Comcast wants to put Netflix out of business, says Al Franken

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 subscri ption for our Comcast news updates.

• Al Franken: ‘They’re coming after the Internet’ [Politico] — At SXSW “The real end for Comcast is to put Netflix out of business entirely,” Franken said
• NPD: Netflix handles 61 percent of streamed movies [Digital Trends] — “Cable operator Comcast managed a distant second place with an 8 percent share during” January and Feburary 2011
• Cable’s top lobbyist, McSlarrow, to lead Comcast Washington office [Post Tech: Washington Post]
• Plaxo gives up on social networking, refocuses on address books [Social Beat] — “Comcast-owned Plaxo used to have a straightforward goal: It helped users maintain their address books. Over time, however, the site has wandered into becoming more of a general social networking tool with its Plaxo Pulse service. Now, chief executive Justin Miller told me Plaxo is going back to its address book roots”
• Xfinity TV app enticing but limited [Boston.com] — With video demo
• Comcast Provides Free Calls to Japan [Comcast blog] — Following AT&T, Sprint and Verizon as PBJ reported.

cWyze: taking Hulu to the next step

Like most founders, Mary Hagy says her company is creating the product that she needed months ago.

Born out of her frustrations with the level of video advertising analytics when she was an executive director of an online video campaign in 2009, Hagy says she thinks there’s an opportunity for a company that can take video analytics past the “views” metric.

Along with Jodie Morgan and Karen Narwold, Hagy founded Queen Village-based cWyze to add a layer of user interactions on top of videos to help provide additional metrics for video campaigns. Companies like Hulu have long been experimenting with similar features, but cWyze hopes to take that to the next level.

[Full Disclosure: cWyze will be demoing at Technically Philly's Switch event on April 26, a part of Philly Tech Week. Tickets are available here.]

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‘Data is essential to care for at-risk populations’ says Francine Axler of Public Health Management Corporation

Public Health Management Corporation isn’t a technology company. In truth, it isn’t really a data company, but Senior Research Associate Francine Axler says they do a lot of the latter and are increasingly relevant to the former.

“We collect the largest local health survey in the country,” says Axler, who is the Director of the Center City-based nonprofit’s Community Health Database. And data, of course, tells stories, increasingly with technology.

The analysis of the latest of these surveys just landed in recent weeks, finding trends in health insurance coverage and the effects of calorie labeling.

“This data is essential. It’s the baseline information that over 400 small, medium and large organization use to target their work for at-risk populations,” she says. “It’s really at the center of outreach work in this region.”

Public health institute PHMC has a lot of different interests, from managing 250 programs and 11 subsidiaries in case management, rehabilitation and related services. The data is meant to inform that work.

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Startup Roundup: Party with PackLate, meet some strangers

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

PackLate gets the in-depth treatment by AOL travel site Gadling in a piece that shows off the company’s newest marketing strategy, that yes, includes the opportunity to party with Steve Barsh. Well, that’s true, but that’s not the heart. The story focuses on the company’s idea and tests to pair people for trips. It’s like white collar Couchsurfing.

DreamIt Ventures grad MindSnacks raised $1.2 million in funding, TechCrunch reports. We followed-up with the company’s co-founder Andy Mroczkowski in our Exit Interview series, as the team is headed for the Bay Area.

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Switch Philly’s latest: Laan Labs, cWyze and Ohanarama

This Switch Philly post is made possible thanks to the Wharton School of Business, Genacast Ventures, VC Deal Lawyer and the City of Philadelphia. Interested in sponsoring Switch? Let us know.

Switch Philly is all about showing off the great products being created by Philly companies every day. With that in mind, we’re excited to announce three of the five companies slated to demo during the Spring 2011 Switch Philly on April 26th at the Wharton School of Business during Philly Tech Week.

After the jump we preview the next three Switch presenters, including a company that makes Facebook more family friendly, another that will rock your next house party and a third that aims to make web video much more fun (and profitable).

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MindSnacks moved to Bay Area for the best environment to build a startup: Andy Mroczkowski

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Andy Mroczkowski tells an important story without meaning to do so.

“Honestly I’m not that critical of Philly,” says Mroczkowski, 31, who moved mobile educational game development startup MindSnacks. “I just had an opportunity for adventure, and we thought the Bay Area was the best place for our company.”

A theme in the Exit Interview series has been a lack of competitive advantage for business in Philadelphia. Today is the last in the weekly series, though we’ll always seek perspective from those who leave — and those who come. In a fitting close, Mroczkowski notes that he’s actually rather fond of Philadelphia, he and his team felt that to give themselves the best shot at success, they planned to migrate westward.

Mroczkowski, a South Jersey native and Drexel alumnus left in January. The founder of local Mac programming group CocoaHeads, he had worked for the Neat Company and freelanced out of Indy Hall.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that MindSnacks, a DreamIT ventures startup that now has five full-time staff, raised $1.2 million in funding on the West Coast. So far, the plan is working.

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Old City Creative Corridor: digital media shop Maiden Media convenes collaboration tomorrow

As new neighborhoods in Philadelphia find blossoming creative scenes, it takes real community building to continue to develop those connections, even if you’re the original.

Decades after first re-blossoming (again), Old City has a new group, website and call to action to grow and connect its community of creativity. The second meeting of the Old City Creative Corridor, convened by digital media agency Maiden Media, will take place tomorrow, Wednesday, March 16 at 6:30 p.m. in the CitiBank in Society Hill at 207 South Street. Meetings will be held the third Wednesday of each month. [RSVP here]

Last month, more than 40 people attended the meeting, said Maiden PR lead Dan Schwartz, including a couple dozen business owners, freelancers and students. Indy Hall, the Old City Civic Association, the Old City District, the Old City Business Collective and others were represented, Schwartz said.

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Keiretsu Forum & Open Angel Forum both come to Philly this month

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.

MUST READS

The Keiretsu Forum has announced it will open a branch in Philadelphia. The forum claims it “will become one of the preeminent private equity/angel investment organizations in Philadelphia.” The group has a meetup planned on the 22nd.

Keiretsu’s polar opposite, the Open Angel Forum (read why here), will be holding its first Philadelphia event on Wednesday. The event, organized by DuckDuckGo Founder Gabe Weinberg, is closed to the public.

DreamIt Ventures is going old school with its second group of advisors for its New York location. According to the New York Observer, the incubator caught a bit of flack for not including enough seasoned entrepreneurs in its last batch of advisors.

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Groupon sells deal for closed Philly restaurant

It looks like Groupon’s Philadelphia sales team has some explaing to do:

If you bought today’s Groupon offering $30 worth of food for $15 at Franco’s Trattoria on Ridge Avenue in East Falls, be advised that the restaurant has closed for good.

Groupon’s offer says the deal is “sold out” and that 105 people bought in.

via Restaurant notes in the Philadelphia Inquirer. If you purchased the deal, be sure to give Michael Klein an email at mklein@phillynews.com.

Tap DJ: Creating a success out of the “touchy, black box” that is the App Store

No, it’s not because Jason and C.C. Laan spend their weekends deejaying local club parties that they decided to create Tap DJ, an iPhone app that lets users mix songs and create samples, mimicking the experience.

“It started with a coffee shop conversation. Our goals were initially based around the fact that Apple had released new APIs to access the iPod library. We asked, ‘what can we make with this?” C.C. says. “The first thing that came up was a DJ app.”

What was originally a few cool and interesting features, says C.C., grew organically. “Once we saw the features we had, we thought it could be pretty good app. We created a website and added the extra polish that might push it.”

And those extra features helped. Since launching after six months of development, Laan Labs‘ Tap DJ has been featured by Apple at least 3 times, placing the application in the spotlight, and bumping it within the top ten iOS applications in February. It has been one of the best successes for the company’s independent line of applications. “There were a lot of iPhone DJ apps that do similar stuff. Ours just put all the pieces in the right order.”

[Full Disclosure: Laan Labs will be demoing Tap DJ at Technically Philly's Switch event on April 26, a part of Philly Tech Week. Tickets are available here.]

So, is there a formula for great app sales?

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