Comcast SportsNet purchases sports blog The700level

Comcast SportsNet has purchased The700level.com for an undisclosed sum, the popular sports blog announced on its site today.

Launching in January 2004, the blog will become a CSN property, though founder Enrico Campitelli Jr., 29, will be brought on as a full-time employee to edit and oversee the product. The site’s other contributors will be used as freelancers.

“We’ve been doing it a long time and I like to think we do it pretty well. But there were maybe two or three other Philly sports blogs in existence when I started. Now there are hundreds,” Campitelli says in his announcement. “This move allows us to not only differentiate, but to also put my undivided attention and effort into making this site a must visit destination for Philly sports fans.

Read more

Ford Fiesta gets branding help from community members

At the risk of seeming too complicit in helping to promote a car company, two teams with technology community ties are representing Philadelphia in a 17-city Ford Fiesta social media branding binge.

Team Philadelphia features Geekadelphia contributor and QVC multimedia designer Tim Quirino and Web developer Michaelangelo Illagan.

Team Philly features the scenester power couple of Lime Projects creative marketer Laris Kreslins and Kendra Gaeta, the founder of online allowance and chore rewards platform Kidszillions.

Like their counterparts in cities across the country, each team was given the keys to a new Ford Fiesta in exchange for posting wildly about their experiences via every social media platform you ever heard of, to, as the site suggests, “reimagine the way Fiesta gets advertised.”

The campaign features a promotional competition component which will crown one of the participating teams the winner, earning a 2011 Ford Fiesta.

Philadelphia magazine launches blog Philly Post

Updated 3/10/10 @ 12:17 p.m.: Added item from comment field

Philadelphia magazine wants to get back into the daily conversation.

The century-old glossy publication and regional staple has launched a general interest blog, the Philly Post.

“The goal is to be in touch with our audience not just monthly, as we are with the magazine, but daily,” said Editor-in-Chief Larry Platt in a release. The platform is Wordpress-based.

Phillymag Executive Editor Tom McGrath will take the helm of the project. McGrath told Technically Philly that the venture will follow top stories in the region, use both original reporting and aggregation and will include pieces from both staffers and contributors in a Huffington Post-like structure.

Read more

Google launches Maps biking directions with Bicycle Coalition data

Google Maps new biking directions feature shows safe-to-ride bike paths in green. It's not the path we'd take to Citizen's Bank Park, but hey, Google does no evil, right?

You could say we’ve been welcoming of spring and the onset of the 2010 Grapefruit League. A bike ride down to Citizen’s Bank Park in a few weeks? Count us in. But how best to get there?

Google has launched a beta and buggy version of its new bike-friendly Maps features, including directions that utilize Philly bike paths and landmarks of local biking facilities, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia reported this morning.

Read more

Community launches support portal for Google gigabit fiber

Philadelphia’s tech community is looking for your support to bring Google to our backyard.

After announcing last week its intent to apply to be a test bed for Google’s ultra-high speed fiber, city officials have collaborated with community developers to launch an external initiative to drum up buzz for its proposal.

Working at Independents Hall over the weekend, the groups helped launch a portal—at gigabitphilly.com—that solicits feedback from local users to help fulfill Google’s Request For Information. The page drives home Philadelphia’s notability as a “city of firsts,” much like it would be for Google’s broadband pilot program.

Read more

Nutter proposes “unprecedented” $120 million IT budget, moves toward paperless

Mayor Nutter has announced plans to significantly invest in city information technology and pursue paperless government efficiencies in an attempt to improve tech infrastructure, cut costs and streamline city services.

“We may not be completely paperless, but we will use less paper,” Nutter said in his budget address to City Council this morning before a packed crowed that filled the historic Council chamber’s floor and balcony seating.

If City Council approves the budget, Nutter says that an “unprecedented” investment in city technology will provide $120 million to improve IT over the next five years, including $25 million in FY11.

Read more

Philadelphia to apply for Google’s experimental ultra-high speed broadband

It wasn’t at a press conference or inside the Inquirer editorial boardroom. The city’s announcement to join the rush for Google’s ultra-high speed fiber broadband came during a few minutes of a presentation, backed by dense slides at a technology community event inside a rock venue.

“Let’s light this joint up,” city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank said, throwing his hands in the air and walking off stage at the fifth Ignite Philly, seemingly surprised by the cheers and laughs the slide earned.

The announcement at Johnny Brenda’s last night, a bar filled with mostly 20 and 30-somethings, came 10 months after Frank first unveiled his $100 million city technology investment vision to Refresh Philly, another young, hip, technology community event staple. Technically Philly urged continued involvement by the community and Frank and, in many ways, that’s continued.

The decision marks something of a marriage between likely the city’s two most prominent officials whom have hands in the region’s technology community: the son of a former mayor and, as City Councilman Bill Green put it last night, “the baddest ass CTO of any city, Allan Frank.”

Read more

Local, national VCs back “Startup Visa” law

Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Rich Lugar (R-Ind.) have proposed a new type of visa for foreign entrepreneurs that have received capital and are looking to start a company in America.

The new visa can be awarded to anyone who has raised at least $250,000 ($100,000 of which must come from a U.S. investor) and is able to create five jobs and $1,000,000 in revenue in two years. The bill has received support from the National Venture Capital Association and 160 VCs offered support in a letter to congress, including three partners of First Round Capital.

As reported by Technically Philly, Mayor Nutter is undergoing comparable efforts to attract technology companies and startups using the city’s tax structure as an incentive. What if the city promised additional bonuses to recipients of the Startup Visa? Especially those who’d like to start a video game studio?

Ripples created from Lower Merion Webcam spying

Students walk down the hallway in between classes at the Science Leadership Academy.

Updated 2/24, 5:50 p.m.: Fixed name of High School.

In partnership with Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, the university’s capstone journalism class, students Chelsea Leposa and Jared Pass will cover neighborhood technology issues for Technically Philly and Philadelphia Neighborhoods through May.

The lawsuit filed against the Lower Merion School District last week has created a lot of questions in the educational community. In this case, it is alleged that the Vice Principal of Harriton High School used a picture, taken from the webcam of the 15-year-old student’s school-issued computer, to support the claim that the student had engaged in inappropriate behavior in his home. In order to take the picture the school remotely activated the student’s webcam.

“We think what they did was horrendous,” says Chris Alfano, the Science Leadership Academy’s computer support specialist. Remotely activating a webcam is a security feature that was previously used by Harriton High School to recover stolen laptops. In the past 14 months it has been used about 42 times, and it has helped recover 28 laptops.

Read more

An in-depth look at the Police Department’s expanding video surveillance efforts

When it comes to fighting crime, Philadelphia is undergoing a video revolution.

Within a few short years, the city is likely to be blanketed by a network of more than a thousand state-of-the-art, high resolution cameras, scanning high-crime areas, critical structures such as the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, SEPTA stops and inner city streets.

But this is only the beginning. The number of cameras on the network is expected to expand exponentially in the near future. City officials are working on ways to link their Police Department operation with surveillance cameras used by such parties as local universities and private businesses to create a super-network of public space surveillance that can feed images back to the video monitoring room at Police Headquarters at Eighth and Race Sts.

Technically Philly worked with former Inquirer metro columnist Tom Ferrick’s recently-launched public affairs news site Metropolis to take an in-depth look at the expanding program in a three-part series published this week. For more, check out the report on Metropolis:

Part One: A New Way To Combat Crime
Part Two: How Other Cities Make It Work
Part Three: How Technology Makes It Happen