Comcast to start selling Verizon mobile in early 2012, described as ‘quadruple play’ [ROUNDUP]

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• Comcast to start selling Verizon mobile early 2012 [Reuters]
• Comcast execs: Verizon deal to bring the ‘quadruple play’ [Digital Trends] — “Late last week, Verizon Wireless signed a deal to purchase 122 spectrum licenses from SpectrumCo, a joint venture between Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks, for $3.6 billion. As part of the deal, which awaits approval from the Federal Communications Commission, the Comcast will now be able to sell Verizon Wireless service as part of their communications packages.”
• More on Comcast-Verizon deal [Philly Tech News] Good roundup of other voice on the deal, which is being billed as having the potential for as big an impact as any other in the industry.
• Comcast CFO: NBC Universal integration continues to go ‘really well’ [Hollywood Reporter] — Says Michael Angelakis 10 months after the deal closed. H/T PTN

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State and District math and science policies leave gaps in competitive STEM curriculum

The cover of the subsequent book resulting from the Gathering Storm committee.

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

It was the Gathering Storm that brought Philadelphia’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics professionals interested in STEM education to action.

Known as the “Rise of the Gathering Storm” committee, in 2005, representatives of the National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine addressed a congressional committee on America’s ability to compete globally in the 21st century.

The committee said in its executive summary that it was “deeply concerned that the scientific and technological building blocks critical to our economic leadership are eroding at a time when many other nations are gathering strength.”

On the top of the list of actionable change was improvements to K-12 STEM education.

In part, it led to the Philadelphia Education Fund’s launch of the Math & Science Coalition, a group of 45 partner organizations from corporate and educational industries dedicated to advancing the conversation around math and science instruction in Philadelphia public schools.

“An overwhelming majority of future jobs in the country will have some STEM component to them. The skills that STEM gives to students are absolutely essential for the future workforce,” says Math & Science Coalition President Don McKinney, who has run the program since 2006.

With STEM programming abundant across extracurricular activities and in alternative learning environments, the Math + Science Coalition raises awareness and creates opportunities to ensure that good teachers are available in public schools in Philadelphia.

As we reported earlier this week in the first two parts of this series, STEM education faces an uphill battle in the School District because of policy precedent and the summer’s budget crisis, which could affect the local workforce that is available for 21st century jobs.

Today, leaders say that in School District classrooms, success in STEM education is hurt by a disproportionate focus on math skills driven by state testing requirements, a curriculum that has difficulties impacting and interesting young students, and an inability to retain teaching talent across STEM studies.

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Code for America: impact of the inaugural fellowship

Inaugural Code for America Philadelphia fellows with Mayor Michael Nutter in February 2011.

The inaugural fellowship year of Code for America is over.

The experimental program that offered chosen cities a team of coders for a year to create open source products that make government more efficient, transparent or ideally both will be back in Philadelphia in 2012, making it the only city to participate in the organization’s first two years. The seven fellows dedicated to Philadelphia this year started in January with an orientation in San Francisco and spent the month of February here, before spending the rest of the year building back on the West Coast.

The City of Philadelphia paid $225,000 for the privilege, which covered stipends for the fellows and was supplemented by foundation and private money. Throughout the process, city and CFA officials were insistent on the fact that the benefit far exceeded the total covered by participating cities: CFA Executive Director Jen Pahlka has put the total consulting value at closer to $1.5 million for each city.

CFA fellow and former Azavea developer Aaron Ogle, who says he is returning to his adopted home of Philadelphia from the West Coast following the fellowship, provided Technically Philly an overview of the largest projects his team completed:

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Philadelphia vying for ‘City of the Year’ for open gov efforts in 2011 GovFresh Awards

The City of Philadelphia and its residents have been nominated in a variety of categories in the 2011 GovFresh Awards, organized by an two-year-old open government news site of the same name.

As of publishing, Philadelphia is battling with New York City to be named City of the Year, and a variety of city organizations and efforts are mentioned in nearly each of the 20 categories. Both Azavea and ElectNext are nominated in Best Civic Startup. OpenDataPhilly.org is mentioned in multiple categories, including the Best Open Data Platform and the Best Government/Citizen Collaboration.

With a quick email sign up, users are given 10 votes for each category, though they’re allowed just three votes for each option. Voting ends next week, when a judging component will begin.

The 14 startups demoing at DreamIt today [Startup Roundup]

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

The Philadelphia Business Journal covers DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 graduating class, which will show off their work this afternoon at the incubator’s demo day. TechCrunch has the full list of startups, including 5 minority led companies launching today. Included in the demos today will be Cloudmine, CirTouch, ElectNext, Flirq, Grassroots Unwired, Kwelia, Metalayer, OneAway, Qwite, SnipSnap, Spling, SupplyHog, ThaTrunk, and UXFlip.

New DreamIt Ventures startup Spling announced a $400,000 Series A investment yesterday led by Deep Fork Capital, TechCrunch reports. It’s a social sharing site, that appears to be a cross between a bookmarking service and social network. In related news, Lancaster-based appMobi, which is striving to create tools and resources for HTML5 development, was named ReadWriteWeb’s Most Promising Company for 2012.

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Lack of citywide STEM education vision leaves Philly’s skilled workforce in jeopardy

Alliance for Progress Charter student Karizma watches her LEGO robot automatically follow a black line.

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

At the Alliance for Progress Charter School, just west of Temple University along Cecil B. Moore Avenue, technology teacher Mary Beth Hertz runs the school’s first all-girl robotics club.

It’s an upstart team, funded by a $640 online donation campaign and Hertz’s own dime, which brought the purchase of a $1,000 robot kit this summer.

On an early evening in October, sixth grader Karizma L. plugged a LEGO Mindstorms robot into an iMac computer and began to fix the ‘bot’s light sensor while Hertz hustled between her and a team of two students working across the room.

After using a kid-friendly software package to program the light sensor by herself, Karizma crouched down beside a white mat nearby and watched as the robot automatically followed a circular black line by comparing the color values of the white and black pixels underneath it.

Karizma gasped and threw her hands up in the air in celebration. “I just followed the instructions!,” she yelled to Hertz, who watched nearby.

“It’s the epitome of what learning looks like. They’re working through a problem. You can see the light bulbs go off,” Hertz says.

It’s a familiar story across public school science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) programs: children learning the values of problem-solving, the impact of technology and the math and science that make it possible.

STEM education reform could be a powerful way to rejuvenate the urban core of Philadelphia, advocates say, where the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last half-century and the recent global recession have led to an unemployment rate larger than the national average. In September, Philadelphia reported a 10.9% unemployment rate compared to the national average of 8.8%.

And though it appears that the District is renegotiating a focus on STEM education under new leadership, stakeholders close to the issue say it’s bogged down by precedent and budget concerns.

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DrinkPhilly.com launches new features, including dedicated events listings

After announcing a three-city expansion in September, Old City-based TheDrinkNation.com and its related mobile app have launched a slew of new features, including a pitch for event submissions, in an effort to grow a robust events listings calendar.

See a blog post from the nightlife news site here and the press release here.

123Linkit acquired by Netline for undisclosed sum

123LinkIt, the WordPress plugin that streamline’s affiliate marketing for bloggers has been acquired by Landsale-based Netline for an undisclosed sum.

“After integrating our software with tens of thousands of blogs, we believe now is the best time to expand our efforts with another team that shares our vision of enhancing the online advertising process,” wrote founder Yasmine Mustafa on the company’s blog. “We’re excited to announce that we have been acquired by Netline and will be joining their RevResponse team to continue creating an enriching and unobtrusive advertising experience on the web.”

Mustafa, 29, said she had been communicating with a Netline employee for months as an informal advisor. After the two companies began exploring a partnership it soon turned into a full acquisition with a bit of help from PhilaDev, the mentoring group and accelerator founded by Chris Myers.

“I still have the check in my bag and I feel like its the last pice of 123linkit I have,” said Mustafa yesterday. “It feels fantastic, it’s a great win. Selling before I turn 30 is a big deal to me.”

Netline paid for 123LinkIt in cash and Mustafa is now an “at-will” employee of Netline. The deal was signed on November 18th. Mustafa is the primary equity holder in the company along with a few contractors.

The 123LinkIt brand will stay, says Mustafa and will be developed beyond just a WordPress plugin.

NBC 10 to partner with WHYY in one of four new Comcast pledged local news initiatives

Four NBC affiliates will partner with nonprofit news organizations in those markets, as the New York Times reports, in another initiative Comcast brass pledged to the FCC in the cable operator’s takeover of the storied entertainment brand.

Locally, NBC 10 will partner with WHYY, the region’s Old City based public media outfit.

In January, the planned project to bolster local news was first heralded as a noteworthy tradeoff for the consoidation of two large content and delivery companies. The model was due to follow an existing partnership in San Diego between voiceofsandiego.org and KNSD, which, as Poynter reported, “cooperate to produce regular fact-checking segments, explainers on public policy and other features.”

The details of the partnership between WHYY and NBC 10 have not been made fully clear.

In July, NBC 10 put out a request for proposals to partner with nonprofit news organizations in the region.

DreamIt demos tomorrow, Quaker BioVentures changes its name [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.

Although its closed to the public, we’d be remiss not to mention that tomorrow is DreamIt Ventures’ Demo Day, when all of the incubated companies present what they’ve been working on. Typically Demo Day is used by the companies to launch products or solicit funding, but some members of this current batch of companies are already well past that. Spling, which was covered (less than favorably) on TechCrunch yesterday, has already announced VC funding. ElectNext launched its first iteration for the elections this year and Cloudmine has been powering hackathons, Startup Weekends and mobile apps for months.

At IMPACT last week, KPMG announced the results of its survey of tech companies and investors. In short, tech companies are growing, hiring and focusing on mobile. Mike Armstrong has the details.

As we reported last week, AboutOne the “Basecamp for families” has raised $1.6 million from Golden Seeds.

Quaker BioVentures has changed its name to Quaker Partners reports the Philadelphia Business Journal. According to the firm’s site, it will still focus on healthcare investments.

Newton Square-based DocVue has raised $890,000. We couldn’t find a web page for the site, but the LinkedIn page of CEO and Founder Vijay Khanna says the company is an “innovative solution that harnesses the power of the provider-patient relationship.” Khanna is also a partner at Radnor-based GIV Venture Partners.