Like many of Vince Gray’s appointments, Office of the Chief Technology Officer veteran Rob Mancini was made interim director when the last guy got dumped, and then given the job for real. Also typical of Gray hires: A deliberate, don’t-rush-into-anything style. Still, he’s presiding over one of the city’s most exciting developments in the form [...]

Like many new things in Bloomingdale, the plan to create a neighborhood-wide free wireless Internet cloud involves Big Bear Café at 1st and R streets NW. But where the café’s liquor license fight highlighted divisions within the gentrifying neighborhood, this plan began with a whiskey-fueled conversation about how to transcend them.
“A [...]

Bloomingdale newshound Scott Roberts caught one of the stranger juxtapositions ever to grace a commercial break: An ad for Comcast's $30 billion acquisition of NBC Universal filmed in that indy-est of independent coffee shops, the Big Bear Cafe. Public interest groups have decried the deal as anticompetitive, and D.C.'s own Albritton Communications has been the [...]

Fight the Tower: Blum and Franco convinced Comcast to remove an eyesore.
Towering Accomplishment: Battling Comcast and Winning
If there were a list entitled “Corporate Behemoths You Don’t Want to Mess With,” Comcast might claim the top spot.
Type “Comcast and hate” into Google and 2.15 million results pop up. The first offers “A new reason to hate [...]