Technically Not Tech: G-town Radio, the Sound of Germantown

G-town Radio is programmed from an office space in the Maplewood Mall in Germantown. Photo courtesy of G-town Radio

In February, residents of Germantown lost two community fixtures when the Journal Register Co. declared bankruptcy and published the final issues of the Germantown Courier and Mount Airy Times Express.

It shouldn’t be a surprise for many who have watched the newspaper industry struggle. Small communities are continuing to hemorrhage vital media coverage.

Consider G-town Radio a band-aid.

In the heart of Germantown in an office space in the Maplewood Mall, Owner and Station Manager Jim Bear broadcasts an eclectic mix of programming on the Internet radio station. And he’s throwing in some civic duty for good measure.

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Bala Cynwyd firm PC Helps Support gets New York Times praise

It’s been 17 years, but PC Helps Support is still around and getting attention for it.

The Bala Cynwyd-based IT support company has 250 Montgomery County-based consultants in an industry known for outsourcing to places like India, where labor is cheaper, knowledgeable and trainable.

It’s small operation is geared toward focused services, like answering questions that Apple users have about their iPhones, and it appears to be a method that’s working, according to a glowing profile in Friday’s New York Times.

PC Helps, founded in 1992 by Jeffrey Becker, offers expertise on more than 160 desktop applications and mobile devices like Microsoft Office, the BlackBerry and, yes, the iPhone. It works in conjunction with a company’s IT department to augment or even serve as a company’s help desk to offer support, the company’s media kit says.

In March, the company launched a blog and is, of course, all about social media: follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook and LinkedIn, or subscribe to their RSS feed.

Events highlights for the week of May 11 – May 17, 2009

Hello, newly sunny Philadelphia, that’s a hell of a farmer’s tan you’ve got there.

Let’s keep that weekend energy going with our region’s active tech community. Half of our highlights are straight outta West Philly. It’s not bias, we swear! But if you just refuse to do anything West of the Schuylkill, our events calendar would be happy to schedule an appointment for you.

On Saturday and Sunday, help University City with some GPS mapping. The folks at Philly OpenStreetMap realized long ago that Google might one day threaten our existence so they’re mapping the world until it happens. How else are you gonna find the way to good Chinese restaurant when the Goog steals your identity and shuts down Maps?

Wednesday, academia will sign-up for Second Life, get harassed by creepy dudes and annoying tweens, and beg for a way to get the heck out of there while still applying some of those virtual concepts to higher education. With Wharton hosting, it might be a little smarter than our summary.

Monday, IndyHall will host a PHP Meetup featuring Sigurd Magnusson of Silverstripe, an open source CMS for the WordPress haters out there. Magnusson will even be taking feature requests, so give him some advice or he’ll ignore your feedback when the next version hits.

Philly Office Geeks are trying to spread the word about social media in the business community on Tuesday. It might be a clever attempt at getting network privileges for Facebook in the office, but we’d bet there’s a little more too it than that.

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: Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go. It’s a name that’s sure to bring the Valley Forge-based search engine company attention just by folks trying to figure out what it means.

Some have called it silly. Others have mentioned a common childhood game by the same name.

CEO Gabriel Weinberg says it isn’t named after anything special.

“I wish I had a good answer for you. I don’t. It came to me one day and I really liked it,” he says during a telephone interview.

If anything, Duck Duck Go is just something different. In the Web search industry, that’s important. It might be one of few ways of chiseling away at Google’s dominating market share the search giant currently queries 63 percent of U.S. searches.

That’s OK with 29-year-old Weinberg. He says Duck Duck Go offers features Google can’t: uncluttered, human-sourced, friggin’ fast search results. Direct to you from the ‘burbs.

Last week, the company unveiled its Firefox toolbar, a search tool that redirects users from parked domains and spam sites, part of Duck Duck Go’s fight against typo squatting. It’s the second Duck Duck Go-branded software release, the first, a search app for Apple’s iPhone. Traffic has been good to the company, increasing steadily month by month, Weinberg says.

We spoke with Weinberg about what makes Duck Duck Go special, how the two-employee company plans to continue growing, and his vision of the future of search, after the jump.

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Friday Tech Links: City election day results online, Skorpion Show redo and More

Technically Philly friends The Skorpion Show get love from the Daily News. Photo by DAVID MAIALETTI for the Daily News.

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. See others here.

• OK, first the Daily News reports this morning that the city would not continue its freshly rolled out policy of allowing access to online election-day voting results. By noon, KYW reported that Michael Nutter was sufficiently embarrassed by Philadelphia’s primitive take on Web access that the money was found to keep it going — something about $30,000 for hosting. Hell, we’ll do it for $300 and hot pretzels.

Brian Tierney talks about the Web, libraries get faster online and five other tech stories you should read — including our most trafficked post of the week.

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Democratic candidates for city controller voice support for paperless government

Democratic candidates for city controller from left to right: Incumbant Alan Butkovitz, John Braxton, Brett Mandel. Far right: Moderator Chris Satullo of WHYY

The Democratic candidates for city controller each voiced support for paperless government initiatives Thursday night at the third and final major debate being held for the elected city office.

The rare moment of agreement between incumbent Alan Butkovitz and challengers John Braxton and Brett Mandel followed a confrontational discussion of the city’s $2.6 billion budget shortfall, real estate tax abatement and wage and sales tax increases.

In a modest side room of the John Perzel Community Center, the candidates responded to a question posed by Technically Philly in front of more than 30 residents in the Mayfair neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia.

If elected city controller, would he support recommendations made by freshman councilmembers in October that would promote digital government initiatives that would cut back on paper consumption, bring forms online and potentially save the city millions of dollars?

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Callowhill software developer Avencia releases legislative data API

Showing Philly's gerrymandered 5th councilmanic district

Updated: 3:51 5/7/09

Here’s a completely uncontroversial statement: the sloppy, meandering legislative districts that are used to keep incumbents in power are an embarrassment to our Republic.

Don’t worry, though, technology is going to solve that, too.

A cool, new version of a free subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API has been released by Avencia, a geographic analysis and software development firm based in the Poplar Callowhill neighborhood west of Northern Liberties.

The new version of CiceroLive, a free sample of the data and mapping tool Cicero API, which pools relevant information about political representatives at all government levels, including the district boundaries for 100 major U.S. cities, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, comes before another likely round of redistricting in 2010, with new Census data arriving then.

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Blue Cadet Web design firm nominated for two Webby Awards

Annesha Taylor has short hair and is seated with a bright floral dress.

She’s speaking into a camera about her first reaction to finding she had become one of the 28,000 HIV-positive people living in tropical Jamaica.

“How was I going to tell my mother? The best way,” she pauses there, “is if I killed myself.”

It’s unsettling in all the worst ways. But it’s also a way to personalize the AIDS struggle on the Caribbean island, which now has one of the highest rates in the world outside the African continent.

Partnering with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting and D.C.-based Joshua Cogan, design firm bluecadet interactive, newly based in the loathsomely-named Art Museum area, helped tell the stories of Taylor and others and package them on Live Hope Love.

They hope to have helped bring attention to the ongoing battle, led by South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes. While surely not they’re only end goal, bluecadet has won praise and honors.

Add another: bluecadet interactive was nominated for two Webby Awards, winning a People’s Voice nod in one, the company announced late last month.

See what got them the win, how bluecadet got the work and what’s up next, after the jump.

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Comcast Roundup: “Worst Company in America,” Hulu threatens and More

Comcast’s place as this year’s “Worst Company in America” is being voted on today in the final round of the annual event held by Consumerist, the Consumer’s Union-owned nonprofit Web site. It is vying for lowlight with AIG — called the battle of the monopoly and the bailout.

It keeps growing and all your complaining ain’t stopping it.

This continued bruising of a telecommunications giant that has seen plenty of it comes on the heels of a five-and-a-half percent first quarter jump in profits for Comcast. The only rising cost for the profitable cable company is programming.

See other top Comcast headlines, including why Hulu should be scary, what happened to Joost and a $1 billion plan I don’t fully understand, after the jump.

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Shop Talk: Daniel Delaney of Vendr.TV

Daniel Delaney is sorry.

He just finished a bit of a rant about how zoning laws that govern where street vendors can do business are putting a stranglehold on Philadelphia’s food cart culture, and seemed startled when I said I assumed he was now based in New York.

“I didn’t mean that as an insult,” he says. “I just look at this stuff a bit scientifically.”

Indeed, Delaney, 23, is taking his food very seriously since launching in February Vendr.TV, a weekly podcast devoted to finding the best-tasting street food in the world. It was just picked up by a network funder, Delaney says, though he can’t yet disclose who.

While the University of the Arts alumnus has made that not uncommon trek up the Jersey Turnpike and his podcast’s stock is on the rise, he might have reason to remember where he first got his taste for food entertainment.

Read what goes into Vendr.TV and how he says our great food city could become a great street food city, too, after the jump.

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