DreamIt Ventures NYC accelerator: the inside story by the Next Web

As Next Web shared the inside story of the New York City expansion of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures, after DreamIt graduated its first 15 startups from the New York accelerator this week:

[Kerry] Rupp says DreamIt was already planning an expansion to New York City after noting that 12 of DreamIt’s 36 alumni companies were based there. “Our alumni came to us and said New York needs you. You could provide a lot of value here. But the clincher was that they said, ‘And we’ll help you,’” explains Rupp.

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Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is area’s best paid CEO at $28.16M in 2010: 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 email subscription for our weekly Comcast roundup or other news updates

• Comcast’s Roberts is area’s best-paid CEO [Inquirer] — “Chief executive officer Brian L. Roberts is atop the compensation list of CEOs of publicly traded companies with a presence in the Philadelphia region, making $28.16 million in 2010…” including salary, bonus, equity and more.
• Is It Really “Business As Usual” At RightNetwork? [Media Matters] “RightNetwork, the conservative media outlet that launched less than a year ago with great fanfare — and investors that included actor Kelsey Grammer — appears to have stalled for more than a month.” CEO Kevin McFeeley, to whom we spoke last fall, says it’s just ‘business as usual’ at the project, which received heavy funding from Comcast-Spectacor chairman Ed Snider.
• What Business Matters Most for NBCUniversal [Forbes]
• John Paulson Slashes Holdings of Bank of America, Comcast [Wall Street Journal] The billionaire hedge-fund manager dropped Comcast stock, among other big brands in a sagging portfolio
• How Comcast SportsNet Plays The Social Media Game [The BrainYard]

WeatherTrends360 helps consumers and companies predict the weather

Don’t call it the Farmer’s Almanac 2.0.

That historic publication, founded in 1818 in New Jersey, seems to have met its match. Bethlehem-based WeatherTrends360, a service provider and, now, consumer product offering, is doing something similar: trying to predict the next year’s weather.

Unlike the Almanac, which relies on predictions around the solar cycle, WeatherTrends360 is using complex algorithms based on historical weather data. And the company is helping large companies plan business strategies by understanding what they weather will be like during important sales cycles.

The company claims that it can predict weather with 80 percent accuracy.

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DuckDuckGo named to TIME’s 50 best websites of 2011

Thanks to an agressive privacy policy and a simple homepage, TIME is digging Gabe Weinberg’s DuckDuckGo search engine as the anti-Google. From TIME:

It doesn’t involve e-mail, maps, real-time results or social networking. It’s just a simple, straightforward search engine that’s reminiscent of early Google, with a no-nonsense privacy policy (it will not store any information that could tie you to your searches). Best of all, the results are dependably relevant and devoid of spam.

Based in Valley Forge, Weinberg is also behind the Open Angel Forum and keeps an active blog about his startup efforts including a post on how he was selected for the list:

People and relationships matter. You have get the right people to know about you. Twitter is great, but there are lots of other ways do to that as well.

NBC 10 and Foursquare partner to experiment in ways to follow local breaking news

NBC Philadelphia announces a partnership with Foursquare this week, which Mashable dives deeper into:

NBC 10 has promised to assign one reporter to use the station’s Foursquare account to report on a lead news story each day. He or she will check in upon arrival at the event location and provide regular updates as the story develops. NBC 10 plans to expand this type of coverage with multiple news events per day, and by rolling out individual reporter accounts.

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Startup Roundup: Tickets available for second Startup Weekend; RJMetrics growing fast

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 a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’s RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

Organizers are gearing up for the second Startup Weekend Philadelphia, a 54-hour hackathon intended to help teams build a business in a weekend. The event will take place at Drexel on October 14 to 16. Tickets are available here. Former launches include LaunchRock, which has since moved to the Bay Area, and presented to investors yesterday at incubator 500 Startups’s demo event.

RJMetrics has published a case study on customer JackThreads, an email-based shopping club for men’s fashion brands, which Thrillist acquired in 2010. The company says that JackThreads was looking for a way to keep track of user data with its rapid growth after acquisition. That in mind, the metrics company has added new features recently, like real-time analysis and drag-and-drop functionality, to its data dashboard. Co-founder Robert J. Moore tells us that the company broke internal records last month for customer acquisition, and has made three new hires in the last two weeks.

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NuPathe looks for $30 mil, DreamIt NYC graduates 15

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

DreamIt Ventures held its Demo Day for its Summer incubator class in New York City. The Demo Day is DreamIt’s event to mark the end of a incubator class where 15 startups demonstrate what they have been working on over the past several months to investors and the media. The Demo Day received coverage in Giga Om, TechCrunch, Business Insider and The Next Web, among other news outlets.

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Google’s Motorola Mobility acquisition includes Horsham manufacturing plant

As the Inquirer’s Joe DiStefano reported this morning, Google’s newly announced acquisition of Motorola Mobility, an attempt to gain more control over Android device manufacturing (a move that a long-running rumor), includes a Horsham-based Moto plant that manufactures set-top boxes. That’s a play for Google TV, too, in addition to the acquisition of thousands of patents held by Motorola Mobility.

DiStefano says:

Search-engine giant Google is entering the hardware business with its biggest-ever acquisition, joining 20,000 workers at Motorola’s factories, to its current workforce of nearly 30,000. The Horsham business, Motorola Home, accounts for about a third of the company’s annual sales.

NextDocs CEO Zikria Syed: ‘rapid growth’ in a niche life sciences market from King of Prussia

Beyond the bubble, a technology company of stability and promise is probably solving an old problem with new solutions.

Zikria Syed

And that’s how Zikria Syed describes his King of Prussia-based company NextDocs, a Microsoft SharePoint-based company specializing in the life sciences that was called last month Microsoft’s best partner in that industry.

Think of the company like this: a smattering of info products that walk pharmaceutical and biotech companies through their varied, highly-technical compliance processes, often involving the Food and Drug Administration or its equivalent abroad.

CEO and co-founder Syed says, with operations in six countries and projected $15 million in revenue for 2011, NextDocs is seeing all the growth he could have imagined and more.

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FixPhillyDistricts.com: local redistricting contest kicks off with cash prizes

The FixPhillyDistricts.com local legislative redistricting awareness campaign and contest Technically Philly wrote about earlier this month has launched in earnest.

Visit the website to submit your vision of how Philadelphia legislative boundaries should look and be in the running to have your idea presented to City Council, in addition to a cool $1,000.

The project is using GIS shop Azavea’s DistrictBuilder tool based on its Cicero API. The project is in partnership with WHYY, which hosted a rousing kickoff event, and the Philadelphia Daily News.