Project Open Voice: Comcast launches project to increase local media, video and other content in Philly, elsewhere

Comcast is launching Project Open Voice, a three-year initiative that fits into its federal mandate to bolster local and minority-themed video content. According to a release: “over the next three years we will create portals for local media online and OnDemand in six communities – Philadelphia PA; Hialeah FL; Houston TX; Peterborough, NH; Fresno, CA; and Medford MA. These communities represent a cross-section of American culture and diversity.”

Pledged features include:

• Content with local relevancy
• Public, Educational and Governmental focuses
• Local sports and entertainment additions
• NBCU and Telemundo programming bolstered

What’s next? “Comcast team members will gather with City and PEG programming representatives shortly to kick off the POV project planning in Philadelphia.”

As part of detailed agreements with the FCC regarding its majority acquisition of NBC Universal, Comcast pledged to bolster its local and minority-themed programming.

Visit Philly, Visit Bucks County launch mobile sites, app

Two major tourist agencies of the region are touting new mobile websites and applications integrating destination and direction-driven content.

The Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. has launched the mobile version of VisitPhilly.com, and Visit Bucks County has released iPhone, BlackBerry and Android apps, in addition to their own mobile website.

Something like three quarters of travelers who use smart phones rely on them during trips, better than the 60 percent usage in preparation, according to the January 2011 ‘State of the American Traveler’ [PDF] survey from Destination Analysts. That’s why GPTMC focused on quickly actionable information, says Caroline Bean, who handles national media relations for GPTMC.

“Our site focuses on best practices to best serve people looking for information during their trip,” Bean says, including focuses on GPS-driven maps tied to sightseeing, restaurants and hotels. Direct ticket sales will be an area of growth for the site, she said, being particularly mindful that VisitPhilly.com sees traffic spikes on the weekends.

The trends are similar in Bucks County. The apps, mobile site and text messaging service are “designed to provide immediate access to tourism-related information,” says Visit Bucks County public relations manager Michelle Greco. Their text messaging focus is tied into advertising and marketing programs featuring discounts and coupons. All products are free to use.

New $20 million Drexel University endowment to build businesses around biomedical research

Portion of less invasive breast cancer screening technology that is similar to what has been developed in part because of an existing Drexel University-Coulter Foundation partnership. A new $20 million endowment between the two is meant to bolster businesses around biomedical research.

Another announcement that came during Philly Tech Week featured funding for an initiative that would better integrate business plans and biomedical research.

Drexel University was awarded $10 million by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program. The University matched the Coulter Foundation’s grant creating a $20 million endowment to bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization… The new endowment will help Drexel enable the Philadelphia region to become a national hotbed of medical device development and build a global network of collaboration between academia and business.

This endowment is an extension of an existing Coulter-Drexel relationship, featuring projects that “have produced more than 40 full patent applications, three issued patents and one copyright registration,” including a wound monitor and a breast cancer screening device.

At the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal addressed the obstacle this program is meant to combat.

“Across the country we’ve seen a disruption in the innovation pipeline post-World War II,” she said. “We’ve gone from a time when there was a close connect between the technology and those who would develop it for market to now when innovation has moved back to the universities, without much of a market function, and we’ve seen big companies reduce their R&D.”

During the event, Coulter Project Director followed by Davood Tashayyod highlighted his work:

“This is an opportunity to create jobs and innovation that can go around the world but start here in Philadelphia,” he said.

A recap of Standards.Next at Philly Tech Week

During Philly Tech Week, the folks at Comcast Interactive Media held the Standards.Next 2011 conference, featuring sessions from Opera’s Molly Holzschlag, CIM’s standards expert Kimberly Blessing and Happy Cog’s Jenn Lukas.

With the rate of change that we are experiencing in the industry, these are indeed exciting times for web developers – as well as challenging times for those on the front lines, advocating the need for standards across the web. Standards.Next gives these individuals a shared voice and provides them with a forum in which to pose difficult, forward-thinking questions to an audience of peers who truly understand the value in doing so.

Read the full write-up over at CIM’s Labs blog.

Open Government Philadelphia: an initiative and policy paper from Councilman Bill Green

Councilman Bill Green publicly unveils his Open Government Initiative, during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network on Wednesday, April 27. He is flanked by RoseAnn Rosenthal and Greg Osberg. Photo by Yusuf Muhammad/Phrequency.com

After a failed bid for a paperless government initiative last year, Councilman Bill Green has redoubled the proposal into a broader 10-point Open Government policy paper, largely calling on technology and the community here.

Green’s announcement of the proposal came during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, though he has continued hitting the talking point recently, a week before the City Council Democratic primary.

“We could become the first paperless and most open city government in the country,” Green said at the event. “We have the opportunity to leapfrog everyone else in five years if we start now.”

In the 17-page document, Green makes 10 recommendations, most of which he proposes to move forward himself with related legislation, though the local technology community is heavily sourced and credited. Download the full paper here [PDF].

Green says between $150-$200 million can be saved in the paperless government move alone, something Sacramento was most recently trumpeting.

Below, find his 10 recommendations and what they could mean for the future of Philadelphia governance, in addition to a related presentation his office shared.

Read more

IGDA connects gamers and developers during Philly Tech Week

Gamers play Jamestown at the IGDA Showcase | Photo credit: IGDA's Flickr Page

This wrap up of the IGDA Philly Game Showcase was written by IGDA Chapter Secretary, Allison Berman. The showcase was part of Philly Tech Week.

The IGDA Philly Game Showcase 2011 brought together designers and programmers from across every major media platform: from mobile video games to game consoles to mobile apps for smartpads and smartphones, to computer games.  One adventurous presenter even created a unique motion-sensitive joystick to go with his game.

While the event was organized by the IGDA Philadelphia Chapter, it was open to any local game makers, regardless of affiliation or membership. Some studios have been very involved with the chapter over the last few years, offering help to up-and-coming students and first time developers.

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PACT awards local startups, Coursekit receives $10k

Welcome to the VC Round-up, 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

In an email to Technically Philly, Good Company Ventures tells us that Resources for Human Development, a founding sponsor of GoodCompany Ventures, is offering $10,000 to GCV applicant companies that focus on social finance. The incubator, which is focused on “triple bottom line” businesses, ended its application process last week.

The Wharton Entrepreneurial Program has announced the four winners of its Wharton Venture Award. The award is a $10,000 prize given to companies being incubated at Wharton so that founders can continue working on their company over the summer. This years winners include Switch presenter Coursekit.

The Greater Philadelphia Alliance for Capital and Technologies held its annual Enterprise Awards last week. Winner include “Best Startup” Monetate and “Investment Deal of the Year” Safeguard Scientifics. Morgan Lewis partner Stephen Goodman was awarded a lifetime achievement award. See the entire video of the event here. According to Ben Franklin Technology Partners, 11 of the award winners have received funding from BFTP.

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Should Center City be a technology business hub?: other neighborhoods compete

Cristina Greysman from Document Depository Corporation explains some of the setbacks young entrepreneurs face in Center City.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

For Paul R. Levy, the president and CEO of the Center City District, the transformation that area has experienced over the last 20 years has been a huge success story amid the backdrop of serious economic troubles. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

It’s the outdoor cafes. All 213 of them.

“To me, that is the ultimate vote of confidence in downtown. People think it’s clean and safe,” he said.

Currently holding 214,433 jobs and paying over $12 billion in salaries annually, Center City relies primarily on the health care and education industries for the bulk of its economic drawing power, Levy said.. While not an alarming statistic on the surface, one need look no further than Detroit to determine what happens to a city that puts all of its progress behind a limited number of industries.

“We cannot rely on health care and education as the primary means of support,” Levy said.

So how about a move to the tech industry? Well, that’s a little easier said than done.

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Philly 311 web app to be piloted in June, due for public release ‘in next three months’

Screenshots of the 311 app on BlackBerry, featuring the welcome and problem screens. Click to enlarge.

By the summer’s end, Philadelphia 311 will take another big step forward, City Managing Director Rich Negrin announced at the Philly Tech Week Signature Event.

“In the next three months, we’ll see the release of our first 311 [web] app” Negrin told 150 attendees at WHYY, many tweeting the news to a projected Twitterfall, in highlighting what’s new for the non-emergency call center.

The web application represents another, more passive front face to 311, supporting call intake volume — due to surpass three million calls received, Negrin added — and the walk-up service at City Hall.

“It’s not just your granddaddy’s app,” said Rosetta Lue, the director of the non-emergency call center. “You can enter requests, track complaints and have a community calendar with what’s happening. You don’t have to wait for our call center to be open.”

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Event Highlights: May 9th – May 16th, 2011

Dear reader, we hope you’ve recovered from Philly Tech Week because the technology community has an impressive calendar of events this week that we think are worth attending.

This week, drink beers with PSL, hack with Philly.rb and discover CiviCRM.

Note: Event Highlights finally has an email newsletter. Get all of the week’s events emailed to your inbox every Monday morning at 11 a.m by signing up here. It makes for wonderful lunch time reading.

Philly Startup Leaders Happy Hour – Maybe its because of the group’s admitted mission to continue the enthusiasm of Philly Tech Week, but we never think its a bad idea to drink beers with your fellow entrepreneurs. Center City. Tuesday. 6 p.m. INFO.

Ruby Hack Night - The folks at Philly.rb have two events this week, but we’re partial to anything with the word “hack” in it. Work on your Ruby project along with your fellow Ruby enthusiasts for that last bit of motivation. Rittenhouse Square. Monday. 6 p.m. INFO.

CiviCRM Meetup – Whenever there’s a new meetup in town, we always like to feature in our Event Highlights. This week’s launch is the CiviCRM meetup for users of the “constituent relationship management solution.” Sounds like there’s some cross over with Open Data Philly, eh? Center City. Thursday. 6:30 p.m. INFO.