LoKast and Qualcomm put more muscle into wireless file-sharing (VentureBeat)

Ben Franklin group announces $2M in early-stage grants (Philadelphia Business Journal)


Can Cable Block the Google TV Revolution? (Wired: Epicenter)

Drumming Up More Internet Addresses (New York Times)

Can Videoscape Save Cisco's Set-Top Business? (Light Reading Cable)

Samsung, SAP to Roll out Analytics for Android Devices (PC World)

HP To Acquire Analytics Specialist Vertica (Information Week)

First Round Capital Roundup: 2/12/2011

One Kings Lane, an online social shopping site focused on household furnishings in which First Round Capital was an early investor, has raised an additional $23 million led by Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. First Round also re-upped. The company, cofounded by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus’ wife Alison Pincus, reported that 2010 sales were up 500% over 2009. (See also Fortune article).


Another First Round portfolio company, Path, turned down a $100 million + incentives offer from Google, according to TechCrunch, instead taking a $8.5 million round led by Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures. Path, cofounded by Facebook veteran Dave Morin, is a mobile social network, and although it is still rather small Google is said to have wanted the talent base.


New York-based Tremor Media has acquired First Round portfolio company Transpera, expanding its online advertising platform into the mobile space. In November of last year, Tremor had acquired another First Round-backed company, SanScout, for a price reported to be at least $65 million. comScore has ranked Tremor a close second to Hulu in terms of the number of video ads served. Also, mobile data solutions platform Motricity agreed to acquire mobile marketing and advertising provider Adenyo for $100 million and incentives that could add up to $50 million more; Adenyo had acquired First Round-backed MoVoxx in 2010, although it is not known what, if any, First Round's resulting equity position in Adenyo might have been.


Digiday: Daily has a brief interview with Ari Jacoby, CEO of First Round-backed "CAPTCHA" advertsing service Solve Media, which has offices in New York and Philly. Gigaom has an article on BankSimple, a New York startup close to launching, which will not actually be a bank itself but rather provide a user-friendly, mobile-oriented platform for consumers to interface with smaller banks. BankSimple's CTO is Alex Payne, an early Twitter employee. The startup has raised $3.1 million to date from First Round Capital, Ron Conway and others. Truveris, a New York startup focused on providing automated pharmacy benefits review services (an area that King of Prussia's Health Market Science is also trying to get into) raised $3.8 million, led by GSA Venture Partners with First Round Capital also participating.


Josh Kopelman has joined GSI Commerce's Board of Directors, a move that appears to make sense in a number of ways, given his background in ecommerce and ad tech and the strength of many of First Round's portfolio companies in these areas. Kopelman also spoke at the Dow Jones Private Equity Analyst Outlook conference in New York late last month, emphasizing the need for general partners to align their fund size to “exit-market realities". “When I hop on a train in Philadelphia I can either take the local or the express,” the Wall Street Journal's Venture Capital Dispatch quoted him as saying. “I think most traditional VCs when they fund a company kind of buy an express ticket to an IPO. And I think what you’re seeing with some of these smaller funds, they’re buying a ticket on a local train".



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Philly Tech People News 2/13/2011

Kenexa CEO Rudy Karsan Hits Best Seller Lists With "We" (Marketwire)


Global Spectrum names Matthew Homan new GM at Wells Forgo Center, Tim Murphy promoted to Regional VP (Philly Ad Club News)

TrafficCast names Traffic.com co-founder as CEO (Milwaukee Business Journal)

BioNanomatrix Board Elects R. Erik Holmlin CEO (Business Wire)

Monetate Adds Seasoned Online Marketing Veteran Nathan Richter to Strategic Services Team (PR Web)

e-Dialog Appoints Joe Gagnon as Chief Client Officer and Executive Vice President of Product Marketing (Business Wire)

AMETEK Names Mark A. Gordon Vice President and General Manager (PR Newswire)

Former SAP Channel Executive Takes Top Sales Post At GFI Software (CRN)

CardioNet, Inc. Appoints Peter Ferola General Counsel and Senior Vice President, Corporate Development (Business Wire)

Former Huffington Post CEO Named to Journal Register Company Board of Directors (Marketwire)

Daily Links 2/11/2011: Lockheed Advanced Technology Laboratories' software helps predict unrest

Are Nokia And Microsoft Hoping Two Wrongs Make A Right? (Gigaom)

Pentagon’s Prediction Software Didn’t Spot Egypt Unrest (Wired: Danger Room)
Article says most promising work is being done at Lockheed's Advanced Technology Laboratories in Cherry Hill.

Snag great angel investors at OAF Philly - deadline next Friday (Gabriel Weinberg's Bog)
Great list of Angels attending.

New 24-hour traffic channel on TV here finding viewers (Philadelphia Inquirer)

CANOE, ANA ANNOUNCE INITIAL PARTICIPANTS IN THEIR CEE MEE INITIATIVE TO STUDY INTERACTIVE TV ADS (Interactive TV Today)

New look, new faces emerge at NECN
After ownership change, news network retools to appeal to younger viewers (Boston Globe)

FCC Chiefs to Testify at GOP Net Neutrality Hearing (Wireless Week)

Cisco: 'We Are Not Exclusively in the Set-Top Box Business' (Multichannel News: BIT RATE)

SAP’s business intelligence roadmap still a mystery to most (SAP Watch)

SNBL USA Purchases Provantis Preclinical Solution Suite; 500 Users to be Deployed (Business Wire)



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Daily Links 2/10/2011: NBC, Versus said to have inside track on NHL deal

Costs drag down GSI Commerce 4Q earnings by 32 pct (Bloomberg)

NBC, Versus have inside track on NHL deal (SI.com: Red Light)

Mobile payment startup builds buzz through causes (Reuters)
On Philly's Xipwire.

Sprint in 'Good' Talks With Clearwire on Financing (Light Reading Cable)

Cisco Cable Set-Top Sales Tumble Again
Vendor Pins Turnaround Hopes on 'Videoscape' Converged TV Strategy (Multichannel News)

Arris Revenue Falls On Weaker Sales To Comcast, TWC
Revenue Drops 11.3% for Fourth Quarter of 2010, Income Plummets 66% (Multichannel News)

Verizon iPhone Lines Inversely Proportional to Verizon iPhone Rumors (All Things Digital: Digital Daily)

Dish Network stock jumps amid talk of AT&T bid (LA Times)

Phila. Early Stage Venture Showcase report (Philadelphia Business
Journal)

Pulse Electronics Corporation Reports Fourth Quarter Results
(Business Wire)

ENIAC Day to celebrate dedication of Penn’s historic computer (Penn Current)




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GSI Commerce to Acquire Fanatics, Inc.
Company announces new $400 million credit agreement and $50 million share repurchase authorization (Business Wire)
Acquisition valued at about $277 million.

GSI Commerce Reports Fiscal 2010 Year and Fourth Quarter Operating Results
(Business Wire)

Clearwire Said to Stop Retail Expansion, Keep Existing Stores in Save Cash (Bloomberg)

Defense contractor Kratos buying Herley Industries (Bloomberg)
Herley Industries is based in Lancaster.


Data Centers Offer Hope for St. Louis Office Market (New York Times)
Highlighted by Unisys's new software development center.

DDMAC's Abrams gives update on policy making (Medical Marketing & Media)

Time Warner Cable slapped for "fiber optic" claims (Reuters)
The ads by Time Warner Cable and some other cable companies misusing the term "fiber optic" to compare themselves to FiOS are absolutely deceptive.

Comcast's Next Big Battle May Be in Its Backyard (Daily Finance)
I'm not sure Comcast agrees with one of the premises of this article: that the agreement with the FCC necessarily changed the terms under which it must offer Comcast SportsNet programming
to others.

Daily Links 2/8/2011: Josh Kopelman joins GSI Commerce board

Rediscovering WWII's female 'computers' (CNN)

Ken Olsen, cofounder of Digital, dead at 84 (Boston Globe)

SAP preps 'huge' BI upgrade (Computerworld)

A Techie Explains Just What Happened With San Diego Comic Con 2011 Ticket Sales (Or Lack Of) (Bleeding Cool)
Post by Keith Fitzgerald, VP Engineering at Ticket Leap.

GSI Commerce Elects Josh Kopelman to its Board of Directors (Business Wire)

Was Eric Schmidt Wrong About the Historical Scale of the Internet? (Read Write Cloud)
RJMetrics cofounder Robert J. Moore gets to the bottom of it.

Kenexa Announces Financial Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2010 (Business Wire)

Vishay's 4Q profit boosted by improving sales (AP via Bloomberg)

Bubble Bubble, Toil and Trouble – or Not? (Safeguard Scientifics Blog)

Airgas Ruling Still to Come (New York Times: DealBook)

Entercom Communications Corp. Reports Fourth Quarter and 2010 Annual Results
Announces 7% Increase in Same Station Net Revenue and 22% Increase in Free Cash Flow in Fourth Quarter (Business Wire)

Daily Links 2/7/2011: Zucker says NBC tried to buy Huffington Post for 18 months

SAP's Business ByDesign Gets Software Development Kit (PC World)

SAP Business ByDesign Graduates From App To Platform (Information Week)

Salesforce.com Rides Chatter Momentum Toward $2 Billion (Information Week)

Epocrates Opens The Door For Health IT (Wall Street Journal: Venture Capital Dispatch)

A Duck & a Wiki Team Up Against the Content Farms (Read Write Web)

Lehigh Valley angel investor group launches (Allentown Morning Call)

Zucker: NBC tried to buy Huffington Post for 18 months, couldn’t agree on price (Poynter)

COMCAST SPOTLIGHT TOUTS SURVEY CLAIMING 67% OF COMCAST SUBS INTERESTED IN INTERACTIVE TV (Interactive TV Today)

Saying goodbye to cable
More TV consumers are using the Internet or even an old-fashioned antenna (Wilmington News Journal)



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TicketLeap snags Comic-Con assignment but runs into some issues

Philadelphia-based online ticketing startup TicketLeap got a bit more publicity than it bargained for yesterday morning when ticketing for the popular Comic-Con 2011 event (to be held in San Diego) went live, as its system quickly went to overcapacity after the 9 am (Pacific) start time, and the problems apparently lasted up to four hours. This was particularly troublesome since the Geek-oriented convention had turned to TicketLeap after two previous failed attempts with another vendor, and TicketLeap had tried to carefully test out its system for the event with a trial run in December. Reaction was so widespread that TicketLeap was briefly trending globally on Twitter.


TicketLeap CEO Chris Stanchak, who responded yesterday on Twitter, posted on the TicketLeap Blog today about the situation. To summarize, he said that although they tried to prepare for heavy demand it still was more than they expected, and as they tried to adjust the scale of their infrastructure with Amazon Web Services during the day, a yet to be specified "bottleneck" prevented the necessary adjustments from taking effect quickly. Not clear whether that bottleneck was more TicketLeap's
or Amazon's problem; a basic benefit of Amazon Web Services is that it is supposed to be fairly elastic in expanding to meet customer capacity requirements. Chris says TicketLeap will follow up with a more technical explanation in the next few days.

Update: TicketLeap's post on the technical issues.



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PhillyDeals: Pa. pension plan's woes are costing taxpayers (Philly.com)

What it's like to cut the cord and stop paying for TV (Washington Post)

Philly Tech People News 2/6/2011

Ulticom Names Bruce Swail CEO (Marketwire)

LLR Partners Expands Investment Team with Four Hires (Business Wire)

Grant Thornton announces next Phila. leader (Philadelphia Business Journal)

Apollo Health Street Adds New Vice President of Sales in the Northeast (Business Wire)

Unisys Federal Systems Appoints New Leaders for Civilian Agencies, Homeland Security and Sales (PR Newswire)