Comcast in talks with Zee Entertainment to more than triple distribution of Indian programming [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.

• Zee Holds Talks With Comcast, Time Warner Cable to Triple Presence in U.S. [Bloomberg] — “Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd., the Indian media company led by billionaire Subhash Chandra, is in talks with Comcast Corp. and Time Warner Cable Inc. to expand distribution in the U.S. and plans to more than triple the number of homes it reaches in the country next year.”
• Comcast’s CIO to Exit in 2011 [Light Reading] — “Chief Information Officer Andrew Baer is set to leave the company by the end of the year,”
• Comcast offers Internetservice at reduced cost [Romeo Observer] — Internet Essential rolls out in Michigan
• Comcast: ‘Don’t be a dish head’ [Fierce Cable] – new ad campaign debuting
• One Great Idea: David L. Cohen: Executive vice president, Comcast [Philly.com] — “His One Great Idea: Ensuring that more Philadelphians have access to the Internet regardless of income” Video below

ElectNext CEO and Princeton grad Keya Dannenbaum: smarter voters make smarter communities

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

Too many voters feel overwhelmed or unprepared to cast ballots on Election Day, so they either choose candidates randomly or never vote at all.

This was Keya Dannenbaum’s concern that fueled the idea behind ElectNext, a startup that was formally launched at the TEDx Philly event Tuesday at the Performing Arts Center at Temple University. Technically Philly first told you about the DreamIt Ventures startup, but now that the dust has finally settled on Philadelphia’s latest municipal election, we thought it worth hearing more.

Featured by TechCrunch and NewsWorks, ElectNext is a website-based matching platform that helps voters vote well down their ballot.

“People go out to vote, and they know who they want for president, or whoever is at the top of the ticket, but they walk into that ballot booth and they are confronted with a ballot three pages long, filled with people and offices they have never heard of,” said Dannenbaum, the startup’s CEO and founder.

Read more

Take the Technically Philly membership survey; 10 questions, 5 minutes to make us serve you better

We want to hear from you, the reader, in our first ever readership survey, here. It’s just 10 questions and should take just five minutes of your time.

Almost three years ago, Technically Philly launched.

We wanted to cover technology how we thought it should be covered: locally, with an eye to urban renewal by creating jobs, making government more transparent and combating the digital divide. While we played newsman, we also focused on making the product sustainable through sales.

We launched a consulting practice, threw events, helped create Philly Tech Week and have gone about being a part of connecting a community. From our very original business plan, we wanted to grow to a membership, where we would be offering clear value for a community that would, in turn, help support us.

Our content will always be free and available, but we think there are other services we can offer and some we already do that are worth paying for. We want to hear from you to get a better sense of what you think we should focus on.

So, please, take our 10-question, five-minute membership survey here.

Startup Roundup: It’s Global Entrepreneurship Week

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

Global Entrepreneurship Week launched on Monday. How are you celebrating?

Read more

Authorship recognition software from Drexel University lab to be released December [VIDEO]

Two competing software tools focused on ‘authorship recognition’ from a Drexel University computer science group are scheduled to be released publicly for the first time at a conference in Berlin at the year’s end.

The Drexel Privacy, Security and Automation Lab
work, led by Dr. Rachel Greenstadt and PhD student Michael Brennan, began in 2009 with research on the shortcomings of software used to uncover the identity of an individual based on writing style, like word choice and sentence structure.

“We have come a long way since then and are currently working on two tools that can be used both to recognize and to anonymize authors,” said Brennan, who organized June’s Random Hacks of Kindness and will organize another again in December. See the sidebar below for details. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly have sponsored both events.]

Yes, at the next Chaos Communication Conference in Berlin in late December, Greenstadt and Brennan will unveil two pieces of software, each meant to outdo the other.

Read more

Is Adapt.ly the next great DreamIt Ventures company? [VC Roundup]

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

We’ve been told that the Philadelphia Media Network incubator is down to the final six companies (from ten earlier in the month) that are due for interviews late this week. An announcement could come as early as next week. If the timetable holds, it’s an impressive turn-around on the project, nearly two months after its launch. However, CEO Greg Osberg first mentioned it nearly a year ago.

First Round Capital’s Charlie O’Donnell has been getting heat from this BetaBeat story. At the risk of oversimplifying a serious allegation, the story accuses O’Donnell, using a series of mostly anonymous sources, of blurring the line between personal and business in his interaction with women involved in New York’s tech community. “A power networker, Mr. O’Donnell has made himself a fixture at tech parties in search of the next Mark Zuckerberg, or as it were, the next Margaret. Trouble is, he’s also looking for the next Mrs. O’Donnell.” Reaches to the piece ranged from amusement to allegations of slander.

Could Adaptly be the next great DreamIt Ventures company? Business Insider sure thinks so. After revealing that the Philly DreamIt grad is set to pull in $10 million in 2011, the company is expanding into England after hiring Paul Turner former head of Europe, Middle East and Africa for Invite Media. You probably remember Invite Media as the company founded by Penn students that exited to Google with a semi-secret office here in Philly. So, Adaptly’s success has Philly connections throughout.

Read more

Tomorrow: help AboutOne raise $1 million for local charities using Twitter

AboutOne, the Malvern-based company that helps families organize all of their documents and other information, wants to invite you to a party.

AboutOne will be hosting a “Twitter Party” that encourages guests to “RSVP” by donating at least $1 to one of three charities and by using the hashtag #AOThanks on Twitter tomorrow night between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.  The company has the ambitious goal of raising over $1 million for local charities Opportunities, Operation Shower and The HERA Foundation which support military families, ovarian cancer and homeless young adults, respectively.

As of this morning, the party has 112 RSVPs and throughout the party AboutOne will be awarding over a dozen prize packs that include a free Windows 7 phone, a $250 Amazon gift card and a free 12 months subscription to local email marketing company AWeber (AWeber, of course, is no stranger to charitable causes).

“Joining our Twitter party and supporting these charities with a small donation is a wonderful way to express your gratitude and thanks at this special time of year and have a little fun,” said CEO Joanne Lang in a press release.

The campaign is, in part, a celebration of AboutOne’s upcoming Acorn Points product which will reward users for getting organized.

Founder’s Factory, Social Media Plus and video games this week [Event Highlights]

We hope you had a great weekend, Philadelphia. One that nothing disappointing happened to you. A weekend that you did not oversleep and miss an important meeting. A weekend that didn’t crush what little hope you had left for February. A weekend where … you know what? This could go on for a while. We better get to the events.

This week: PSL’s Founders Factory returns, find your next co-founder and play some games.

Read more

Inquirer business columnist Joseph N. DiStefano on Philly tech [Friday Q&A]

With the pressure of updating a daily news blog in addition to his regular column in the Philadelphia Inquirer, columnist Joseph N. DiStefano says that the biggest change over the last few years in the newspaper offices at 400 N. Broad is acceleration.

“It’s a lot easier to get a hold of key documents and get answers to a lot of basic questions online,” says DiStefano, who pens the Inky’s PhillyDeals column.

“But reporting is reporting. News is information that someone else wants to suppress.”

DiStefano has the gruff exterior one might expect of a veteran newspaper columnist who writes hard news about regional business.

“I used to tell CEOs that if you’re indicted, I will cheerfully write that story on page one. Not to celebrate indictment, but because we have the space there,” he says. “It’s an adversarial role.”

Since 2007, DiStefano’s distinct attitude has been on display in that column, which covers a broad range of business topics, including development and real estate, finance and Philadelphia’s technology community.

DiStefano, who grew up on the Main Line, has been in the reporting business since 1988, when he was looking for a steady line of work after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in economics and U.S. history.

He’s gone on to report finance at Bloomberg and in 2005, published Comcasted, about Comcast’s cable strategy, all while he and his wife were raising six kids.

After the jump, we ask to borrow DiStefano’s crib notes for business and technology reporting in Philadelphia.

Read more

Phila.gov/business launches phase two, featuring ‘Business Assistant’ wizard

Mayor Nutter unveils the next rollout of Phila.gov/business Thursday at the Community College of Philadelphia. Photo courtesy of Kait Privitera.

Mayor Nutter officially unveiled Thursday phase two of an effort to overhaul the business services portal on Phila.gov.

If you’re surprised by the continued development of Phila.gov/business ahead of an on-going site-wide redesign effort, then you might also marvel at the fact that the project landed on time from an internal deadline Technically Philly reported on in June, despite the start and stop of the overall Phila.gov refresh.

Visit the new business portal here: Phila.gov/business.

The city is trumpeting the ‘Business Assistant’ wizard, which is meant to walk new businesses through the online process of meeting city license and compliance requirements. Additional web access to permits and applications was another big goal for the project. In September, the wizard soft launched and, since then, some 720 users have registered and half have sought information on business, a press release said.

How widely used the portal will be will test the effort’s success. This multi-agency effort lands as other portions of Phila.gov are being recast. Internal deadlines for that project have varied.