Philly Tech People News 2/21: Idinopulos leaves PeopleLinx, rejoins McKinsey; First Round Capital names first female partner

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Michael Idinopulos leaves PeopleLinx, rejoins McKinsey



Michael Idinopulos, who was PeopleLinx' Chief Marketing Officer from 2013 through 2015, has returned to McKinsey & Company, this time as VP Client Experience,  New Ventures, according to a recent update on his LinkedIn page.

Idinopulos was first with McKinsey in the mid-2000s leading firm-wide collaboration technology. His group launched some of the earliest enterprise-wide deployments of social technologies (blogs, wikis, microblogging, internal social networks), according his LinkedIn page.

He then ventured into the social enterprise world, first with Socialtext, one of the earliest technology platforms for social software inside the enterprise, and then with PeopleLinx. Among his achievements there was refocusing the company away from a dependence on LinkedIn to a more open approach built on the Salesforce platform.

New Ventures, the unit he is joining, is a tech startup within McKinsey that brings its best technology to its clients.


Idinopulos received his Ph.D., Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.

There is no CMO listed on PeopleLinx' website, and no word on whether its seeking a replacement, but Amaya Capellan, who has Princeton and Wharton degrees as well as a broad range of experience, has been on board as VP of Product since early 2015.



Birchbox Co-Founder Hayley Barna Joins First Round Capital as First Female Partner (Re/code)

 Visible change in First Round leadership ranks /
FRC website

AccuWeather Names Sarah Katt as VP
Product Development, Operations Exec Joins From Verizon (Multichannel News)

We’re excited to announce two additions to the Comcast Ventures entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIRs) program: Michelle Gonzalez and Noah Shanok. (Comcast)


TWO COMCAST NBCUNIVERSAL EXECUTIVES NAMED AMONG MULTICHANNEL NEWS’ WONDER WOMEN (Comcsst)

MissionOG adds Rob Metzger as Senior Advisor (PR Web)


HealthQX Continues To Grow & Attract Philadelphia Talent (Press Release)

Shannon Hartley, former head of Razorfish Health, joins nonprofit
(Medical Msrketing & Media)

NBCUniversal Cable Shakes Up Executive Team (The Wrap)

Yahoo Said to Start Approaching Possible Bidders Soon As Monday (Bloomberg)
Article suggests Comcast as potential bidder, but gives no evidence of its interest.

Saturday Highlights: York-based UFD connects into New Jersey; Signs of hyper activity in IoT market

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QVC laying off 100 in Pa., sending jobs abroad: Report
(Philadelphia Business Journal)

York-based UFD connects into New Jersey (York Dispstch)

Arris says its E6000 converged edge router is being used in Comcast DOCSIS 3.1 deployment (FierceCsble)


Rising Cloud Sales at Microsoft, Amazon Reflect Bigger Shift in Enterprise Market (Wall Street Journal: Digits)

AWS Remains Dominant Despite Microsoft and Google Growth Surges (Synergy
Research)



Data Center Stocks: Rackspace Pivot to Cloud Support Fails to Impress Investors (Dsts Center Knowledge)


Industrial and Consumer IoT Grow in Order of Magnitude
(Ed Ruth/ Verizon Ventures)

Amazon recruiting heavily for Echo and Alexa engineers, hosts big invite-only event to find talent (GeekWire)

Links 2/19: New IoT alliance formed; Salesforce Acquires PredictionIO To Build Up Its Machine Learning Muscle

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Microsoft, Samsung and others form IoT alliance to do what Apple and Google already are (The Next Web)


Limerick software firm to create 30 jobs with €5.5m investment (RTE)
Limerick (Ireland,not site of our beautiful nuke plant) software company Kneat, with a Philadelphia office, actually Norristown. Kneat offers a process validation platform for the Life Sciences companies.


Digital Place-Based Advertising Is Primed For Programmatic Growth (Ad Exchanger)
Mentions Vistar Media.

Salesforce Acquires PredictionIO To Build Up Its Machine Learning Muscle (TechCrunch)

Links 2/18: FCC approves controversial set-top proposal ; Epam Jumps 9% As Q4 Beats

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Epam Jumps 9% As Q4 Beats; Can Stock Challenge India Outsourcers? (Investor's
Business Dsily)


IBM Buys Truven For $2.6 Billion, Boosts Watson Health Unit (Information Week)

HHS adds more guidance for health app developers navigating HIPAA (Mobihealthnews)

FCC approves controversial set-top proposal by 3-2 vote (FierceCable)


Comcast offers credit for Monday's service outage (CNN Money)

Links 2/17: SAP Hybris Chief makes the case for YaaS; EPAM reports strong results

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Silicon Valley’s new darling: Healthcare (Accenture Strategy)
Accenture study suggests Silicon Valley can't address most health technology issues without the help of people more knowledgesble with the system.

SAP Integrates Apache Spark, Buys Into Mobile Analytics (Informstion Week)

Cloud platform wars – SAP Hybris Chief makes the case for YaaS (Diginomics)

EPAM Reports Results for Fourth Quarter and Full Year 2015 (Globe Newswire)
Beats estimstes hsndily.

6 Months After Fraud Cleanup, AppNexus Describes Impact On Its Exchange
(AD Exchanger)
AppNexus is a First Round Cspital portfolio compsny.

ESPN in Discussions to Get on Other Streaming Services (Re/code)

Grammy Report: Taylor Wins, CBS Live Stream Loses (Fortune)

Moore College of Art & Design hosting an event featuring women game artists on February 25

Tom Paine

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Alison Carrier, UI/UX Designer for Red Crow Austin
Panel Host
Courtesey Moore College of Art & Design 

Moore College of Art & Design has obviously gone through significant changes since its founding in 1848. Some of the most recent examples of that change will be on display on February 25.

With the growing popularity of its Animation & Game Arts major, Moore College of Art & Design, the first and only visual arts college for women in the U.S., is hosting an event featuring a dynamic roster of women game artists. The video game and technology industry has been seen as a male interest for the past 20 years. With this major, Moore hopes to close the gender gap.

Game Changers: Women Making Games, will be held on Thursday, February 25, 2016, from 6 – 8 pm at the College, 20th Street and The Parkway. The event is FREE and open to the public. RSVP at womenmakinggames.eventbrite.com.

This event will be live streamed at moore.edu/gamechangers


Game Changers will explore the role of women in the game art and mobile industry drawn from the experience of the speakers.

At 6 pm, Alison Carrier, a UI/UX Designer for Red Crow Austin, a mobile game studio created by Electronic Arts, will moderate a panel discussion about the future of the industry, among other topics. Panelists will include Nicole Kline, an analog game designer, writer and editor; Amanda Renfroe, Production Manager and 3D Character Animator at Steamroller Studios in Central Florida; and Kat Webster, a 3D character artist currently working at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic.

A meet-the-artists reception will follow at 7 pm. The panelists will return to Moore the following day, February 26, to speak with Animation & Game Arts students in their classrooms.

“This is the third year of this event and each year the audience becomes larger and more engaged,” said Stephen Wood, instructor of Animation & Game Arts. “The program is growing rapidly. When I took over the program in 2014, we had about eight students who were declared majors and today we are close to 30.”

This is also the first year that junior AGA majors (Moore, traditionally a two year school, hss sdded a BFA option) will seek out and complete their required summer internships. The Game Changers event is one way for students to start making industry connections, Wood said. “It’s very important to me that the students get out of their comfort zone and speak to professionals working in the field. Game Changers has always been a part of that goal. It’s a great experience for our students.”





PANELIST BIOS

Alison Carrier (Moderator) is currently a UI/UX Designer for Red Crow Austin, a mobile game studio created by Electronic Arts (EA). Known for her passion to deliver world-class user experiences, she has worked in EA’s mobile sphere on several projects, including her most recent work, The Simpsons: Tapped Out. http://www.gameongirl.com/podcast-posts/tag/red-crow-studio

Nicole Klineis busy as an analog game designer, writer and editor. She is half of the analog board game design team Cardboard Fortress Games, creator of the game RESISTOR_. Kline wrote the story for Monsters! by Quadratron Games, copy edited Grimm Bros.'s Dragon Fin Soup and has penned more video and board game reviews than she thought possible. She is the Senior Editor at Warp Zoned, a contributor at Geekadelphia, the co-founder of the Game Makers Guild Philadelphia, Gameloop Philly and Girl Geek Dinners Philadelphia. http://www.cardboardfortressgames.com

Amanda Renfroe is Production Manager and 3D Character Animator at Steamroller Studios in Central Florida. She is currently managing a nine-person team at Steamroller working towards the release of Deadwood: The Forgotten Curse (Kickstarted back in April). She is also animating on various contract work from studios like Volition, Edios, and other game/movie contracts at Steamroller. Renfroe received her B.F.A. a the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2013 and has a true love for facial animation.

Kat Webster is a 3D character artist currently working at BioWare on Star Wars: The Old Republic. She has been in the video games industry for nearly three years and has worked as a general 3D and environment artist, as well as having done her fair share of random design work. Webster received her Bachelor’s degree in Game Art and Design from the Art Institute of California in September 2012 and enjoys multiple aspects of art and design, but creature and character work is where her passion lies.
www.kat3d.weebly.com


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Phorum 2016 Demo Pit, with new format, seeking applicants through March 1

Tom Paine

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This year’s Phorum 2016 will be held on April 14 at The Fillmore Philadelphia.

Applications for this year's Phorum Demo Pit are open until March 1. The theme for this year's conference is "Systems of Insight," which is intended to examine how companies collect data about markets, customers, and businesses, convert that data into usable information, and apply institutional experience to turn information into knowledge or insights.

Since it was initiated in 2012, Phorum has served to energize the Philly area's Enterprise Systems community, bringing together the best and brightest minds from both in town and elsewhere. Many significant associations and ideas have grown from that.

The Demo Pit has been a launching pad or proving ground for some of the region's most promising ventures, including Curalate, Clutch, iMomentous (now Phenom People), and last year's winner Tesorio.

The Phorum 2016 Demo Pit competition will take a new, more interactive approach than in past years. Participants will now appear on stage in one of two sessions and will have an opportunity to pitch their companies to a panel of judges and the audience.

Nate Lentz, Managing Partner of Osage Partners will serve as the lead judge for the Demo Pit sessions and competition.

The Demo Pit committee is looking for startups with established products and/or services in the following areas: analytics (machine learning, natural language processing and predictive analytics), information management (big data) and cloud technologies.

Those interested can find the application form (pdf) here.

What Google Alerts show about Uber

Tom Paine

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Like many people, I rely on Google Alerts to track businesses and other topics I want to follow. I've got a few hundred of them, and though they aren't often the sources of my most important stories, some offer neat clues which lead eventually to great stories.

Since at the moment I've got most of my alerts in the same subsection of feedly, the reader I use, I see them all at the same time. And over the past couple of years, my Google Alerts have increasingly been dominated by Uber-related items.


Here is a sample of what my Uber Google Alerts showed over a period of a few hours today (press on text to highlight):

Its not a stream, its a torrent, and they tend to cover almost every aspect of society and most of the globe. I am sure there are people who do nothing but monitor these and other information streams about Uber.

TierPoint: Local presence important part of national data center strategy

Tom Paine

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One of the early acquisitions by a small St Louis-area data center operator was the former Philadelphia Technology Park at the Navy Yard in 2014. At the time, it didn't seem to make sense that a small company would reach so far from its territory.

Jerry Kent /
TierPoint website

J

But TierPoint was not just any small startup. It was founded by cable pioneer Jerry Kent, who was behind giant Charter Communications and later Suddenlink, another cable operator that was recently acquired by Altice for $9.1 billion.

Kent decided that it was time for him to move out of cable and is focusing his attention on growing TierPoint. In fact, he's bought several top managers from Suddenlink over to help run TierPoint.

TierPoint acquisitions /
TierPoint website

In the Northeastern market, TierPoint further upped its holdings by acquiring Xand in late 2014. Xand had acquired Bethlehem-based DBSi in 2012, adding three premium raised floor facilities in Pennsylvania. Two other southeastern Pennsylvania locations came through a later acquisition.

TierPoint's strategy is to focus geographically on Tier 2 (generally midsized) markets because "they continue to be emerging markets and provide the most opportunity for growth," said TierPoint Senior Vice President of Operations Bob Hicks. It hasn't invested much in mega datacenters, rather preferring small to medium-sized facilities with room for expansion when possible.

Bob Hicks is a Lehigh Valley native who came to TierPoint via DBSi and Xand. Until the day after I sopke with him last month, he was responsible for TierPoint's 6 local sites. But in late January, Hicks was named a Senior Vice President of Operations, with responsibilities for local operations and data centers in Arkansas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee.

Hicks said that when TierPoint entered the Philly-area market it was considered undeserved - demand outstripping capacity. Of course, capacity isn't a single dimension, but depends upon which market segment your talking about, in TierPoint's case the enterprise market. Now Hicks thinks its more back in balance, but not without its opportunities. TierPoint is for now looking mostly at expanding existing facilities. Last year it wrapped up a large expansion in Valley Forge -a 17,000 square foot POD. At TekPark (Allentown), its adding a 13,500 square foot POD slated to go live by the end of September.

Expansion at the Navy Yard is still a future possibility, Hicks tells me, but there are some constraints. One he cited is the way energy distribution, managed at the Navy Yard by DTE Energy, is handled.

I mentioned to Hicks that one reason technology rollups such the kind that TierPoint
is attempting fail is a lack of integration planning and execution. Different locations are running a variety of legacy systems, and its not so easy to get them running on the same page. Hicks says 2016 is the year to achieve that integration, and a number of very knowledgeable people are identifying and sharing best practices and technologies.

TierPoint's acquisition strategy is nationwide in scope and has not slowed. The largest deal, as far as I know, is its October 2015 deal to buy the data center operations of Windstream Communications for $575 million. Windstream had acquired D&E Communications of Ephrata, PA a few years ago, but spun most of those assets off into a separate company prior to its Tierpont deal. But two Windstream data centers in the area from its 2011 acqusition of PAETEC, one in Conshohocken and one in Bethlehem, were included in the TierPoint transaction.

TierPoint has strong backers. In addition to local investors like the aptly named Redbird Capital (think baseball), it has regional powerhouse Stephens Inc (think Walmart IPO), the huge Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, and most recently PE giant TA Associates.

The larger question here is what's the endgame? Can what TierPoint is doing fundamentally effect data center economics?  One example could be large enterprises that want centralized but geographically distributed and differentiated applications. But isn't that what the Cloud, or Amazon Web Services, can already do?  Or is it to simply build a strong national brand with local points of presence?

Links 2/16: Birchbox Co-Founder Hayley Barna Joins First Round Capital as First Female Partner

Birchbox Co-Founder Hayley Barna Joins First Round Capital as First Female Partner (Re/code)

 Visible change in First Round leadership ranks /
FRC website

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: Don’t Regulate Us to Death Like the Jitney (Re/code)

Things Uber CEO Travis Kalanick May Have Said In His TED Talk Today (Gizmodo)


Comcast floods the Twittersphere with X1 tweets (Philly.com)



Venmo crosses $1B monthly transfers for the first time (The Next Web)


Randall’s Take (CableFax)
(AT&T chmn/CEO Randall Stephenson’s tske on FCC's chsnces in court.)


SAP Brings Advanced Analytics to More Fingertips, Buys Roambi (CMS Wire)