Lights out for local Jersey Shore TV station (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Bankruptcy judge: Aereo can sell its TV stream tech—with some caveats (Ars Technica)
Pa. program funds university-industry research (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Lights out for local Jersey Shore TV station (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Bankruptcy judge: Aereo can sell its TV stream tech—with some caveats (Ars Technica)
Pa. program funds university-industry research (Pittsburgh Tribune-Review)
Philly Tech People News 12/28/2014: News on Comcast execs; Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at Penn Medicine named
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Comcast signs Smit through 2019; WSJ: Angelakis ranks high among CFOs; Burke's NBC News issues (Philly Tech News)
Vertex Hires Executive to Lead Expansion in Latin America (Business Wire)
Echo Therapeutics Announces Scott W. Hollander as President & Chief Executive Officer (PR Newswire)
Rackspace Appoints Kevin Costello to Board of Directors (Marketwire via CNN)
Costello served as President of Ariba before and after its acquisition by SAP.
Jason Moore Named Director of the Institute for Biomedical Informatics at Penn Medicine (Penn News)
University of the Sciences president steps down (Philadelphia Business Journal)
Nextdoor, with Comcast Ventures as one of its investors, partners with Philly, while EveryBlock expands to new cities
Tom Paine
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In late 2013, it raised $60 million from John Doerr, Tiger Global and others to bring its total funding to over $100 million at a probable valuation of over $500 million. Another investor in that round was Comcast Ventures.
I don't see anything in the announcement that suggests that Nextdoor is offering Philadelphia something unique to that service that couldn't be found in other communities it is available in around the country. It is essentially a bulletin
board that can create separate communities for neighborhoods with cities or counties, and group messages by various topics within those communities. The feature it did add in September that may be particularly helpful to Philadelphia is Nextdoor for Public Agencies. This allows government agencies to communicate with residents on Nextdoor targeted to selected neighborhoods. Before this, residents could only communicate with other verified residents in a neighborhood.
No money is being exchanged in either direction, Technical.ly Philly reported, citing a City spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Comcast has expanded its back from the dead, wholely-owned EveryBlock to Houston, Boston, Chicago, Denver and Philadelphia, all cities served by Comcast Cable. Though different in stylistics, both services are trying to serve the same function towards the same basic goal - generating local revenue, though there doesn't seem to be too much of that yet. From what I've seen so far, EveryBlock seems to be preseeded with more local information, while Nextdoor is basically just a bulletin board, though that may not be true everywhere.
That Comcast owns Everyblock while Comcast Ventures has a stake in Nextdoor is not surprising. Comcast Ventures has its own investment strategy, though there might be a chance that the two might fit together in some manner down the road.
@phillytechnews @PhiladelphiaGov We need to work with every channel that helps us connect people and neighborhoods to one another
— Adel Ebeid (@adelebeid) December 17, 2014Interestingly, Nextdoor's CEO and co-founder is a Philly native, Nirav Tolia, though he grew up mostly in Odessa (Friday Night Lights) Texas. From there he headed to Stannford and a somewhat controversial but successful Silicon Valley career.
Links 12/26/2014: One view of Enterprise market in 2015; FCC proposal could bring Aereo back to life
The Enterprise In 2015 (TechCrunch)
Outlook of Emergence Capital, which invested in Salesforce, SuccessFactors, Veeva Systems, and Box.
Comcast’s secret hotline for special cardholders really exists. But it’s not much different from the regular one. (Washington Post: The Switch)
How David Gregory Lost His Job
(The Washingtonian)
FCC proposal may set stage for Aereo comeback (SNL Capitol Connection)
TechCelerator Companies Graduate From Business Bootcamp (State College.com)
The state of consumer fintech
(Tanay Jaipuria/Medium)
Indian E-Commerce Is on Fire. What Will Amazon and Alibaba Do About It? (Re/code)
Grants worth $115,000 to aid two Bethlehem tech firms (Penn Business Daily)
Today in Philly Tech history 12/16/2014; Transistor invented at Bell Labs 67 years ago (Some say 12/23/47)
Tom Paine
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 |
| Souce: Wikipedia |
Sixty-seven years ago (December 16, 1947), the transistor was invented at Bell Labs in New Jersey when researchers William Shockley, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain were able to use germanium crystal to create an amplifier that boosted an input signal by 100 times. Some cite the date as December 23, when it was first demonstrated to Bell Labs officials. The three would share the Nobel Prize for physics in 1956.
Michael Kanellos, in a piece for ReadWriteWeb , writes that "the center of the computing industry, by rights, should be King of Prussia, Pennsylvania", given the proximity of Bell Labs, companies like Sperry Rand (which grew out of the ENIAC project at Penn and later merged with Burroughs to form Unisys) and TV and radio manufacturers such as RCA and Philco who were doing advanced electronics research. Also important were RCA's research lab in Princeton, and Western Electric (AT&T's manufacturing arm) facilities in Allentown and Reading. A couple of other pioneering companies I would mention are Kulicke & Soffa and Technitrol (now Pulse). In addition, the engineering and scientific resources of schools like Penn, Princeton and Drexel were valuable assets.
So with all these pieces in place, why did the Philadelphia/New Jersey region fail to become what Silicon Valley is today? Although I doubt its so simple, Kanellos cites the often-told story of William Shockley departing for Palo Alto (where he was raised, actually), and others who followed him west, as being a critical turning point. Shockley's erratic personality drove away many who worked for him, but several of those people went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel.
Just a few links 12/24: "The Interview" is streaming; 45 Philly cab companies sue Uber
Sony Plans to Stream “The Interview” On Its Own Site — and On Google’s Play and YouTube. (Re/code)
As Comcast merger enters final phase, deal may be on thin ice (Gigaom)
Uber sued by 45 Philadelphia taxi companies (Philadelphia Business Journal)
Comcast signs Smit through 2019; WSJ: Angelakis ranks high among CFOs
Tom Paine
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In an SEC filing today, Comcast said that Neil Smit, President & CEO of Comcast's Cable business, has signed up until 2019, with a salary hike and additional financial inducements.
If the merger with Time Warner Cable goes through, he is going to be managing an expanded empire.
Meanwhile, the Inquirer's Bob Fernandez reports that Comcast"s vice chairman and CFO, Michael Angelakis, was rated as the third most effective CFO by the Wall Street Journal, based on Comcast's return on invested capital, operating margin, dividend growth, and share buybacks over the last three years.
Brian Roberts' other top lieutenant, Steve Burke, is receiving heat for his management of NBC News, but he is typically stereotyped as the guy from Comcast who doesn't understand the news biz, which overlooks his early experience with ABC.
Philadelphia Magazine reported last month that Burke's Rittenhouse Square home was finally sold or was under contract after being on the market for a long time, but I'm sure he can still get pretty good digs when he's in town.
Center City-based Cloudamize, helping customers manage Cloud spending, ramps for growth
Tom Paine
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Cloudamize, not to be confused with another Philly startup, Cloudmine (though both are MissionOG portfolio companies), is looking at a large market opportunity.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon's massive public cloud computing service, is estimated to be closing in on a $5 billion annual run rate, growing at 40%. Many large enterprises, medium-sized companies and startups have migrated all or parts of their information processing to it. But the need to optimize AWS spend, which is usually more complex than one can analyze on a spreadsheet, is becoming greater as the amount spent grows.
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| Khushboo Shah / Cloudamize website |
Shah hold a PHD in Electrical Engineering from Southern Cal and was working for a Princeton firm when she began formulating the ideas behind Cloudamize. After completing the DreamIt program, she launched it on a shoestring, and in
September 2013 received $1.2 million in VC funding from Philly-based VC firms MissionOG and Gabriel Ventures. It now has 17 employees, mostly in Philadelphia but a few in India and elsewhere, and plans to add about 5 more over the next couple of months.
In November, Cloudamize added two senior execs, Jonathan Kanarek (HP, Tenduit) as chief operating officer and Gabrielle Smith (Amazon Web Services) as vice president of sales and business development. In October, Cloudamize said it had tripled its customer base over the past six months. It demonstrated the enhancements that have driven its growth at AWS re:Invent, AWS' big user conference, in November.
It also extended its addressable market to cover Microsoft's Azure, which is considered the second largest public cloud provider. Next year it plans to add a couple of more public cloud providers, and then add a private cloud platform (my guess: something related to VMware) into the mix to begin analyzing hybrid cloud issues for customers, Shah told me in a phone interview.
Cloudamize helps customers pre-plan moving workload to the public cloud, then monitors their monthly usage on AWS to optimize workload and costs. "Today when customers think about moving to the cloud they need to first understand the cost prior to moving their infrastructure," Shah said. "They need to figure out their existing infrastructure and application inventory and understand what it will look like and how much it will cost when they move that to the cloud. Today this exercise is done manually and it's pure guesswork. We automate that via a SaaS application. We collect over a half a million data points per workload per day and map existing infrastructure and applications to the cloud. We provide TCO (total cost of ownership) and performance analytics that defines cloud migration roadmap based on their data and hence the guesswork is eliminated."
Cloudamize markets primarily to SMEs (small & medium-sized enterprises) who have a few hundred to thousands of servers. It relies mostly on channel partners for sales. Pricing can range from a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands.
There are competitors, several having 'cloud' in their names (Cloudyn, CloudCheckr, Cloudability), and some have raised more money to this point, but Shah believes her product is distinguished by the granularity of the data it collects and bases its analyses on, and the degree to which it is productized in a SaaS application.
When I asked Shah if AWS was receptive to companies like Cloudamize, she responded that under Jeff Bezos' leadership at Amazon delivering value to customers has always been emphasized, and AWS was no different. It has been quite helpful, she said. That is different from some enterprise vendors I know of who aren't known for going out of their way to help customers reduce how much they spend with them.
Shah expects that Cloudamize will be seeking its next round of financing some time during 2015.
Links 12/23/2014: Report: NJ software fiasco leaves thousands of Medicaid recipients stranded
N. J. Medicaid fiasco: Thousands stranded without coverage, no fix in sight (NJ.com)
Comcast-TW Cable Opposition Heats Up Even With Another FCC Delay (Variety)
Comcast, Merger Foes Trade Familiar Arguments in Last Round of FCC Comments (Variety)
In world of CFOs, Comcast's Angelakis highly rated (Philadelphia Inquirer)
Salesforce: Drexel Starts at Hold; Cloud Cash Flow Disappoints (Barron's Tech Trader
Daily)
Exit Interview: What's next for Tibco founder Vivek Ranadivé? (Fortune)
Paoli tech: Zonoff demos office apps at DuckDuckGo (Philly.com: Philly Deals)
Seeding the cloud — AWS gives credits with select edX certs (Gigaom)
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