Technically Not Tech: How Happier.com will make itself money and you, well, happier

They offer a path to happiness, for five bucks.

Based on research from a noted University of Pennsylvania psychologist and coordinated by a team of three telecommuters in various Philadelphia neighborhoods, Happier.com is on the forefront of positive psychology and research dissemination.

Last week, the site rolled out a Freemium-style revenue strategy to its 20,000 users — a $4.99 monthly subscriber charge for full access to the site..

“The best researchers get up everyday trying to figure out how to get a grant, write a paper, be seen to fund their work,” said Andrew Rosenthal, a co-founder. “We get up everyday building tools for people to use this research.”

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Special Event Highlights: Entrepreneurship Week

The economy has been rough.

We know it all too well here at Technically Philly. Jobs are sparse and all that sittin’ around gets you to thinking: What if you took your talents, your Rolodex and that unemployment check and started your own business?

The The Empowerment Group‘s Entrepreneurship Week—running all week long—is chock-full of 13 events to learn about starting or super-powering your business. And every last minute of it is free.

As promised in our events roundup earlier this morning, find out what’s going on this week throughout the city, after the jump. For more events, visit our events calendar.
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Events highlights for the week of April 20 – April 26, 2009

We’re extremely excited about our event calendar this week. It’s got everything from design, to web hosting basics, to news innovation. We couldn’t ask for more. Except that you get out there and support the community by attending one of these swell opportunities.

All week, the Empowerment Group‘s Entrepreneurship Week is chocked-full of great opportunities to learn about starting or super-powering your business. Be sure to read our highlights of the week-long event.

Philadelphia Standards Organization has three top-notch designers talking clean design and Web standards, and PANMA is hosting a discussion on the state of Web hosting in 2009, all on Tuesday. Thursday’s Junto is all culture, as several prominent artists, educators and organizations will discuss art criticism’s past, present and future.

Finally on Saturday, Technically Philly helps host its first event, BarCamp NewsInnovation Philadelphia. We hope all techies—journalistic or not—will join us to help change the news industry.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Friday Q&A: Roxanne Christensen, co-creator of SPIN-farming

Roxanne Christensen is a co-creator of SPIN-farming—Small Plot Intensive farming, a system of urban agriculture that is being marketed online—that is able to gross farmers more than $50,000 from a half-acre of terse, city land.

In 2000, Christensen, an online publisher and longtime Philadelphia resident, came across the blog of Wally Satzewich, a Canadian farmer who had recently become a city-based urban farmer.

Satzewich had set up a small, sub-acre plot in the backyard of his home in Saskatoon, a college-town in the Saskatchewan province. He soon realized that the small plot, rife with high-value crops and without large overhead expenses, had the same bottom line as his 20-acre lot outside of town. He ditched the big digs.

Christensen pitched the concept to the Philadelphia Water Department, who had been in touch with her about reducing maintenance costs on land that it owned in the city.

The pitch landed in the form of the Somerton Tanks project, a sub-acre demonstration farm in the Somerton neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia which earned $68,000 gross sales in its fourth year of operation. It has since closed because, as Christensen puts it, “we had proven what we needed to prove there.” Christensen and Satzewich launched the online SPIN-farming learning series in March 2006.

We talked with Christensen to see how the online distribution model has driven the concept and to see if it’s time for Technically Philly to ditch our computers and get our hands dirty.

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Friday Tech Links: Comcast and the NFL spar, Conficker and domain extensions

4/17/09 11:09 a.m. Update amended: Thanks Jim!

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun.

Because that’s what we do best.

• USA Today reports that a “seemingly endless stream” of new domain extensions, like .philly, could join traditional fare like .com and .org next year under a landmark change approved last summer by the Orwellian-named Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the entity that oversees the Web’s address system.

Below see more stories you need to be sure you saw, including our most trafficked of the week.

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BREAKING: City Council unanimously approves cell phone driving ban

1:07 p.m. 4/17/09, Update amended: Thanks Tom!

Oh man, are we glad to be transit riders today.

Philadelphia City Council has unanimously passed legislation that could make it illegal to use cell phones while driving motor vehicles, Technically Philly reports.

Citizens would be required to use hands-free headsets or other devices behind the wheel, according to a press release from councilmembers Bill Green, Bill Greenlee and Frank Rizzo.

“The passage of this legislation should send a very clear message: drivers need to put down their cell phones and pay attention to the road,” Councilman Bill Greenlee said in the statement. “Dialing a phone number or sending a text message while driving will no longer be tolerated in the City of Philadelphia.”

For the bill to be made into law, Mayor Michael Nutter will have to sign it, which he plans on doing, said administration spokesman Luke Butler. When he will hasn’t been established, but the city charter dictates the mayor has to sign or veto legislation within 10 days, Butler said.

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Lockheed Martin engineers get a chance to play on Space Day

There’s something about Lockheed Martin’s Space Day plans that reminds us of the 1983 geekcult classic WarGames.

Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which has offices throughout the region, including Cherry Hill, and is usually embroiled in our ongoing coverage of scary regional military tech innovation (yes, we’re considering a regular category), is doing something for the kids.

The company plans to ooh-and-ahh middle-schoolers by showing off human-computer interaction concepts with Nintendo Wii remotes, according to a press release.

The demonstrations will take place on May 1 at Lockheed’s Advanced Technology Laboratories locations in New Jersey and Virginia in celebration of the company’s international Space Day, its effort to scout K-12 geeks globally.

“Shall we play a game?”

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The NFL is not happy with Comcast. Must … resist … football puns.

Everyone’s favorite hometown cable psuedo-monopoly is in court this week over allegations it is favoring its own content over third-party channels.

The National Football League and Comcast have been fighting over the cable giant’s handling of the NFL Network in FCC court. Since its launch, Comcast has excluded the NFL Network from its primary channel group forcing customers to pay an extra eight dollars for an additional programming package.

The NFL is accusing Comcast of favoring its own sports channels, such as The Golf Channel and Versus, while making it difficult for the competition to be carried. The network has been relegated to MTV’s 1986 tactics begging customers to call Comcast and demand the NFL network but the result will affect the strange balancing act that Comcast does between content producer and content provider.

The NFL Network is mostly known for carrying a handful of live football games throughout the year, broadcasting classic games and covering the NFL draft. Unless you are a die-hard football nut, the result of this case will go mostly unnoticed as the Eagles are not currently scheduled for any NFL Network games.

Comcast has countered, accusing the NFL of demanding an unrealistic per-subscriber fee of 70 cents and will stop carrying the network at all when their contract expires at the end of this month. Comcast is also being taken to court over a similiar dispute with WealthTV.

via Philly.com and the Wall Street Journal

Shop Talk: Philadelphia Weekly redesign with Keith McGinnis of Review Publishing

Update amended: 8:50 p.m. 4/19/09

From time to time in the recent past, one of the most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia has gotten a major redesign.

Unfortunately, there was never one source that covered the whys and the hows. Now there is: Technically Philly.

So, here’s the first in an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

Both of Philadelphia’s big alternative-weeklies have changed their online looks in recent months. It just so happens that the one that came out last may have started first.

At the end December, CityPaper, founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, went from this to this. And then, early last month, Philadelphia Weekly made its own jump from a cluttered display.

“We knew we needed to step up our platform online, not just re-skin the site,” says Keith McGinnis, the IT Web head over at Review Publishing, PW’s Samson Street-based parent company. “Now we have a platform that can help us rise to the occasion.”

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How social media took Asher Roth from Philly suburbs to hip hop stardom

It’s going to be that anthem you hear over and over again this summer, and the artist behind it happens to have grown up in Bucks County, a half hour Regional Rail ride into Center City.

Like a growing collection of young artists, Asher Roth, the artist behind “I Love College,” found his path to a major label album by way of MySpace. But it seems likely he’ll see more than Internet fame.

I helped profile Asher Roth on the cover of today’s Philadelphia Weekly, but during our interview last month, we also spoke about the role social media have had on launching his career.

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