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 weekly Comcast roundup or other news updates.

DEFINITE READS

• Comcast CEO: “Jury is Out” on Netflix’s Impact [Wall Street Journal: Digits] — Brian Roberts on whether Netflix is friend or foe.
• Comcast CEO Brian Roberts Speaks Out on Bloomberg FCC Complaint, NBC News [MediaBistro]
• Hulu weighs sale options after approach: source [Reuters] — Comcast, via NBC, has some ownership. Tech Crunch called this BS.
• Powell: Comcast/NBCU Merger Net Positive for Industry [Broadcasting & Cable] — “National Cable & Telecommunications Association President and former FCC Chairman Michael Powell told a C-SPAN interviewer that he thought the Comcast/NBCU meld would be a net positive for the industry, providing some ‘real glue’ for an industry already melding increasingly disparate interests.”

MIGHT INTEREST

• List of biggest advertising spenders has Comcast, Campbell’s  [Philadelphia Business Journal] — Comcast spent $1.85 billion on advertising last year
• Comcast spent $5.7M in 1Q to lobby for NBCU deal [AP]
• Reid’s top aide got $1.2M from Comcast [On Media: Politico]
• The NBC News/CNBC Exodus, Why Is So Much Top Talent Leaving The Network? [Mediaite] H/T Philly Tech News
• Comcast Will Slash Wait Times for Cable Repair After ‘Worst’ Designation (Bloomberg) H/T PTN
• Comcast’s New Products Aim To Bring Digital Media To Cable TV [NASDAQ.com]
• Comcast Using Juniper, Ciena Metro Ethernet Gear[Multichannel News]
• Brian Roberts video interview [Bloomberg] — Watch it below, focusing on the above announcement

First look at Comcast’s enhanced TV service with Facebook integration [VentureBeat] — Watch the 17-minute presentation demo below.

Comcast CFO Discusses Comcast/NBCUniversal and the Future of Media [Chamber of Commerce] — Michael J. Angelakis had spoken at an event with David L. Cohen, who chairs the chamber and afterward spoke about the merger, including how it might impact the region.

• Philadelphia Syndrome: In Search of a Cure [Matt Monihan] — One of the leads in the Northern Liberties Devnuts co-working crew gives his take on Philly defeatism
• Philadelphia region lags in job creation, according to U.S. figures [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• SEPTA to sell ads on its website [PlanPhilly]
• Protesters disrupt speech by Sunoco CEO [PhillyInc: Inquirer] — “Protesters interrupted a speech being given by Sunoco Inc. chairman and chief executive Lynn L. Elsenhans at a luncheon at the Philadelphia Marriott Downtown Thursday afternoon.”
• 76er Evan Turner’s life now an app [Philadelphia Business Journal] — “”Philadelphia 76ers rookie Evan Turner has joined forces with XCO SportsLink to develop a free smartphone application that will provide fans with exclusive access into his life on and off the court.”
• Emotional tributes to Baldino at Pennsylvania Bio Awards [Philadelphia Business Journal] — Frank Baldino, the life sciences legend in the region, was honored after passing last year
• Straight talk about the Japanese nuclear plant disaster [PlanPhilly] — By a local nuclear power plant operator, not long before Temple University-Japan students were evacuated.
• AT&T’s ‘river of data’ flows through Philadelphia [Philly Inc: Inquirer] — Tour of their regional control center

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

• Appeals Court Upholds Access Rules for Cable TV [New York Times] — “United States appeals court on Friday upheld a Federal Communications Commission rule that forbids cable companies that also own programming channels from refusing to allow competitors to also offer those channels.” This is expected to have a major impact on Comcast’s pending acquisition of NBC.
• As Technically Philly reported yesterday, Comcast has launched a free WiFi network for existing customers in Philadelphia and some parts of New Jersey.  The Jersey Journal reports on the spread of these hot spots outside New York City in New Jersey.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Comcast unbound: Wi-Fi service available in Philly, parts of N.J., Del. [CED Magazine] — Includes some 2,000 spots in Philadelphia
• Microsoft, Comcast, Yahoo: no zombie cookies here, Congress! [ars technica] — A breakdown of the use of Flash cookies by major sites, including what Comcast does.
• Comcast Says Interactive Ads Available in 10M Homes [Broadcasting and Cable]
• Comcast Sponsors City Year’s Opening Day [Comcast blog]

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

For the executive team at Solve Media, this venture is just the latest chapter in a long partnership.

“At this point, we can finish each other’s sentences,” says Ari Jacoby, CEO and co-founder of Solve. Solve’s management team, which includes Stu Libby, Todd Lieberman, Max Sobol [founder of StartPhilly] and Jeffrey Weisberg, all formerly worked on VoiceStar, a Philadelphia-based call analytics company that was purchased by Marchex in 2007.

The band got back together for Solve Media, a new tweeted:

However, while each publication claims that the company is “New York based” most of its operations are right here.

“Philadelphia is the main engine of the business that is Solve Media,” says Jacoby. The company’s technology operations, customer services and publisher sales are based here while its advertising sales are 100 miles north.

As for the rebranding from “AdCopy” to Solve Media, Jacoby says that a lot of customers mistakingly thought that the company was freelance advertising copywriters so the company decided to switch gears just before launching yesterday.

“Because completing a TYPE-IN is really ‘solving’ a puzzle,” he says.

Disclosure: Technically Philly was approached as a possible partner for Solve Media.

The small company, headquartered in Rittenhouse, made big news when it was purchased by Google. Industry analysts were mostly concerned with how the purchase of Invite’s real-time display advertising bidding software played into Google’s long-term strategy.

But here in Philly, we’d guess that there were likely a handful of celebrations taking place from West Conshohocken down to University City as Invite Media’s Philadelphia ties run deep.

The story of Invite Media can be traced back to 2005, when Invite co-founders and Penn students Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg founded Eatnow, a company that allowed college students to place food orders online. The company started at Penn before expanding to other campuses. The company eventually folded, despite expanding to 17 Philadelphia colleges.

After a stint interning at West Conshohocken-based First Round Capital, Turner, along with three other Wharton grads founded Invite and located the company at 1716 Chestnut Street before expanding to New York, San Francisco and London.

After operating in stealth mode and weathering a fire, the company launched its “Bid Manager” software in February before getting snapped up from Google on June 3rd.

According to All Things Digital, the company only raised $5 million in venture capital money from Center City-based Comcast Interactive Capital and First Round. The company also raised money from nearly a dozen angel investors. It was allegedly purchased for $81 million, likely giving its founders and investors a tidy return on investment.

According to Turner, the company will continue to run independently and will keep its offices in Philadelphia where 16 of its 48 employees are located, giving Google its first physical presence in the city.

Both Google and Invite Media have told Technically Philly that they expect for most staff members to remain at the company, save for the few that would voluntarily choose to leave.

Google’s move to display advertising and exchange bidding

Google is mostly interested in Invite’s main product called “Bid Manager,” a real-time ad-purchasing dashboard that allows markets to buy ads across numerous networks, including Google.

In 2009 Google made over 99 percent of its revenues with advertising, mostly the text-based ads that appear after search results. The company has been targeting display advertising, such as banner ads, as an area for growth. As a result, it has snapped up companies like DoubleClick, AdMob and now Invite Media.

“We’re investing really heavily in display and exchange,” said Susan Wojcicki, Google’s VP of Product Management at CM summit, an event hosted by Federated Media during New York’s Internet Week. “Agencies have expressed a desire to buy other ads through Google. We’ve opened up the ability for AdSense to be purchased across all networks and we want to be as open as possible.”

The company’s customers will still be able to purchase on other advertising networks similar to the relationship that DoubleClick has with Google.

“We’re going to invest significantly in developing Invite Media’s technology to enable its clients to easily and effectively buy ads in real time across multiple exchanges,” said Neal Mohan, Google’s Vice President of Product Management in an email to Technically Philly. ”In time, we’re planning to make their technology work seamlessly with our DoubleClick for Advertisers.”

Invite Media, backed by First Round Capital and Comcast Interactive Ventures, acts as a central real-time dashboard for buying web display ads. It’s likely that Google will use Invite’s technology to help further streamline its advertising business, which accounts for nearly all of its revenues.

The company was founded by Penn grads Nat Turner, Zachary Weinberg and Scott Becker and also has offices in the 67th Ward.

This isn’t the first time Google has shown love to the 215, the company also invested in DreamIt vet SCVNGR last year. Google also has been on a bit of an acquisition binge this year, snapping up seven companies since April.

Edit: More details on All Things Digital and on Silicon Alley Insider.

An example of an ad package. Click to see all of the package options.

Over the past few months we have been adding to a long list of advertising options: feed ads, display ads, event listings and job posts are all part of our offerings to regional organizations and advertisers. We admit it can get a little confusing.

To help solve the dilemma, Technically Philly has introduced our advertising packages, an easy way to create a marketing campaign that suits the exact needs of you and your organization using a multitude of advertising offerings.

Hosting an event? Get a calendar listing and a display advertisement with our Events Planner package. Want direct access to TP’s 10,000 readers? Sponsor one of our weekly features or purchase an RSS advertisement.

And that’s just the start of it. Here’s a quick look at our eight offerings which range from a $50/month donation to eye-catching full site wraps.

A quick look at all of our packages:

• Philanthropist – A $50 donation and a mention in our weekly supporters post.
• Events Planner – Get your paid event in our calendar, plus a display ad.
• Networker – A posting on our Jobs Board and a display ad. For the growing company.
• Techie – Advertise in our RSS feed.
• Regular – Sponsor one of our weekly features.
• Inside Salesman – Our ad sales team will write a 600-word feature on whatever you’d like that appears directly in our content stream, plus a display ad.
• Jetsetter – For total coverage. Full site wrap and a ton of other bonuses.
• Standard Ad Options – Cherry pick your own package.

Feel free to explore our offerings and as always, we welcome any comments or criticism.

An example of a feed ad. Click to enlarge

Dear more than 600 of the most tech-savvy, innovative and entrepreneurial Philadelphians who subscribe to the Technically Philly RSS feed:

We can’t quite thank you enough for making the choice to have our technology community and business news sent to you daily, by way of our RSS feed and e-mail subscription — saying nothing of 11,000 monthly unique site visitors, Comcast news roundup subscribers or 1,200 Twitter followers who are mostly actual people.

Starting Nov. 1, one of two big changes will happen to your feed.

1. You’ll begin seeing it sponsored by really supportive organizations, businesses or individuals who want to see, help and be associated with Technically Philly as it becomes a sustainable, effective and necessary tool for promotion, collaboration and discussion surrounding this nascent community of innovators in the Delaware Valley. We’re offering monthly sponsorships now for the bargain basement trial offer price of $200 per month. See more details below or contact us at advertising [at] technicallyphilly.com.
2. The full-text feed which we’ve always offered will, very unfortunately, be cut off, to be replaced by a summary feed.

Just the first paragraph of our features, news items and other content will be visible, requiring you to click through to our site, the metrics of which will help us sell higher advertising rates thereafter.

We at Technically Philly dig reading other full-text feeds and want to offer the same of our own, so we’re way keen on nabbing sponsorships for every month from here until kingdom come. That’ll give you, the subscribers, the chance to peruse from your reader of choice — and maybe click through from time to time to see our native skin. But we can’t offer that without the support of a sponsor.

This is something that comes after a lot of thought and discussion. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us or feel free to voice them publicly in the comments below. Our dear readers, we’ll keep you posted and continue to be entirely transparent about this process.

We also think this is one sweet spot for a sponsor, getting involved in a place where some of the most educated, community-involved, Philadelphia-lovin’ Web-based entrepreneurs and innovators are coming together and offering them something of value.

Next week, we’ll also be unveiling some more pretty big changes related to advertising, partnering, our jobs board and, heck, even a new member to the TP team.

A screenshot of a ClickEquations client's paid-search portfolio, breaking down a variety of ad campaigns.

The ClickEquations crew say they do what they do best because they were once the customer.

Launched in 2006, the Conshohocken-based company was once strictly a search agency managing mostly large-sized pay-per-click accounts, but founder and president Craig Danuloff and team increasingly found limitations in the tools available for the accounts they handled.

“The best products are the ones created to help the consumer, right?” says Alex Cohen, the company’s marketing manager.

So, that’s what Danuloff, who got involved in e-commerce software as early as 1994, and CEO Lucinda Holt did. The duo moved the company’s focus to developing tools that company’s themselves could use to manage their own paid-search accounts — placing and tracking links listed on search engines by chosen keywords.

Since that private beta launch last August, things have turned out alright, so far, for the company trying to own paid search, which is the targeted, contextual advertising that appears on Web sites, particularly search engines, according to keyword relevance.

Eight investors, including Philadelphia investors Emerald Stage2 Ventures, MentorTech Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, last month invested $3 million in the firm’s expansion, including growing their development staff to accelerate the number of features they offer. Nautica, Comcast, Liz Claiborne and Forbes Traveler are among their high-profile clients, with other announcements on the way, Cohen says.

For continued growth, ClickEquations will win over lots of companies that aren’t using ad management tool and, Cohen says, explain just why “Google is not your friend.”

“The challenge of advertising in the past was that you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t know,” he says. “Now, of course, the problem is that you have more information than most people know what to do with.”

So, the result is most don’t do anything, he says.

“Eighty to 85 percent of the possible market isn’t using any tool at all. Most of the rest are often using what’s available from Google, Yahoo or MSN or what they’ve hacked together themselves,” Cohen says.

The tools from ClickEquations include a Web-based reporting application and an Excel-based ClickEquations analyst, all of which can be shared among employees and are meant to give your company more metrics based around your paid search in a more easily read and organized format than anywhere else.

Your company, Cohen says, will be able to tell not just what keyword-based paid search campaign is working, but why. Their browser-based reports, he says, are silly with data and easily compare across all the major search engine platforms in a single interface.

Separating your search campaign from the companies on which that campaign is hosted is important because, as Cohen readily says, “Google is not your friend.”

“Everyone has this Apple-esque fuzzy feeling toward Google, but it’s becoming more aggressive in monetizing their properties,” he says. “The tools they provide you are actually about you spending more money. Our tool is focused on making you more money.”

Cohen noted for examples Google’s notorious lack of transparency about the tweaking and changing of its keyword algorithm for paid search and shifting paid search results to get more — not necessarily better or more relevant — clicks, which make them more money.

ClickEquations’ target audience — which Cohen describes as a company that is spending or hopes to spend more than $25,000 a month on paid search — will be able to get a much better view of effective conversion rate than any search engine would like to make clear.

“The other tools out there are much more focused on the engines, what’s profitable for the engines,” he says. “When there is data that helps you really see what your campaign is doing, it’s often buried. We change that.”

That is how ClickEquations expects to ride the building tide of the paid search market, Cohen says.

“Everyone sees the trends of advertising moving online, but not everyone is seeing that once on the Web it’s moving disproportionally to search marketing over display,” he said. “So paid search is stealing market share from print and from even online display.”

“It’s a market that is already big, and we think it’s going to explode.”

Below watch a ClickEquations video on paid search analytics.

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

We’ve been chronicling the plight of Razorfish for a few months now. To recap: Microsoft acquired Razorfish’s parent company in 2007 and has been looking to unload the interactive agency ever since. Razorfish, formally known as Avenue A, has offices all over the world including Center City Philadelphia.

According to the Times of London, Microsoft was in “an unholy rush” to get the deal done so it wouldn’t have to pay scheduled bonuses to Razorfish’s employees.

Details of the deal after the jump.

The software giant settled on Publicus’ $530 million deal which includes an agreement to buy “hundreds of millions” in Bing advertising. Microsoft will take a stake in Publicus as part of the deal.

• The purchase was roughly 1.5 times Razorfish’s 2008 earnings.
• $230 million was in equity and $300 million in cash.
• Publicus agrees to buy ads from Bing at a discount for five years.
• Razorfish’s management will remain unchanged
• Razorfish will retain its branding.

[h/t to Philly Tech News, paidConent, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal and the Times of London]