a first-time, tw0-week crush of conversations, workshops and discussions that brought together the 20-and-30-something sect of Philadelphians, who make up the membership of 10-year-old YIP.

In addition to other events, the week featured a Technically Philly co-sponsored panel discussion on the city’s business future.

Held at WHYY’s new Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons in Old City, Friday’s showcase featured a cocktail reception followed by a dozen speakers, half of whom were “more seasoned,” according to YIP Chair Claire Robertson-Kraft, and half were themselves young and involved.

Though there were expectations to the contrary, no fireworks shot off between Mayor Nutter and former Mayor John Street, who has recently taken to criticizing his successor on a number of issues. While both spoke at the event, the two men weren’t so much as in the same room at the same time, as their speaking was separated by state Treasurer Rob McCord. Councilman Bill Green was in attendance, welcomed by both Nutter and Street.

All had words for the city’s creative economies, which rely heavily on the young and involved, as did Philly Startup Leaders co-patriarch Blake Jennelle, who spoke during the less-seasoned half of the program.

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Event Highlights: October 4th – 10th, 2010

As much as we want to believe Switch is the only event happening this week, it turns out there is other stuff going on, too.

We’d like to implore you to get your tickets for Switch before its too late, but also to check out Philly.rb’s hack night as well as meetup with your fellow PHP enthusiasts. Also if Switch isn’t your thing, no biggy. There are lots of Wednesday events on our calendar.

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RightNetwork’s Kevin McFeely bases ‘right-minded entertainment’ in Philadelphia

By a Philadelphian’s conventional stereotype, it might not seem terribly strange that a Georgian would be leading a new conservative cable channel startup.

It’s proving less understood that the Atlanta-based president and chief operating officer of RightNetwork is the outlier on staff, flying weekly to meet more than a dozen employees in their Center City headquarters.

Yet there is Kevin McFeely, the boyish 38-year-old chief whose career in content — including sales leads at Tech TV and the Anime Network — took him to Atlanta. Two years ago, he was brought on to help build out a concept for conservative entertainment. By summer 2009, it was decided that the world’s first cable channel dedicated to conservative entertainment would be based in Philadelphia.

Early in September, the channel officially launched, including on-demand content for Verizon FiOS users, online, mobiles phones and other distribution to start.

Today, he’s flying between familiar hubs of content and distribution, and suddenly Philadelphia is in the mix.Still, it’s tough to ignore the inherent politics of a cable channel promoted as being from an ideological perspective.

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