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:

Newsworks — NewsWorks is the online home of WHYY News and its growing network of journalism partners. This public media service covers the Philadelphia region, Delaware and South Jersey, with a focus on regional issues, neighborhoods, health and science, and arts.

Morgan Lewis — Morgan Lewis provides comprehensive transactional, litigation, labor and employment, regulatory, and intellectual property legal services to clients of all sizes—from global Fortune 100 companies to just-conceived startups—across all major industries.

Alteva — Reduce your total cost of telecom ownership and improve employee efficiency and customer satisfaction with Alteva’s cloud-based Voice over IP phone systems and services.

The University City Science Center — The Science Center has officially opened Quorum, a central gathering space to enable the entrepreneurship and innovation communities to meet, share and learn.

Splat Productions — Splat Productions provides smart, brand-centric website design and internet marketing services to privileged clients in the Philadelphia region and beyond.

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

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.

Angel Interviews: Farid Naib will take your pitches now

Introducing Angel Interviews, a series dedicated to debunking the assumption that entrepreneurs need to look outside of Philadelphia for angel and early stage investment. Every so often we’ll interview a local angel and ask him or her about investment criteria and how to get in contact. If you’re an angel investor that deals primarily with technology companies or you have any suggestions about how we can improve this series drop us a line.

When Technically Philly asked Farid Naib about the state of early stage investing in Philly, he doesn’t even hesitate to display his enthusiasm.

“Philadelphia absolutely has a good early stage program with all of the angels and early stage VCs out there,” says Naib.

And he would know. The founder of Document Depository Cooperation has a long history of success both founding and investing in local technology companies such as Gain Capital and FNX Solutions. However, Naib asserts that Philadelphia does have one issue that needs resolving: entrepreneurs need a better method to connect to local angels.

We spoke with Naib, who has a long investing portfolio that ranges from a coconut water company to an “as seen on TV” company and about angel investing in Philadelphia and beyond.

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Scrapple TV: Marc Brodzik of Woodshop Films wants national ‘pirate TV’ network online [VIDEO]

Woodshop Films founder Marc Brodzik gives direction to Scrapple TV Sports co-anchor 'Hot Carl' during a recent shoot.

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

A man in a suit and white beard with a deep baritone began to read the news in front of a green screen.

Suddenly, the bright ring of a cell phone broke the silence in the otherwise quiet recording studio. Marc Brodzik, who was standing behind the camera, wearing a faded Tide detergent shirt, shorts and flip-flops, reached into his pocket and with a grin pulled out his phone and shut the ringer off.

“Phones off, bitches.”

It is with that humor and laid backed demeanor that things are run at Brodzik’s Woodshop Films, a local video production company that started its own internet channel, called Scrapple TV, three years ago.

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Comcast buys Olympics, Universal Studios, Spectacor to sell 76ers [VIDEO]: Roundup

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.

DEFINITE READS

• NBC Wins the U.S. Television Rights to Olympic Games Through 2020 [Bloomberg]
• NBC Universal snaps up other half of Orlando parks [Reuters] — “NBCU will buy out [Blackstone] the private equity firm’s 50 percent stake in Universal Orlando for around $1.025 billion.”
• How Will NBCUniversal’s Olympics Deal Affect Comcast’s Stock? [Hollywood Reporter] — H/T Philly Tech News

MIGHT INTEREST

• New day for Comcast to spend $$ [Philly Inc: Inquirer] — For Olympics and Universal Studios
• “Education Nation Experience” Launches in Philadelphia [Comcast blog] –David L. Cohen kicking off the NBC News event with others at National Constitution Center
• Comcast VC arm leads stampede to San Francisco’s 1 Kearny St. [San Francisco Business Times]
• NBC finishes last in prime time [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• Comcast to offer home security package [Reuters] — As we’ve heard before, pushing into the other market of home security
• Comcast SportsNet to telecast Philadelphia bike race in high definition [Philadelphia Business Journal] — The local sports network shot the International Cycling Championship, including the Wall in Manayunk
• Sources: 76ers sales talks ongoing, sale ‘imminent’ [ESPN] — In which Comcast-Spectacor sells to a New York-based ‘leveraged buyout specialist’ Joshua Harris, a Wharton grad

Comprehensive city vision gets approved with broadband objectives

More than 150 gathered at Moore College to celebrate Philadelphia2035

The Philadelphia City Planning Commission voted unanimously last evening to approve the city’s comprehensive planning vision, Philadelphia2035, during an event honoring the process and officially kicking off implementation of the plan.

In front of more than 150 people at Moore College of Art & Design on the Parkway, Mayor Michael Nutter stopped by to congratulate the Commission, community groups and citizens on a visioning process that included months of interviews, planning, public comment and revision, before Deputy Mayor Alan Greenberger called the Commission to vote.

Perhaps more relevant to our audience of technology users in Philadelphia, the evening also marked the official acknowledgment and inclusion of a plan for broadband as a vital public utility.

Describing a section of goals in the plan dedicated to utilities, Greenberger asked the crowd to imagine that “our entire population is connected virtually with state-of-the-art broadband infrastructure, further enabling life-long learning and employment access.”

“Those are great goals,” he added.

In May, Technically Philly submitted comment to the Commission solicited through reader feedback and by asking broadband leaders for their input. After careful deliberation with technology leaders in the region, the Planning Commission has added a section to the comprehensive plan’s utility section that addresses a plan for city-owned broadband infrastructure, expanding affordable access to low-income populations and encouraging technical innovation and recruitment of high-tech businesses.

The full objectives are listed below the jump, but first, be sure to check out the video package that introduces the full Philadelphia2035 city vision.

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Neil Kleinman on OpenDataPhilly: “it is not be too late to demand that we have the right to know who is looking”

As OpenDataPhilly.org moves on, adding new data sets from the City of Philadelphia and other civic agencies, privacy concerns are clear.

While no data on individuals, health providers, crime reports or other particularly sensitive material is included in the data catalog, University of the Arts Professor Neil Kleinman shared the following thoughts last month:

This New York Times article [on the sensitivity of personal data breaches] reminds us of issues we need to face as Open Data Philly moves along.

Open Data Philly promises much in the way of citizen participation in the details of the city – what works, what doesn’t, and what needs to be monitored. It promises the ultimate in a system of checks and balances. It opens up the possibility of a new generation of citizen journalists, who can investigate the business of the city and the Feds without extraordinary access to resources.

Connecting people to data” is good. But let’s remember that corporations are people too. Just like us, they have access to “the data” – both public and private – collected in the course of doing business with the city or the federal governments.

Privacy may be dead. But it is not be too late to demand that we have the right to know who is looking.

This is something the European Union understands. It has been developing guidelines that give individuals the right to know when someone has been poking around in their data – who’s doing it and why. For lots of reasons, the United States has not taken such an approach. When are we going to begin?

Disaster Mapper, Philly SNAP star at Random Hacks of Kindness Philadelphia [VIDEO]

One half of the teams at Random Hacks of Kindness Philadlephia, held June 4-5, 2011. Photo by by Philip Neuffer

The first Philadelphia Random Hacks of Kindness featured six teams working on at least that many projects, including three that were awarded special recognition by judges this weekend.

The weekend-long hackathon focused on climate change and disaster relief management was held at Drexel University and organized by Drexel computer science PhD student Mike Brennan, partnered with Technically Philly. After a kickoff reception at Indy Hall, as many as 50 coders, designers and subject matter experts arrived Saturday morning at Drexel’s computer science building on JFK Boulevard. Photos of the event here.

[Full disclosure: Technically Philly co-organized Random Hacks and this reporter was an event judge.]

Find the three featured hacks and other projects built during the weekend, in addition to getting a video tour of the end of Saturday’s hacking.

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Code for America puts City of Philadelphia on short list for 2012 fellowship

Inaugural 2011 Code for America fellows pose with Mayor Michael Nutter in February. Philly is in the running to again be a CFA city in 2012.

Updated 6/9/11 @ 12:12 pm EST with more details from Code for America

As the inaugural fellows for Code for America, the year-long, service-driven, municipal government coding fellowship program, ramp up their final few months on the Philadelphia team, the city has been put on the short list to have another crew next year, according to a press release.

In the current 2011 cycle, fellows working with three city governments, including Philadelphia, are in the new nonprofit’s San Francisco headquarters working on projects informed by spending February in their respective cities, talking to government officials and community leaders. The seven-person Philadelphia team is developing a web-based application meant to empower community leaders to better plan and executive civic initiatives across neighborhoods. Details on that have remained somewhat fuzzy, though it’s hardly the only work these fellows have done.

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Augmented Reality by PhillyHistory.org and Azavea launches on iPhone, Android

Click to enlarge.

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

In February 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities awarded the Philadelphia Department of Records a Digital Humanities Startup grant to investigate the use of augmented reality applications for mobile devices.

The prototype application, AR by PhillyHistory.org, is available for free download on iPhone and Android. It allows users to view historic photographs as 3D digital information overlaid atop their current location using the camera, GPS and many other sensors that came stock with nearly all consumer smartphones.

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Startup Roundup: Jamestown launches; Venmo banks

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

The long-awaited Jamestown: Legend of the Lost Colony, a retro platform shooter produced by local game development shop Final Form Games, is available today. It’s $9.95 at GamersGate, but hasn’t shown up on Steam or Direct2Drive, yet, as anticipated.

PhillyInc’s Mike Armstrong reports the winners of the 2011 Baiada Center Incubation Competition, including Passion Fly, which rewards brand ambassadors, CarTech, for the geeks wanting to measure automobile performance, and a BaseCamp for frats, Greek Solutions.

Venmo is once again making major industry moves, including a recent decision to work directly with banks to provide users with the ability to withdraw money from their Venmo accounts directly to a bank account overnight.

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