DEFINITE READS

• Can QVC Translate Its Pitch Online? [New York Times] — On just how the West Chester-based TV sales network turned the Internet friend from foe
• PhillyInc: Deconstructing Invite Media’s success story [Inquirer] — The back story of the big exit
• This 16 Year-old Built a 100 MPG Hybrid Sports Car (Video) [Treehugger] – On Azeem Hill, who spoke at the last Ignite.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Hacking away at the Next Big Thing [Baltimore Sun]
• Hilton Inn @ Penn to Get iPad Treatment [Geekadelphia]
• Chirp up: Students participate more in class when using Twitter, study finds [Daily Orange] H/T Keystone Edge

GIVE A GLANCE

• Chamber Honors the Best of the Region’s Small Businesses [Chamber of Commerce blog]
• Second Issue of Tek Lado Hits Honor Boxes Today [Geekadelphia] — New edition of the bilingual technology, Latino-culture magazine, edited by Liz Spikol
• Philadelphia U. plans College of Engineering, Design and Commerce [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• Aramark’s full-year sales up 2 percent [PhillyInc: Inquirer] — Growth for one of the city’s largest companies.
• Former Inquirer publisher Tierney buys one firm, forms another [Philadelphia Business Journal]

Every Friday morning, we make sure you didn t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

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.

DEFINITE READS

• Zatz Not Funny reports on Comcast’s deal with Blockbuster to partner on DVDsbyMail to, you know, send DVDs by mail, and TechDirt wonders why.
• The New York Post reports that the FCC is readying a ‘net neutrality trap’ for Comcast.
• The Inquirer’s Bob Fernandez reports that Comcast has already spent $90 million on lobbying, advertising, lawyers and other costs pushing for approval of their acquisition of NBC.

Below, four months in prison for hacking Comcast, the most expensive rowhome purchase ever and more.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Multichannel News reports that Comcast has completed the first phase of its ‘Project Infinity’ video-on-demand network for D.C. and Philadelphia. H/T Philly Tech News
• E-Commerce Times has an opinion piece on ‘why AT&T and Comcast are changing their brands.”
• As we reported yesterday, Comcast COO Stephen Burke has reportedly made the most expensive Philadelphia rowhome purchase in the city’s history.

GIVE A GLANCE

• Wired magazine reports that a 2008 hack stunt sentenced a 21-year-old in prison for four months.
• The Inquirer reports that CEO Brian Roberts sold $11.4 million worth of Comcast stock, donating $1.4 million worth.
• The LA Times reports that the parent company of Politico and other D.C. media is “making noise” about the NBC acquisition.
• The Comcast company blog reports on their presence at BlogHer, the annual conference of mommy bloggers and other female-focused content.

When there is just too much Comcast news to follow, the Comcast Roundup will be there every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST

Philadelphia Web communities have been abuzz about popular online forum Philadelphia Speaks being down since Friday.

As we tweeted:

Reynolds just sent word to Technically Philly on what is behind the sudden and days-long “server upgrade” that the site’s splash page currently suggests.

“[It] got hacked,” he wrote, adding “GRRRRRRRR.”

He pledged the forum would return “in a day or two.” Meanwhile, check out the group’s new Facebook page, which reads like a support group for withdrawing addicts.

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.

From L to R: Comcast Founder and Chairman Emeritus Ralph Roberts; Executive Vice President David Cohen and Chairman and CEO Brian Roberts. Photo by Tom Gralish / Inquirer Staff Photographer

• The Inquirer’s Bob Fernandez gets out of his newsroom cubicle and maybe feels a little holiday joy, writing that Comcast’s already celebrated holiday show has now taken on a 3D explosion. Even GPTMC’s uwishunu is bumping the show.
• paidContent reports that Comcast is rolling out local sports news sites to compete with ESPN’s latest pushes.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

• The New York Times reports that an advertising-dependent broadcast network model ensures that Comcast is more interested in the cable channels than NBC the network in its pursuit of purchasing the company.
• The Associated Press reports that, yeah, Vivendi is nearing its decision on whether to sell NBC or not. On the same day, though, the New York Times cites anonymous sources in reporting that talks between GE and Vivendi have stalled and that the two could be at least $500 million apart in valuing NBC.
• Bloomberg reports that Vivendi really does want out of NBC ownership, but they are trying to squeeze every last dime out of selling their share. H/T Philly Tech News
• The Post’s Kang also reports that another analyst has written of a likely lengthy review of the Comcast-NBC merger if it would come to fruition, this analysis suggesting it could stretch to the end of 2010.

GIVE A GLANCE

• Cable Digital News reports on Comcast partnering with its owned subsidiary thePlatform, which is trying new ways to send the proposed TV Everywhere platform to be, uhm, everywhere.
• The Associated Press reports that John Malone, whose Liberty Media controls DirecTV, says Comcast purchasing NBC would give it “too much market power.” Washington Post tech blogger Cecilia Kang reports that many small cable and online video companies make the same claim.
• The Inquirer reports that three men have been indicted on charges of hacking in Comcast e-mail and voice mail service last year.

The Chicago Tribune has a video package on what it takes to be a Comcast customer service agent.

When there is just too much Comcast news to follow, the Comcast Roundup will be there every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST

If you go…

Where: Baiada Center @ Drexel – 3225 Arch Street, Philadelphia

When: Sat, Sun. 10 a.m. – 6 p.m.

More info

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.

Photo courtest of PBJ

As always, edited for length and clarity.

What is your involvement in PSL?

I’m on the Board of Directors and I’m in charge of operations.

What can someone expect by attending PSL Weekend? The site seems purposefully vague.

We’re trying to get a group of crack designers and programmers together and general strategists and trying to put together a more of a visual aspect of PSL as well as content that shares what we are doing.

We don’t do a lot of blog posts, even though we have 500 member companies and all of these events every year. We don’t do a lot to say what’s going on. We also don’t collect our membership information in a way that’s easily accessible and visible.

We’re really just going to group together around ten and figure out the strategy for the weekend and figure out what we are going to accomplish and just go town. Basically rebuild what we currently have. We’re trying to walk away with a new Web site, a content strategy for the Web site, a better way to handle new members and making sure we have a colorful statement around what PSL is.

That handles the branding of PSL and the outside world’s perception of PSL. Is there anything being done to change the goals or internal workings of PSL?

We spent the last year creating the foundation for PSL so if the leaders disappeared we would still have a working model. That’s where the manifesto came from.

This is building up the internal functionality of PSL.

Anyone can show, right?

We are looking for all the help we can have. We figured we can get a group together and really see ourselves as a community. One or two people taking the reigns and building something that they like isn’t going to give us the result we are looking for. We prefer people getting their hands dirty.

Looking back is there one thing PSL is particularly proud of? And looking forward, what is the one thing PSL wants to get done in the next year?

The big thing for me is the awareness of the entrepreneurs in the area and providing them a foundation for them to ask questions in a way they felt they were getting reliable answers. The community is incredible. I never would have expected it to explode the way it has.

Over the next year, I think what I really want to see is that to continue to evolve. We are still looking for these big breaks out of Philly. Giant funding stories, giant acquisition stories. That’s one of the things that, as the economy gets better and people have more solid businesses, we will start to see.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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.

Ordered by an incredibly complex algorithm rendering importance:

• eSchool News reports on complications to the doom and gloom three-year appraisal of Microsoft’s West Philadelphia School of the Future, near the Zoo.
• Plan Philly reports that another announced delay for SEPTA‘s smart card movement could actually be, uh, smart.
• Philly Tech News gives insight and detail to the conversation about state fundign for early stage funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners, after Joey D took apart BFTP.
• The Official Google Blog announces the launch of a new feature to its image search that scans for creative commons content, something awfully users for Web content creators. Will this hurt big stock photo business and drive down freelance photographers? We aren’t supportive of the Google blog making a totally lame and predictable reference to the 67th ward as the example in their post though. In other Google news, the New York Times BITS blog reports that the Beta tag on Google applications was finally dropped.
• The Philadelphia Daily News features an op-ed from stakeholders in Philadelphia’s digital divide dialogue. The op-ed was cross-posted on Young Philly Politics, which also featured a video from the Digital Philadelphia Initiative Summit, facilitated by the city’s CIO Allan Frank. See that video below.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Shop Talk: School District of Philadelphia launches probe into its computer recycling program

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.