Philly Tech People News 7/3/2011

E-retailing veteran Fiona Dias is leaving GSI (Internet Retailer)

SCTE Elevates Three Staffers
Group Promotes DiGiacomo, Harris and Russell; Retains Hughey and Wright as Subject-Matter Consultants (Multichannel News)

RDC Names Frank R. Sanchez to Board of Directors (Business Wire)

T-Mobile Appoints Marty Pisciotti as Vice President General Manager of Greater Philadelphia Tri-State Region to Oversee Local Sales and Operations (Business Wire)

Comcast extends employment contract for CEO Brian Roberts (LA Times: Company Town)

How Comcast makes its Skype integration look seamless (Gigaom)

Daily Links 7/1/2011: Comcast Shutters NBC Universal Digital Studio

Comcast exec David Cohen raises at least $1.2 million for Obama (Washington Post)

Google Inc. among those in preliminary talks to buy Hulu (LA Times: Company Town)

Comcast Shutters NBC Universal Digital Studio
Eleven Positions Affected; Third Season Of American Family Insurance Series in Limbo (Ad Age)

Providence Equity to Buy Blackboard for $1.64 Billion in Education Deal (Bloomberg)
Providence Equity was part of the consortium that lead the LBO of SunGard in 2005, and has other interests in the Education market. Its not inconceivable that Blackboard eventually could end up
being combined with SunGard Higher Education, if that makes strategic sense.

Salesforce places bets on HTML5 (ZDNet Blogs)

InterDigital Rallies Following Strong Nortel Patent Auction (Forbes: The Tech Trade)

Verizon 'Evaluating' Usage-Based Pricing for FiOS, DSL
Still Leaving the Door Open to the Idea (Broadband Reports)

TiVo $2.4B Takeover Seen After Fight With Dish (Bloomberg)

Fiserv Acquires Payments Provider CashEdge for $465 Million (Bank Systems & Technology)
Exit for Bala Cynwyd's Susquehanna Growth Equity.

D.G. Yuengling & Son, Inc. to Brew Up Process Automation with Integrated ERP Software (PRLog)
Implements system from Wayne-based Deacom.


LLR Partners Leads a Recapitalization of Bristol-based Strategic Distribution, Inc. (LLR Press Release)



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Daily Links 6/30/2011: DreamIt Ventures teams up Ben Franklin Tech Partners, local angel investors, to keep more startups in Philly

Accelerator DreamIt Ventures gets on the cash bandwagon (Gigaom)
Aims to team up with local angels and Ben Franklin Technology Partners to keep more promising startups in Philly.
Ben Franklin press release.

Domain-name expansion likely to create turf wars (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Obama in Philly Thursday
Comcast exec, young professionals host two DNC events to raise campaign cash (NBC Philadelphia)

Comcast Gets Two More Weeks To Respond To Bloomberg Complaint
July 13 Deadline Moved to July 27 (Multichannel News)

Scripps Sets $1 Billion Buyback in Sign Cable Programmer Won’t Seek Buyer (Bloomberg)

Why Adobe is losing the mobile development war (GoMo News)
Lancaster's appMobi introduces appFlash.

Delaware, Philadelphia advertisers team up (Wilmington News Journal)

HP: Break ‘Em Up? (Forbes: The Tech Trade)

SAP’s four dimensions of SaaS success (Enterprise Irregulars)

ShopRunner kicks up the pace
The Amazon Prime competitor plans an e-wallet and a monthly subscription option. (Internet Retailer)
One of the important pieces left over after eBay acquired most of GSI Commerce.

Technology-in-education conference reaches out to tweeters (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Lokadot Launches Free iPhone App for Philadelphians and 'Old City' Tourists for 4th of July Weekend (PR Newswire)



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More First Round Capital portfolio news; Square, RockMelt get big investments

Following up on two companies I discussed in yesterday's First Round Capital Roundup: Mobile payments processor Square has raised $100 million in a third round of funding led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers; the new financing values the company at more than $1 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. Square also added another powerful Board member, Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker. Square was founded by Twitter's Jack Dorsey; First Round Capital invested in its Series A round in 2009.

While Facebook has been working closely with social web browser RockMelt on product integration, Facebook has not invested in the startup. But now one of its major backers has; Accel Partners teamed up with Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz to lead a $30 million round. Accel's Jim Breyer will join RockMelt's board. Marc Andreessen of Andreessen Horowitz knows a little bit about browsers, having been behind the development of Netscape. First Round Capital also reinvested in this round.


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Comcast Exec to Network Bigs: 'We have to get out of our own way' (Adweek)

Cable TV looks to go social to keep audiences tethered
Facebook-like features would join recent upgrades that allow customers to watch on smartphones, tablets (Chicago Tribune)

Oracle Acquires Larry Ellison-Backed Storage Company Pillar Data Systems (TechCrunch)

$35 million invested in McCandless start-up (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Pittsburgh area venture has technology for fraud-proof credit and debit cards.

SAP Ventures Leads $14M Round In Collaborative Sales Software Developer SAVO (TechCrunch)

Domino Sugar Wins Big With SAP In Cloud (Information Week)

Lawson Shareholders Approve Sale to Infor (PC World)

Analysts: Capital One may not stop at ING acquisition (Wilmington News Journal: Delaware Inc)

First Round Capital Roundup: 6/28/2011

Plenty of things going on in the Wonderful World of First Round Capital, perhaps at even more than the usual rapid pace.

First, locally, portfolio company Monetate of Conshohocken announced the winners of its first Open Source Prize: the First Prize winner was Michael Schroeder's Rx Shortages, a mobile application designed to help doctors and hospitals access information about drug shortages. Winners get a lot of neat tech stuff and most importantly, a month's supply of pizza and Mountain Dew. The winners where honored last week in an “Open Source Open Bar” event in Philly last week.
Monetate currently has about 50 employees and hopes to have 100 one year from now if it can find the engineers it needs locally, the Inquirer reports.

Still curious about the lack of an announcement on First Round's apparent investment in Radnor's Relay Network, although First Round, NewSpring and ICG are clearly listed as investors on Relay's website. I reported on the disappearing Wikipedia entry for Relay back in April.

New Hope-based myYearbook cofounders (and siblings) Catherine Cook and CEO Geoff Cook were named Ernst & Young Entrepreneurs Of The Year for the Greater Philadelphia area. Catherine Cook was still in high school when she help start the company, which says its annual revenue run rate is now at $30 million.

More on the Channel Intelligence/Click Equations deal: CEO Lucinda Duncalfe Holt (who is changing her name to Lucinda Bromwyn Duncalfe-not a divorce, as she explains here) is moving on; President Craig Danuloff will become Chief Product Officer at Channel Intelligence. The two companies have had a client relationship for years and have both been in ICG's portfolio, though I'm not sure how exactly they fit together or what the future plans are for Click Equations under Channel Intelligence. ClickEquations had 12 employees at the time of the deal, according to an article in the Inquirer.


First Round Managing Partner Chris Fralic gives us a photographic portfolio of the signs that carry the names of some Bucks County estates, a place "where people excessively name their houses", he says.

Going on elsewhere: Josh Kopelman participated in a VC panel at the Churchill Club in California earlier this month, talking about how he pitched and didn't pitch Half.com, among other things. The Wall Street Journal writes about Silicon Valley's Alpha Club, a networking group for entrepreneurs that First Round helps fund.
First Round's Charlie O'Donnell reports on "Dinner with Werner" (Amazon Web Services' CTO Werner Vogels that is) with some First Round people recently.

Mobile payments startup Square, in which First Round has a stake, made two very high-profile additions to its board; former US Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers, and venture capitalist Vinod Khosla.


Portfolio company Turntable.fm is getting a lot of buzz and users; a complete pivot (as Managing Partner Howard Morgan writes) from a startup originally named Stickybits, Turntable.fm lets users play DJ and build up points based on their audiences. AdKeeper, which has raised funds at a $100 million plus valuation, fortunately says people are actually keeping online ads, which is what the service is designed to do. Facebook has teamed up with RockMelt's social web browser with an integration that Facebook apparently invested a good deal of time developing (though Facebook is not an investor in the company).

ROBLOX, a neat-sounding startup that lets kids build virtual games which simulate real life, raised a $4 million second round with First Round returning as co-lead investor. SimpleGeo has teamed up with Factual to expand its Places API; if I understand it correctly SimpleGeo is going to focus its business on its API with Factual providing more of the location data.



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Daily Links 6/28/2011: Updata Partners leads $18 million investment in Plymouth Meeting's Pet360

Mark Suster: Understanding the Changes in the Software & Venture Capital Industries (PE Hub)

Updata Partners Leads $18 Million Investment in Plymouth Meeting-based Pet360, Inc. (PR Newswire)

ThingWorx Acquires AlwaysOn Developer Palantiri Systems (TechCrunchIT)

Safeguard Scientifics Realizes $145.4 Million in Aggregate Cash Proceeds from Shire’s Acquisition of Advanced BioHealing
Transaction Expected to Generate 13x Cash-on-Cash Return to Safeguard (Business Wire)

Enterprise Social Vendors Play Own Game Of Survivor (Information Week)

Hulu Buyers Would Get Exclusive Content, With Strings Attached
(All Things Digital)

Toys R Us to work more with EBay (Reuters)

SunGard Reaches Agreement to Acquire FINACE (SunGard Press Release)

MobileMD and Main Line Health Ink Five-Year Contract Extension (PR Newswire)

Local Developers Create Game Based on Philly Cyclists
UPenn students spent two years developing new iPad and iPhone game (NBC Philadelphia)



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Daily Links 6/27/2011: Comcast may want NFL Thursday Night package

SBJ: NFL Shopping Eight-Game Thursday Night TV Package, Turner, Comcast Interested (MediaBistro)
While Comcast is definitely trying to upgrade Versus, I don't think they want to go head to head with ESPN right now, as some are writing.

Report: Hulu courting a 'range' of potential suitors (CNET News)

Ron Meyer's contract as Universal Studios president extended through 2015 (LA Times: Company Town)

FCC’s net neutrality rules about to be official, and invite lawsuits (Washington Post: Post Tech)

Safeguard Scientifics Leads $35 Million Financing for NovaSom (Business Wire)

Penn Students Leave School to Launch CourseKit With $1 Million Seed Round (TechCrunch)
Will be based out of New York, though.

Growing Philly software firm asks: Where are the engineers?
(Philly.com: Philly Deals)


ICG Commerce Acquires Neuwing Energy Ventures -- Unlocking the Many Sides of Green (Spend Matters)

Oracle Fusion Applications Pricing Revealed (PC World)

Why Google Health Really Failed—It’s About The Money (TechCrunch)

McKesson Buys Portico To Gain ACO Financial Tools (Information Week)

Marimow quits Philly Inquirer for ASU Cronkite School post (Poynter)

Bell and Howell Finalizes Sale to Versa Capital (Business Wire)
Versa Capital is a Philly-based turnaround specialist.



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Philly Tech People News 6/26/2011

Philip Moyer Joins Safeguard Scientifics as Managing Director, Technology Group (Business Wire)

Sybase Appoints New President of Sybase 365 (PR Newswire)

Joint presidents to run Wolters Kluwer analytics biz (Medical Marketing & Media)

TAGSYS Names New VP of Sales & Marketing
Bruno Davoine will guide TAGSYS global go-to-market strategy (Business Wire)

David Adelman Elected to ICG Board of Directors (Globe Newswire via MarketWatch)

Health Market Science Appoints John Schultz as Executive Vice President of Sales (openPR.com)

NBC's Dietz Promoted to EVP of Affiliate Relations (Broadcasting & Cable)

ShootersINC Lands Acclaimed TV Producer John Foy To Run ShootersTV (SHOOTonline)

ERT Appoints Robert Kleiman MD to Chief Medical Officer (Realwire)

Deacom’s Rapid Ascent: Get to know the Newest Industry Specialists
(PRLog)

E-SoftSys Hires Jim DiNardo as VP of Operations for Self-Storage Software Division (PR Newswire)



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How Consumer Technology & User-Generated Content Are Changing Ed-Tech (ReadWriteWeb)
From ISTE'11 in Philadelphia.

Are they rising from the dot.com wreck? (Philly.com: Philly Deals)
Inquirer's Joe DiStefano on Radnor's Cross Atlantic Capital Partners, which I wrote about earlier this week.

Interview with Yoni Greenbaum of Philadelphia Media Network (Video: ScribeMedia)
Says there are other things Philly.com must do before its ready to implement paywall/metering.

Hulu Strikes Tentative Content Deals With Disney, News Corp., Say Sources (Hollywood Reporter)