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.

• OVERNIGHT TECH: Franken wants probe of Verizon cable deal [The Hill]
• Financial Relief for Mets May Come From TV Partners [New York Times] — Comcast could have some investment
• Super Bowl with pomp and promotion [Associated Press] — On Comcast’s NBC using the Super Bowl stage
• Verizon’s Cozying Up With Comcast Draws Attention [New York Times]
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• Comcast Employee Hit by Car, Charges Possible [News Channel 9]
• Verizon-Comcast Alliance Seeing Pushback [Marketwatch] — Video discussion

The City of Philadelphia isn’t another rust belt city and shouldn’t be treated like one. That about sums up the wide-ranging, tone adjustment that served as Mayor Nutter’s Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce annual mayoral luncheon address Monday.

“We can no longer measure ourselves as compared to other cities in the Mid-Atlantic or even throughout the United States,” tweeted:

Referencing Rome and Paris more than he mentioned Chicago or Baltimore, the half-hour speech, which addressed development, investment and a stake in the ground for Philadelphia as international city, featured a call that the technology and startup community is a means to continue to change perception. Read a transcript of the speech here.

“One of the best things to happen to Philly over the last decade has been the growth of organizations that bring big thinkers together such as our own Philly Startup Leaders,” tweeted:

It was the first time tweeted:

“But not the last,” she added.

Soon after 2 p.m., a crush of bankers, lawyers, nonprofit leaders and other corporate managers hit the escalators and spilled out of the Center City Sheraton at 17th and Race streets. The broad business community hasn’t always agreed with the administration, though Chamber chief Rob Wonderling lauded the mayor in his introduction. Still, a different tone is taken by some in the narrow technology business community, according to at least one voice.

“I really think you’re going to see a focus on entrepreneurship and economic development in his second term,” said Bob Moul, the recently named CEO of AppRenaissance and Philly Startup Leaders chief who Nutter mentioned as a model for the city’s future. “It’s an exciting kind of progress.”

Other news from Nutter’s speech:

• Comcast Executive Vice President and Chamber board chairman David L. Cohen kicked off the event by tweeted:
  .
• New Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne was awarded the $100,000 Powell prize, which he donated to Drexel University.
• Mayor Nutter tweeted:
  .
• Among other development claims, Nutter pledged movement on three long-stalled efforts: to tweeted:
  of the Divine Lorraine Hotel and to move forward the revitalization of Market East.
• Among other broader efforts, he discussed the expansion of the Philadelphia International Airport.

Turns out, despite the focus on them in technology news, there are lots of questions about what exactly a ‘startup‘ is.

Any new business might use the word as an adjective, but we at Technically Philly think we need a philosophy for what exactly constitutes a technology startup when we categorize and cover their work in the Philadelphia region.

Here’s our definition. Tell us what we’re missing.

• Broadly, a startup is a new business that is testing plans for scalable revenue.

Though not always, a technology startup typically has these common traits:

• Fewer than 20 employees
• Younger than three years
• Seeking or have secured early-stage investment, especially angel and Series A.
• Looking at scale of a product, rather than growth of a service
• Led by initial founders who describe themselves as entrepreneurs
• Focusing on disrupting existing processes through greater efficiencies
• Often involves technology solutions to create efficiencies through product over service

The artistic headquarters of AppRenaissance, at 309 Cherry Street in Old City Philadelphia, which new CEO Bob Moul describes as representative of mobile.

Bob Moul says his 50s are going to be his best decade yet.

Today, Moul, who led Berwyn-based Boomi to a Dell exit, announces he has become chairman and CEO of AppRenaissance, a year-old Old City mobile development shop. The 48-year-old, who left Boomi after transitioning the acquisition and diving into the local entrepreneurship scene on way to volunteering to lead Philly Startup Leaders, has major plans for what is now a five-person startup.

“The goal is to IPO or otherwise make a really big technology story here,” Moul told Technically Philly on Super Bowl Sunday. “I want to build a major, permanent software company in Philadelphia.”

Moul is proving to be a convenient poster child for a technology community seeking big name players in a city that is still shaking its post-industrial rust. At a Chamber of Commerce luncheon this afternoon, Mayor Nutter is due to speak about, among other successes in local technology, Moul and his interest in building business in Philadelphia proper.

Bob Moul

Though a suburban resident and frequent defender of regional connectivity, Moul says his whirlwind tour through the Philadelphia tech scene has made him realize the importance of building up a central hub.

“You can look at all the different industries that Philadelphia used to have and how that connected to what the region became,” said Moul. “This is a digital rebirth.”

With recent news of a possible First Round Capital move here, the on-going question continues of whether it’s truly in the cards for Philadelphia to build up a truly dense collection of technology businesses or if the broad region might continue to keep it too diffuse for a change in impact and perception.

“There’s a richer source of talent in the city [than suburbs], it’s a much more vibrant community to build a company. That is good for everyone in this region,” Moul said. “Maybe saying the reputation for technology here is blossoming is overstating it, but it’s sprouting or budding… and big stories help move that forward.”

Moul is joining AppRenaissance at an earlier stage than he joined Boomi by almost every measure. The company was already a half decade old with 18 employees when Moul joined Boomi in 2005. By contrast, AppRenaissance isn’t yet a toddler, with just five employees, though it also has a board that gives it roots in Silicon Valley and India.

Old City is an ideal location for his new venture, says Moul.

“Mobile is a hugely creative endeavor. Of all the different applications and platforms, mobile above all else is about the intersection of art and ingenuity and technology and science,” Moul said. “We want to run more of a studio than an app firm, and Old City has that artistic spirit.”

At the surface, AppRenaissance, which presented a 2011 Philadelphia Geek Award, may seem like a cookie cutter app shop that builds mobile tools and does related contract work. But, Moul says the differentiation can come in shared infrastructure, developing products for scale and, as he adds, “focusing on the hand-crafted nature that Philadelphia was once known for.”

Moul is joining Scott Wasserman, the company’s CTO and founder, and bringing a top notch growth resume. Before Boomi, Moul was president of education solutions powerhouse SCT leading to its own acquisition by SunGard in 2003. Prior to that, he spent nearly 20 years at EDS, including stints overseeing efforts in Hong Kong and Australia.

But, now, has Moul missed the window of getting in on the basement floor of the mobile scale that was among the buzz words of choice in 2011? He says it’s still the beginning of the movement.

“Even though mobile has been around for a while and we know it’s big, I think it’s early in how we’re going to see it penetrate in how we work and play,” Moul said. “There’s loads of talent around mobile here, so I feel like if we coalesce, we can build a major mobile software company that can impact the market and the region in a really big way.”

“The team at AppRenaissance wants me to take that journey.”

Saskia Thompson

So says Saskia Thompson, who later this month will celebrate one year in her role as the executive director of the newly created City of Philadelphia Office of Property Data.

Her job is to square a dozen or more efforts and uses and agencies that track and rely on city address details — think permits from L&I and billing from utilities. The problem is that through the years, different city departments created their own processes and technologies, so whenever the U.S. Census comes around or the city wants to update its property tax assessments, there is a giant headache.

Oh, and then there is the ongoing issue of how many vacant properties are in the City of Philadelphia.

That will be in the hands of Thompson, a Detroit native (where she started her city government career) and University of Michigan graduate, who is serious and measured in conversations with Technically Philly, contrasting with her relative youth, punctuated by bright blonde hair.

Thompson, 42, who spent the better part of a decade working for Charlotte, N.C.’s city manager, is the steward of a project that she says began in earnest in 2009.

“There was an ad hoc group around the city that got together to say that the flow and the accuracy of property data is not what we’d like it to be,” Thompson said during a December interview in her small office in the Municipal Services Building across the street from City Hall. In 2010, six months after the ad hoc group led some departmental interviews and best practices research, the group gave recommendations to the mayor and managing director.

“The bottom line was that there was no real ownership of property data,” said Thompson, who lives in University City. “A number of agencies create it or use it or both, but we don’t have named data stewards for each property attribute that everyone in the city relies on.”

Thompson sought out a gig with the City of Philadelphia for as much as a year before the right gig opened up, she said, adding that after Detroit and her time in Charlotte, she wanted to work on the bigger stage of a large Northeast corridor metropolis.

She’s gotten her wish.

Housed in the Finance Department, which is also charged with the boondoggle of property tax assessment, Thompson first brought on a small additional staff last October and may do more. To do this right, she says, it will be another year before implementation of a solution begins.

Below, Thompson talks to Technically Philly more about her goals and why she’s not a data geek.

Edited, as always, for length and clarity.

Let’s start by defining what success is for this project.

Success is a couple of things.

It will have named data stewards for each piece of data and a clear process for tracking and maintaining changes. We don’t have that now. We have people working very hard every day to get this right, but it’s pretty much on an ad hoc basis. We need a much more formalized process.

[Secondly,] the ultimate success is that we know our data is trustworthy, transparent, easily accessible and it’s very customer friendly. I am a huge fan that government should be transparent and our data should be public, but we need to be on the forefront of doing that. The reason we’re not is not because we don’t want to share, it’s because we want to make sure what we share is accurate and want to do so in a responsible way.

What is the strategy for bringing together a mess of different processes around city property data?

There are a couple of theories of how you do this, one is the scorched earth theory, where you just take everyone that touches  the data and consolidate that into one department in one and place and we just start over. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do that at some point, but I felt like it wasn’t the place to start.

We don’t have the luxury of starting from zero. Work has to be done every single day. People are using this information. The data, while we know it isn’t perfect, isn’t so bad that services aren’t being delivered.

So I was interested in finding a way to do this while we do our other functions. And I knew we couldn’t get it done to make the property assessment deadline of 2012, so I proposed that we need a very small team to start with to to a deep dive of business process mapping in every department that touches every attribute across the city because we can’t fix this with technology alone.

There will be a technology component but that is going to come later.

This is essentially about how we do the work, who is responsible for which component. Who owns addresses? Who maintains the streets center line? How are changes to all of those data tables transferred and where is the chain of command to make a change and implement a change? All of those things to me may seem like technology is really about how we get the work done.

A year later, where is this effort?

I proposed a really deep dive effort — we’re still a few positions short — and [in December] we started the site visits to those that touch data.

What is the timeline and the ultimate goals we can look for?

The only timeline I’m willing to talk about now is the research and design phase. I’m not sure what implementation is going to look like. People want quick wins for obvious reasons, but we need to see… for example, it is possible we may need legislative changes in order to do this in a different way. We certainly know there are policy changes. And, of course, everything I’m talking about here involves a people component and to do that, it takes time.

So I expect to spend about six months doing the research phase and then a three to six months phase to design our solution.

Now, if we find some low hanging fruit that is more easily fixable, we aren’t going to wait to do that, but I’m not going to set a timeline for implementation until we’ve really done our homework.

And the other thing is I have no idea how much it is going to cost. There will be a technology component, there will be changes to our software, so we need to see the costs. Some of this might get done as we make other upgrades.

For example, we know we have an old mainframe at property assessment that needs a real robust CAMA system. Changes that we’re talking about, we may decide it doesn’t make sense to change other systems as part of another implementation, and that’s just an example.

Just to clarify, you’re saying that a year from now, we’re going to have the research on what is involved and a rough concept of what the solution is going to be.

Yes. And we would have a timeline for implementation.

Does this include the ever-present vacant property conversation?

Definitely related, now there are multiple efforts on vacant property because people are trying to tackle different things. But, yes, this is definitely a part of that.

The real hurdle remains the definition of a vacant property — is it Water Department turn offs or something else.

Yes, and so there is a committee, more than one, and the city is trying to determine its role. The city has a role in managing vacant property, but we’re also not the only player when it’s a property we don’t own. There are multiple efforts that are probably related, but we are not leading them, though we will be part of them.

Then talk a little bit about what data are we specifically talking about.

Think of all the attributes that touch a piece of property.

There’s the address, some cases there are multiple addresses. Our addresses don’t necessarily match Postal Service addresses, and they don’t necessarily need to. We use addresses for different reasons. We need to know where services are delivered, we need to know where it’s located, like street information and block ranges.

Think of all the things that touch property history, ownership, zoning and things like we want to be able to have a history of an address and have all outstanding permits that have been assigned to that address.

Our permit database — and we have one, we know what permits are assigned to an address – - but there’s no way to easily coordinate that, like how 911 routes police and fire or medic to an address. They are coming from completely different data tables.

Consolidation is a touchy subject at the City of Philadelphia, do you see your office owning this data?

I’m not saying that OPD is going to own it. That’s probably not the best way because we’re not the closest to this, what I am saying is that we will be in the centralized coordinating role and setting some standards for how these things are done and making the transition across the board.

Property data is an important type of city information, but certainly not the only one. Do you expect to take over other roles with city data?

I don’t know what this is going to look like in the end state. This is no different than a whole host of efforts in the city that involve business processes so we can optimize our data to have an integrity and translate that across units and the public.

Our focus is on property data. I hope that our process is repeatable for anything else we work on.

Do you at least picture coming out of this finding other dependable data sources that can be shared, outside of property or other ancillary benefits?

One of the things that we don’t have is a consistent process for releasing any kind of data. I’d love to see that done. There’s a more seamless way to get information from the city.

When I say there are other efforts going on, [the city is] trying to completely revamp our web process behind the scenes and our presence to the public, so how data becomes public is a part of many goals that are important.

Do you have a personal interest in data?

I’m not involved in this because of the data. I’m involved in this because I believe in making government as efficient as we can and moving it into at least the 20th century.

This is the third city I’ve worked for, and I like how cities work, I like the operations. There ‘s no other corporation that has as many core services as the city does.

Most corporations have three or four things they are responsible for and that’s it. The city is responsible for hundreds of core functions that if we quit doing, you would hear about it.

And so I come at it from that perspective. I want the city to be more responsive because I think they’re great places to live. Every city has its own culture and its own unique vibe and that’s how I got involved in it.

I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek. I want to make the city work better.

• Organizers tell us that the deadline for nominations for the PA Tech Awards, which we covered last month, has been extended to midnight tonight. Vote Philly!
• Spot the most defibrillators in Philly, win $10K! [SciStarter -- An interview with Penn Prof. Raina Merchant, who is behind the effort we covered
• Hedger pausing on print [New York Post] — Randy Smith, who owns nearly a third of the company that publishes Philly.com and the newspapers, is trying to sell, reports the paper. More from Poynter.
• SAP will add 500 jobs in Newtown [Delaware County Daily Times]
• AstraZeneca to cut 7,300 more jobs amid fourth-quarter profit drop [Inquirer]

• Dell Forms Software Group, Names Former CA CEO as Head [PC World] — With Berwyn’s Boomi division playing a role
• Sunoco CEO Elsenhans to step down [Philadelphia Business Journal] — Lynn Eisenhans
• Philly fuse maker chooses Bucks over North Carolina [PhillyDeals:Inquirer] — Action Manufacturing is moving 175 jobs out of North Philadelphia to a new Bucks County spot
• A Geek’s Guide to First Friday & Second Saturday: February 2012  [Geekadelphia]
• Quantum Leap’s tweet counter picks up more buzz [Delaware Online] — Newark, Del.-based analytics company
• “Jackpot Internet Cafe” will offer high-end computers and software, as well as sweepstakes games [PlanPhilly] — A Fishtown business that has concerned residents compromises and pitches itself as a more of an internet cafe.
• #visitUS: Help Curate a Philly Foursquare List, Get Philly a City Badge [Geekadelphia]
• Apostrophe just got easier [P'unk Ave newsletter] — More from the South Philly web firm’s CMS
• Drew Bacon’s Poppler: The Geekiest Guitar in Philadelphia [Geekadelphia] — Video below.

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.

• Verizon Wireless-Comcast Deal Meets Political Resistance  [Wall Street Journal]
• Police: Man Posing As Comcast Technician Takes Cable Box [WUSA] — In Maryland
• Wall Street Reflects on Comcast-NBCUniversal Ahead of Deal’s First Anniversary [Hollywood Reporter]
• Comcast CEO looking to expand global reach [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Comcast Signs Multiyear Extension With Amdocs [Multichannel News] – “Vendor Also Cites Strong Performance in Europe, Emerging Markets”

MIGHT INTEREST

• NBC Channels Marilyn Monroe in Super Bowl Ads to Aid Network [Bloomberg] — “Comcast Corp.’s NBC, the last-place network for seven straight years, will use this weekend’s Super Bowl broadcast to promote a prime-time lineup being remade by entertainment chief Bob Greenblatt.”
• NBC’s price for Super Bowl ads not shocking to advertisers [Philadelphia Business journal] — “NBC is charging 17 percent more for a 30-second Super Bowl ad this Sunday than Fox charged when it had the game last year, Forbes reports.”
• Verizon’s wireless, marketing deal with cable firms to be considered at Senate hearing [Post Tech: Washington Post]
• Internet Essentials Progress Report [Comcast Voices]
• Marin Telecom Agency Battles Comcast Over Fees [MillValley Patch]
• Comcast SportsNet series taps into hatred of Phila. sports fans [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• Comcast-Spectacor leader Luukko makes Billboard power rankings [Philadelphia Business Journal] — Peter Luukko
• Comcast reveals social TV strategy that rewards subscribers in patent application [FierceCable]

GIVE A GLANCE

• The Weather Channel Replaces Its Chief [Media Decoder: New York Times] — NBC Universal co-owns with Bain Capital
• In a Departure, USA Network Plans a Washington Political Drama [Media Decoder: New York Times]
• Comcast Names Amy Lynch as Area Vice President of Comcast California’s Southwest Bay Area [PR Newswire]
• Comcast’s Split-Personality Problem [Daily News]
• Comcast plans to expand eligibility for reduced-price Internet [York Dispatch]
• Comcast Takes Home Security To Mile-High City [Multichannel News] — “‘Xfinity Home’ Service Provides 24-Hour Monitoring, Home Automation Features”
• Comcast going all digital, expanding basic [KeysNet] — “Digital television will soon come to even basic-service cable subscribers of Comcast Corp. in the Florida Keys.”
• Comcast’s Xfinity Celebrates Black History Month With Special Entertainment Choices Across Screens and Devices [BlackNews]

New City Commissioner Al Schmidt ran on a campaign of reform for the beleagured Board of Elections.

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”

Not only is the culture of the office one in need of updating, so too is the physical City Hall office space, Schmidt said, noting that it looked “like nothing had changed in decades.”

To be fair, when he first walked into the office on Jan. 3, there were four or five computers there.

“But they never had an internet connection or even word processing software,” said Schmidt, laughing with a degree of incredulity. “They might as well have been poorly performing lamps.”

It shows how much Schmidt and Singer have to do to meet many of their promises.

Another story line exists with Schmidt, who lost a spirited 2009 campaign against City Controller Alan Butkovitz. With a few of the Republican City Council candidates, he represents a divide in the local GOP between an old guard that has focused on a small, if stable, slice of the pie for patronage jobs, and a newer reform movement that hopes to run competitively in citywide elections.

An educated former performance auditor from the federal Government Accountability Office, Schmidt 40, who is married and has two daughters in East Falls, is bright, cheery and prepared. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-bred Schmidt sat down with Technically Philly to discuss his campaigns and plans for his new office.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Give us the quick pitch on what your new job is.

The three city commissioners sit on the Board of Elections to decide matters before the election board, from polling place changes to much bigger things. They run the election machinery in the city.

The Board of Elections has roughly 100 full-time civil servant employees and an approximately $10 million budget, with offices in City Hall, at Delaware and Spring Garden and a warehouse in North Philadelphia. So it is an organization and operation that you’re running, and much like agriculture or farming, there is a time when you’re sowing and a time when you’re reaping.

You have two elections every year, a general and primary, whether it is federal or municipal only, so there’s always activity that takes place every year, but sometimes there are different things that occur. There is a voter ID bill being discussed in Harrisburg, that’s something new this year. There is another bill that would change how names appear on the ballot, having them rotate rather than some candidates just getting stuck with a low position. Special elections, we’ll have some of those this year. Those are examples of things that come up that we decide.

There’s no redoing elections. There’s zero room for error. That’s what makes this so critical.

Remind us of what you campaigned on and why you think it worked.

There were a couple of core principles that we ran on that we thought the office could benefit from.

One was greater transparency in terms of voters and people interested in getting involved in civic life in the city and having access to the information to make the most of it, including people who want to run for office, because it shouldn’t just be someone who is connected to some ward office.

Another element was accountability. There were previous Controller audits and other reports, including from Inquirer and the Daily News, that consistently pointed out its lack of accountability for how it spends its money and its responsiveness.

And to improve efficiency. Elections in Philadelphia cost more than any other county in the state, and it’s more than twice the average of any other county. It costs $10 per voter to run an election in Philadelphia and that’s more like $4 or $5 in the rest of the state.

Sure, but large cities present problems in terms of population and access that can drive up cost.

Well,yes, but it’s high in terms of the amount spent per voter when compared to other big cities too, so something is wrong there. But because [previous commissioners] weren’t transparent about how they spent their money, we don’t know what’s wrong until we’ve come into office. So we have a lot of work to do.

We’ve seen the reform movement in citywide offices happen before, perhaps most famously in the 1950s, so why do you think this resonated now?

My background is in political history — I have a Phd in political history — so you have different types of moments and sometimes they catch fire and sometimes they don’t. For example, there are plenty of things in city government to be outraged about every day and every year, like DROP which really captured people’s attentions and has had a significant impact on the results of elections, and other things are at least as abusive in terms of use of taxpayer dollars, but they never catch people’s interest. So you try to raise awareness of what you can, and see what interests.

I’m obsessed with Richardson Dilworth, Clark and that whole phase: they had been losing for 12 years before they were successful in the face of a Republican Party in this city that had once outnumbered Democrats 12 to one. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans six or seven to one. I’m not suggesting that any change in the city either with our party or in city government will be easy but you’re certainly not going to succeed if you don’t try.

With a reform Republican breaking into a Democrat/Republican machine commission, the Clark-Dilworth comparisons are inevitable, but the difference, of course, is that whenever we have a seen a big watershed change in registration locally, it has at least nearly mirrored something happening nationally.

The Democrats had the wind at their back and the New Deal was going on, so the migration of African-Americans not only to Philadelphia from the South but also from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party…

So that changes a lot, but there are some notable people trying to reshape the GOP locally. Can a change really happen locally without a national trend to push it along?

Well, you just don’t know. I don’t want to overdo the Dilworth thing, but it’s not like when Dilworth is starting out that Dilworth knew there would be a New Deal or that African Americans would defect en masse from the Republican Party.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, there’s no sense whatsoever that there is going to be a change to the city that would be parallel to the Dilworth-Clark era. This is not going to be a Republican city in the foreseeable future. The Republican Party registrations have been declining for years and plummeting years ago. That has caused strife within the local Republican community.

One last politics question, in terms of being a different breed of local GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic city, do you see your role to make your party affiliation more palatable to more progressive voters in Philadelphia or to make party affiliation less important overall by suggesting it’s an outlier?

At least the way I’ve conceptualized it, we want a Republican reform taking place and Democratic reform taking place in the city. The objective is to improve and reform city government. The objective isn’t partisan. If we do the best job we can do, there will be a partisan benefit to it. But if you look at it through a strictly partisan effort, it won’t work.

Singer is in a different party, and I’m sure there are many things we disagree on, but in terms of city government, there are very few things we disagree on it.

There’s the old saying that there’s no Republican or Democrat way to fix a pothole, well, similarly, elections in Philadelphia are either going to be fair or not be fair, it’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing or a Green Party thing. Taxpayer dollars are either spent well or they’re not.

What are you excited about that would interest a technology community?

A lot of the changes are really primitive that still move the agency forward a light year.

Right now, there’s hardly any information available online. Only recently did they put information up on how to register for absentee ballots. Putting up past election results and things like that is primitive stuff but important.

We do look forward to some small innovations like being able to text your address and we can text back the location of a poling place.

When you look at the great work done by the Committee of Seventy, you realize they’ve done it to fill a vacuum left by the city’s commissioners not keeping up with this. Go to Seventy’s website, put in your address and find out where you can vote. It’s not like you have to go to City Hall and look through a big binder to find out where you vote.

They have information on how to run for office, and I think it’s all things the city commissioners should be doing.

What is priority one for you?

There’s one that is immediate and one long term.

The most immediate thing is that we have to propose a budget for our office for city council. There’s very little time. In past, the budget hasn’t been very transparent. We want to do more.

How?

Not just how much you have to spend, but on what.

A budget can be five line items, with $1 million for this and $3 million for that, or you can break that down more. I think City Council deserves that and we should do that.

And what’s the longer term goal?

My background is as a performance auditor. We can find ways to find efficiencies to save money and improve services. I’d like to lead a way to evaluate the entire office. There are many civil servants there who work very hard and know what they’re doing, but I suspect there are ways to further improve services and save money.

I think it’s foolish to just rush in and make changes.

Just because you win an election, doesn’t mean you’re right and know everything about how to improve performance.

So taking a little more deliberate approach to do the changes right is what that performance evaluation will be intended to assist with.

How would you judge success at the end of your term?

One thing we did from the start after election was form a a transition committee and one of their responsibilities was to assemble our commitments during our campaign, so now it’s important to look to those as a touchstone for as much as warranted for delivering on what we promised. Some may be impractical, but I doubt it and believe we’ll be able to follow through.

Two new faces on a three person panel, and Commissioner Clark wasn’t exactly out campaigning, so I doubt you know each other well. Will the three of you go out and get beers?

[laughs] Well, the Sunshine laws prohibit us from discussing business privately, but we can get together to discuss the Eagles but nothing before the commission.

What was the relationship between the commissioners in the past?

Marge Tartaglione made decisions and two other commissioners placed temporary employees, since the board hires a significant number of temporary employees before and during elections.

Is there water cooler talk in your offices?

It’s not like the City Council can go around and talk about issues, it’d be in violation of Sunshine Laws. though that seems difficult, it is in place for a good reason, to ensure transparency. Small matters like internal office needs can happen in executive session, but otherwise, we don’t talk about high-level matters.

….We’re going to do good work, and the voters will be able to know about it.

• A look at Cipher Prime’s ‘Splice’ [Inquirer] — Geekadelphia’s Eric Smith pens a column
• New Jersey man turns campaign stint into software success [Inquier] — “Together they spent 20-hour days devising a social-media tool – a “game-changer,” the nonpartisan New Organizing Institute has called it – that maximized efforts by the campaign’s field offices and led to the prodigious get-out-the-vote initiative that proved key to Obama’s success.” On NationalField from Aharon Wasserman.
• Open Question to our Readers [Hive76]

• InterDigital shares could retreat after no deal emerges [Inquirer:PhillyInc] Meetings with Google and Apple around its 19,500 patents drove stock prices up. More from Peter Key here.
• Rick Nucci as Dell Boomi General Manager [Philly Tech News] — Noting the transition from Bob Moul who left the company after the exit to Dell
• Philly Gamification Start-Up Hiring Dozen Employees [FINS] — More on Hoopla Software from Philly Tech News here.
• Liquid Acquires Premier Video Production Capabilities [Liquid Interactive]
• SAP Roundup [Philly Tech News] — Among other items, PTN hits some SAP North America news coverage
• Philly Gets Curbed [PlanPhilly] — From potential competitor and more from NewsWorks on the story Technically Philly broke here of the real estate blog network adding a Philly outpost.
• Code for America’s Jennifer Pahlka talks networked cities at TEDx [PlanPhilly] — Video below.

[Disclosures: InterDigital has been a Philly Tech Week sponsor in the past.]

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.

• If Comcast can’t make it in the wireless biz, who can? [Gigaom]
• New in Your Wireless Store: The Cable Guy [Media Decoder: New York Times] — “A pending $3.6 billion transfer of spectrum between cable companies and Verizon Wireless will give Comcast, the nation’s largest cable company, a presence in select Verizon retail locations. Comcast salesmen will offer Verizon customers special offers on cellphones and other deals if they sign up for Comcast’s Xfinity service.”
• Bloomberg jabs at Comcast on anniversary of NBC deal approval [LA Times: Company Town]
• Verizon, Comcast Send Marketing Deals to FCC in Airwaves Review [Bloomberg]
• VIDEO: Comcast Xfinity Commercials Interrupt Giants Vs. 49ers Game (UPDATED) [Half Smokes] — in D.C. market

• Comcast’s Web-Slinging Set-Top Visits the FCC [Light Reading Cable]
• Comcast patents technology for recommending alternative TV programming to subscribers [FierceCable]
• Sprint, DirecTV ask FCC for Verizon cable deal info [Reuters via Yahoo Finance]
• Comcast & the FCC: Is the secret in their logos? [Philly Tech News] — Noting similarities in their logos
• Comcast Challenges FCC’s Decision on Tennis Channel Complaint [Broadcasting and Cable] — “Cable operator asks commission to reverse the ALJ’s finding that it had discriminated against the channel”
• As Seacrest Makes Deals, a Potential Role on ‘Today’ Still Looms [Media Decoder: New York Times] — More on the Ryan Seacrest negotiations with Comcast
• Comcast Spotlight exec heads to Viamedia [CED] –”Independent cable rep firm Viamedia announced that it has hired Brad Henderson as director of national sales.”
• This Major Catalyst Will Cause Time Warner To Outperform Comcast [TWXNews]
• Comcast Center says Thanks Gary [DC Sports Blog: Washington Post]
• Comcast flipping digital switch [The Post and Courier]
• Comcast Names Amy Lynch as Area Vice President of Comcast California’s Southwest Bay Area [PR Newswire: Sacramento Bee]
• Activists, Comcast tangle over accessiblity of low-income program [NewsWorks]
• Green Your Home with Xfinity Home Security [Comcast Voices] — Still pushing into security systems, seen as a related growth market