Highlights 1/23: Campbell's joins the Today Show and Vox Media for branded content; Union League members form Broad Street Angels investor fund

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Campbell's Joins the Today Show and Vox Media for a Branded Content Series (Adweek)
In Comcast's tent.

Warby Parker debuts first Philly store on Saturday (Philly.com)

Union League members form Broad Street Angels investor fund (Philly.com: Philly Deals)

This afternoon, I was informed that @POTUS @realDonaldTrump designated me the 34th Chairman of the @FCC. It is a deeply humbling honor. pic.twitter.com/Joza18aP33

— Ajit Pai (@AjitPaiFCC) January 23, 2017

Comcast's Cohen on Pai:

“We congratulate Ajit Pai on his appointment as Chair of the Federal Communications Commission. He has served with great distinction as a Commissioner over the past four and a half years, and has demonstrated that he is highly qualified to lead the Commission. We commend his tireless efforts to develop and support policies that benefit American consumers and spur greater investment and innovation in broadband technologies to connect all Americans and drive job creation. This is a terrific appointment for the American consumer and the companies the FCC regulates and we look forward to continuing to work with Chairman Pai in his new role.”

https://twitter.com/ComcastPolicy/status/823652336916631553


Verizon, Comcast Merger Talk A 'Nonstarter,' Says JPMorgan (Investor's Business Daily)

Very rough conditions in the ocean right now. A wave buoy off Barnegat Light is showing waves over 18 feet 💨🌊 pic.twitter.com/XPTDqKK84b

— HC Beach Patrol (@HCBeachPatrol) January 23, 2017

Dish Upgraded, Stock Rises On Verizon Takeout Scenarios (Investor's Business Daily)

Should we want a bipartisan FCC? (Mark Jamison / TechPolicyDaily)

What a great acquisition for both @Ipipeline and @Resonant. A #LifeInsurance automation dream! Congrats! https://t.co/QmmSGfgQOJ

— Samantha Chow (@SamChow74) January 23, 2017

Analyst: Finisar 'Disqualified' From Big China Customer Hauwei, Stock Falls (Investor's Business Daily)
Finisar still has a presence in the Philly area from its 2008 acquisition of Horsham-based Optium.

IBM Touts Trump-Pleasing Hiring Plans While Firing Thousands (Bloomberg)

Cool offices: LiquidHub https://t.co/LhoAnqn2xB via @PHLBizJournal

— Peter Key (@PeterLKey) January 23, 2017

OpenText Buys Documentum, Faces Competition as Veeva Goes Bigger on ECM (CMSWire)



Mark Hurd co-CEO Oracle provides NetSuite update (Diginomica)

Dollar Shave Club, whose co-founder/CEO is from Lower Merion and a fantastic actor, has now raised total of $73 million

Tom Paine

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Dollar Shave Club, the monthly razor (and related products) delivery subscription service for men based in Los Angeles, said in late September it had exceeded 1 million members, and that it would triple its revenue to at least $60 million this year, the LA Business Journal reported. It also received another $50 million in venture funding, bringing the company's total amount raised to about $73 million.

Dollar Shave Club's co-founder and CEO is Michael Dubin, 35, who grew up in Lower Merion. He attended Emory and worked in New York before heading west. Dollar Shave Club, founded in 2012, was launched out of Santa Monica's Science incubator.

It is interesting to see some of the established, big money firms line up behind Dollar Shave Club, such as Venrock, Battery Ventures, TCV, and even Comcast Ventures. They must see something very disruptive going on. But there is serious competition among startups. One is Harry's, founded by Warby Parker co-founder Jeffrey Raider. It has already raised well over $100 million and bought a razor factory in Germany.

I checked to see if First Round Capital had invested early in either of these startups, but as far as I can tell it hasn't. I thought it might have been Josh Kopelman's type of business, as he loves subscription services that need to be refilled once month, and game- changing strategies that turn industries upside down in terms of convenience and price. Also, he had the connection to Raider from Warby Parker, and Dubin, with his flair for promotion, might be his kind of entrepreneur. But my biggest concern in investing big money in this business would be the (lack of) barriers to entry, or that Gilette or the smaller established brands would eventually put their feet down to crush them by establishing an off-brand product and selling it direct. I think of CDNow (though not a perfect analogy).

Update: Gillette has come out with a subscription productintended to compete with Dollar Shave Club. In fact it advertised it during the World Series.

Anyway, it will be interesting to watch.

Here is the fantastic viral video with which the company launched in 2012. "Mike" is actually CEO Mike Dubin, who spent time as an improv actor.



Update: Your beard is killing the shaving industry Washington Post)

Links 6/25/2014: eBay names IBM vet to head Enterprise unit; ShopRunner to work with Alibaba on China deliveries

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eBay Names Outsider to Head Its Enterprise Unit (EcommerceBytes)

Alibaba/ShopRunner Let Chinese Tap U.S. Brand Sites
(Investor's Business Daily)

Radnor-based Laboratory supplies provider VWR Corp files for IPO (Reuters)


Cloud BI – genuine trend or marketing exercise? (Diginomica)

Google Introduces Android TV, Its New Platform For Smart TV Apps And Navigation (TechCrunch)

The Father of Net Neutrality Returns to Do Battle With Comcast (Wired)


Is Warby Parker Too Good to Last?
(Wired)

Philadelphia CIOs Reveal Hiring Plans For Second Half Of 2014 (PR Newswire)

Links 12/20/2013: Oracle acquires Responsys for $1.5 billion

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Oracle Acquires Cloud Marketing Player Responsys for $1.5 Billion
(AllThingsD)


Warby Parker raises $60 million (Fortune Tech)
First Round Capital, a seed investor in Warby Parker, participates again.

Knewton nabs $51 mln
(PE Hub)
First Round Capital re-upped here again also.

Comcast CEO meets with top U.S. communications regulator (Reuters)


InterDigital Loses U.S. Patent Case Against Nokia, Huawei
(Bloomberg)

BlackBerry stock rises 13% despite $4.4B loss (CBC)


The Top 10 Data Center M&A Deals of 2013 (Data Center Knowledge)

$30M post-incubator business project in limbo (Lehigh
Valley Business)

Daily Links 2/25/2013: Christie expected to sign Internet gambling bill tomorrow; Warby Parker raises $41.5 mm

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$30 million Bethlehem project targets tech companies (Lehigh Valley Business)

First Round Capital Funds Another $500K Student-Run Venture Fund in New York (All Things D)

Warby Parker Grabs New Investment From American Express & J. Crew CEO, Closing $41.5M Round (TechCrunch)
Founded at Wharton; First Round Capital was an early investor.

Workday competitor SilkRoad selects banks for IPO -sources (Reuters)

FCC Roughed Up in D.C. Circuit
Judges have lots of issues with statute of limitations on carriage complaint and First Amendment implications of remedy (Broadcasting & Cable)
On Comcast/Tennis Channel dispute.

Awaiting the Dimming of G.E. at 30 Rock (New York Times: City Room)

Motorola Brings ITV to Older Set-Tops With ActiveVideo Software (Multichannel News)

Gov. Chris Christie expected to sign bill allowing Internet gambling on Tuesday (Press of Atlantic City)

Wharton and Cisco Show Off the Telepresence Classroom of Tomorrow (Time Tech)


SideCar Says Three Philadelphia Drivers Caught In ‘Sting’, But It Plans to Continue Operations (TechCrunch)

Xtium Expands Partnership with YASH Technologies
Partnership brings increased deployment velocity, economic benefit to managed cloud hosting market (PR Web)

MeetMe® Launches in Chinese, Russian and Japanese
(Marketwire)




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Daily Links 9/10/2012: Warby Parker raises $37 mm; LLR Partners raising new fund

Warby Parker raises $37 million (Fortune: Term Sheet)
Founded by former UPenn students; First Round Capital an early backer.

LLR Partners Is Officially Fundraising For Its Latest Pool (PE Hub)

Meet Dreamit Ventures Philly’s New Class of Startups (PandoDaily)

Penn Researchers Make First All-optical Nanowire Switch (Penn News)

Infosys acquires Swiss SAP consultant Lodestone (CIO.com)

Epicor Goes Upmarket With Cloud ERP, Targets SAP, NetSuite (PC World)

Dell, Ramco join hands to leverage ERP-as-a-service on the cloud (Times of India)

SAP, Adaptive Planning, Good Data Step Up Cloud Competition (Information Week)

Oracle sues ex-partner on similar grounds as SAP, TomorrowNow, Rimini Street (PC World)

Google Fiber is coming to 90% of eligible Kansas City neighborhoods (Gigaom)

Subscriber data from Internet service providers (AP via Business Week)

Futura Mobility, LLC Launches mHealth and Telemedicine Solutions (Business Wire)

First Round Capital Portfolio job board: Interesting Reading

Tom Paine

First Round Capital's job board, covering all of its 130+ portfolio companies, makes for interesting reading, and not only for job hunters. It currently shows about 1,000 open positions. It can tell you a great deal about the developments taking place within some of the most interesting web/mobile startups, and the directions they may be going in.

For example, San Francisco-based social recommendation and sharing engine StumbleUpon, which historically has been a fairly small operation, shows 32 open positions, most of them in San Francisco. First Round Capital was an early investor in StumbleUpon, which started life in Alberta. It was acquired by eBay in 2007, an experience that didn't work out too well, and it was reacquired by an investor group that included the founders and FRC in 2009. Recently StumbleUpon has experienced accelerating growth and increasing monetization.

Conshohocken-based ecommerce software vendor Monetate has 12 open positions listed, 11 of them in Conshohocken.

Other FRC portfolio companies with Philly area openings listed include Curalate (one in Philadelphia), Solve Media (one in Philadelphia), PackLate (one in Conshohocken), Relay Network (two in Radnor), Lifeshield Security (one in Yardley), OpenX, which has a King of Prussia presence through its acquisition of LiftDNA early this year (two), and one position with New York-based Warby Parker in Philadelphia. Warby Parker is looking for 19 people in total, according to the job board.

A startup named PerformLine, which has its headquarters in Morristown, NJ and provides online advertising compliance services, has two openings. New York-based Fab.com, which apparently has warehouse & fulfillment operations in Edison, NJ, lists several openings there.



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Daily Links 6/11/2012: Comcast hunts for new studio COO, plans sports radio network

NBC gears up for massive Olympics coverage online and on TV (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Comcast studio hunts for new COO: sources (Reuters)

NBC Sports To Create Radio Network To Challenge Disney’s ESPN (Bloomberg)

Looking for the Apple TV? Look in Front of You. (Peter Kafka/All Things D)

Larry Ellison: His public versus private cloud (Vinnie Mirchandani/Enterprise Irregulars)

Oracle's hardware worries surface again as analysts eye Q4 (ZDNet Blogs)

Oracle-SAP Retrial Delayed (PC World)

Continue Reading

Daily Links 9/23/2011: Comcast developing "AnyPlay" iPad TV streaming service

Newton's BigBelly Solar is building an Internet of trash cans (Boston Globe)
BigBelly has many of its trash bins in Philadelphia.

Amazon air conditions centers after criticism (MarketWatch)

Dish’s ‘Blockbuster Movie Pass’ Aimed More Towards Subs, Not Netflix (paidContent)

Dish misses out on opportunity to cash in on Netflix missteps (Ars Technica)

Comcast Working on iPad TV Streaming Service Called AnyPlay (Mac Rumors)

Vishal Sikka Gets Real on SAP HANA Benefits and Barriers (ASUG News)

The Oracle Mark Hurd Wants You To Know
As Oracle has reshaped its business, some misconceptions have arisen, Hurd says. He wants to set you straight. (Information Week)

HP: How to polish a Silicon Valley gem (EE Times)

Nationwide Said to Be in Talks to Buy Harleysville (Bloomberg)

Stylish Eyewear Maker Warby Parker Tries On $12M In Funding (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)
New York-based online eyeglass retailer founded by Wharton students; First Round Capital an investor.



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Daily Links 9/16/2011: Pennsylvania joins DOJ suite against AT&T/T-Mobile merger

About 20% Of U.S. Consumers Prone To Dropping Pay-TV: Analysts
High Cost Of Services Most-Cited Reason for Not Subscribing, Credit Suisse Survey Finds (Multichannel News)

Time Warner Cable's Stern: We Have to Move Away from Monolithic TV Packages (Multichannel News)

Microsoft Sees Xmas Debut for Xbox TV (Light Reading Cable)

GOP lawmakers scrutinize LightSquared (Washington Post)

AT&T, T-Mobile merger faces new obstacle as seven states join DOJ lawsuit (Washington Post: Post Tech)
Pennsylvania is one of them.

New York Startup Warby Parker Raising A Big Round At ~ $100 Million Valuation (Silicon Alley Insider)
The New York-based online eyeglass vendor was co-founded by four Wharton students; First Round Capital has been one of its investors.


The Hottest Trends in HR Technology (Human Resources Executive Online)

SAP TechEd: SAP BW to Run on HANA Database by November (ASUG News)

4.0 Releases of Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management Solutions from the SAP BusinessObjects Portfolio Now Generally Available (PR Newswire)
A long awaited release.

Infosys May Buy Thomson Reuters’ Health-Care Unit, Business Standard Says (Bloomberg)



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