Will innovation finally come to the Delaware Waterfront?

For decades it has been a sore eye in Philadelphia’s case for its return as a great city of the world: the cement slab that is known as the Center City hub of Penn’s Landing.

Plans for casinos, condiminums and other massive corridor-wide development on Philadelphia’s main portion of the Delaware River have been designed, redrawn and withdrawn countless times. A $1 million grant from the William Penn Foundation is going to start to change of all of that, many involved say.

On Sunday, Mayor Nutter, City Councilman Frank DiCicco and William Penn Foundation President Feather Houstoun promised real progress in several tangible ways, including a park, a recreational trail and, yes, a formal master plan for entire waterfront.

Maybe you didn’t know about it. The news conference was held at Penn’s Landing. Why the Hell would you go there?

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Recap: 2009 Wharton Business Technology Conference

On Friday, Technically Philly was invited to attend the 2009 Wharton Business Technology Conference, held at the Park Hyatt at the Bellevue. The event included 50 speakers, panelists, and moderators from the technology industry and boasts that it is Philadelphia’s largest technology event. That may be true, but we’re still paralyzed by the conference’s creepy marketing photograph, pictured above.

Keynotes were presented by Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft‘s Business Division, Ahmed Mahmoud, CIO of AMD, and Clay Van Doren, Managing Director Service Design and VoIP at BT. And panels covered topics ranging from tech entrepreneurship and venture capital to cloud computing and going mobile. We showed up wearing jeans, in a sea of suits, wondering what all the fuss was about.

Our thoughts on the panels we were able to attend, details on how Philly got snubbed, and ruminations on Microsoft’s future (it involves Minority Report), after the jump.

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Knight foundation sending $1.35 million to Philly green tech sector

Grants totaling $1.35 million that are dedicated to creating jobs in Philadelphia’s burgeoning green tech industry were pledged by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation on Friday, according to the organization’s press release.

“I expect Philadelphia will be the nation’s capital of green jobs,” Mayor Michael Nutter said. “Whether you have a GED or a Ph.D., there is a green job for you.”

The grants include a series of new initiatives, like the proposed John S. and James L. Knight Green Jobs Training Center, which will focus on moving low-skilled workers into higher-paying careers focused on green technology. It is scheduled to open in 2010, to be run by the city’s Energy Coordinating Agency and funded by a $1.1 million grant from the Miami-based foundation. The center is planned to be a 20,000 square-foot hub for the best green tech training providers in the country.

The announcement came on the same day Vice President Joe Biden was in Philadelphia to discuss leveraging growing green economies to offer better paying jobs.

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