Comcast Roundup: Competing with ESPN, greatest Comcast photo ever and More

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 e-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

• Yo, Happy Thanksgiving. Comcast is celebrating, first by bringing the Yule log to OnDemand in HD, and in more ways below.

• Forbes reports that this Thanksgiving, employees of Comcast, General Electric, NBC and Vivendi should all pray that the deal to give Comcast a majority stake in NBC goes through. If the deal fails, Forbes suggests, all those involved will be hurt.
• New York Times Media Decoder blog reports that Upper Darby princess and now NBC star Tina Fey hosted an Ad Council event and liberally joked about the possible Comcast-NBC merger. “It leaves me wondering,” she reportedly said, “will I have to change the name of my show from ‘30 Rock’ to ‘Industrial Park Along the Schuylkill River’?”

After the jump, Chicago Tribune video on becoming a Comcast customer service agent and the photo we hope will someday be on the currency of the global nation state that Comcast creates after it outlasts Google and Facebook in a universal war of empires. We assume this will happen in 2012.

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Friday Q & A: Doug Bellenger of Philly Startup Leaders and PhindMe

In its two years of existence Philly Startup Leaders has outgrown its Web site and much of its administrative backend.

“We saw this list of activities creeping up on us,” said Doug Bellenger member of the PSL Board of Directors and COO of PhindMe Mobile. “And we said, ‘How are we going to address all of this?’”

To help bring the entrepreneurial support group up to date, it has organized an entire weekend hackithon that hopes to gather together the community to cross some items off its to do list.

We asked Bellenger what specific goal the group has for the weekend event as well as what he feels is PSL’s greatest accomplishment.

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Friday Tech Links: Mount Airy teen hacker in WSJ, Digital Philadelphia summit video and More

Ari Weinstein, 15, in the computer lab of Germantown Friends School, where he just finished 9th grade. Yukari Kane/The Wall Street Journal

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Ari Weinstein is the youngest Mount Airy-based hacker we’ve featured on Technically Philly in our long and illustrious history.

Weinstein, 15, is apparently “getting job offers from Israel and all over the place,” and will follow in my footsteps and appear on Fox 29 Monday morning (See clip here), after his place in a Wall Street Journal cover story that ran this week, as reported dutifully by our boy Joe DiStefano.

Weinstein is a contributor to iJailBreak.com, a blog devoted to help users install unapproved software onto Apple’ iPhone and iPod touch products.

Dude is keeping it straight tech raw in northwest Philly, even while he’s in summer camp on the Left Coast. Dude’s father Ken is a developing playing a large role in something of a retail resurgence in Mount Airy, DiStefano reports, including his ownership of the Trolley Car Diner.

H/T Joey D

After the jump, more Ben Franklin Technology Partners dispute, a Digital Philadelphia op-ed and six other tech stories you should read, including our best read article of the week.

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