UPDATED: School District e-waste investigation three months later: no reported progress

Screenshot courtesy of PBS Frontline documentary

Update: A School District spokesman called to clarify several statements: 9/30/09 @ 3:50 p.m.

The latest in an ongoing series on School District of Philadelphia e-waste. Reporter Stephen Zook walked the West African landfill in question to file this report exclusively for Technically Philly.

ACCRA, GHANA — The air stinks of oil, fish and grease, only to be overtaken by that of garbage and sewage. It surrounds you as soon as you near Agbogbloshie, a neighborhood on the outskirts of this West African country’s capital city.

In most of Accra — a coastal city about the size of Philadelphia — open sewers carry little more than rainwater and a few pieces of debris in their troughs. In Agbogbloshie, even after a fresh municipal clean, a milky sludge sits in the sewers, alongside garbage left to dry on the road beside them, probably adding to the stink created by the town’s rambling landfill.

It is there, where many of Agbogbloshie”s children make a living looking for metallic scraps to be sold, that at least one printer from the School District of Philadelphia was found. It was shipped here as part of the growing practice of e-waste from wealthy nations being brought to developing countries, like Ghana. The printer, spotted in a PBS Frontline documentary exposing the e-waste trend and first brought to the fore locally by Technically Philly, created a call to action that has yet to be fulfilled.

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G-town Radio receives $7,500 grant to fund Germantown radio projects

Radio isn’t dead and G-town Radio‘s Jim Bear would be one of the first to tell you it.

Reverberating from Maplewood Mall in northwest Philadelphia, “the sound of Germantown” is growing. The Internet-only radio station has been building off a recently awarded $7,500 grant from social justice resource Broad and Roses Community Fund.

The money will fund a high school youth radio project, community forums, a series of audio profiles of interesting citizens and a new political talk show based around Germantown policy issues. The organization also hopes to put the finishing touches on a Web site redesign, improve studio space and purchase new audio equipment.

It’s not a lot of money, for sure, but it is proof that the community is interested in G-town, Bear said in a phone interview with Technically Philly.

“It really helped legitimize what we’re doing,” he says. “To have this input from outside resources helped make people feel more confident in what we’re doing.”

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Technically Not Tech: South Street’s J1Studios to release first video game

In junior high school most students doodle or play hangman when not paying attention. Jason Richardson, on the other hand, wrote code.

“All during school I just wouldn’t pay attention to the teacher. It looked like I was taking notes but I was just writing code on graph paper,” he says. “I have a thing for creating.”

The 31-year-old founder of South Street-based J1 Studios spent his youth making board games, card games and video games and hasn’t let up since. Richardson is taking the hobbies of his youth and slowly building a geek media empire complete with anime-style comics, podcasts and video game development and will have a booth at the upcoming GameX expo.

But, if you ask Richardson, he’ll tell you it all started with an Apple II and a Zelda instruction manual.

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bluecadet interactive’s Josh Goldblum wins Emmy

A Web-based multimedia package on living with AIDS in Jamaica is not done winning awards for the firm that designed it.

Josh Goldblum, founder of the Art Museum area’s bluecadet interactive, won a News & Documentary Emmy last week for his work as interactive producer on the project, called Live Hope Love.

The project, which combines photography, video documentation, poerty and interviews with the victims of AIDS, began in 2007 with a request from the Virginia Quarterly and became a broad partnership between the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, D.C.-based Joshua Cogan and South Carolina poet, activist and Jamaican native Kwame Dawes.

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Event Highlights for September 27 – October 3, 2009

It’s getting to be that time of year.

The weather is getting cooler, football season is underway and unconferences are sprouting up everywhere.

Before the year closes out, we’re due for the original BarCamp, FlashCamp, and BeerCamp. Kicking off the camps is the third annual Podcamp is happening at Temple University this weekend along with SearchCamp and Social Media Camp.

But first, head on up to the Franklin Mills mall to show the world that you always liked that PC guy in those Apple commercials. Join developers and IT-types as they gather to chat about all of the new features in Microsoft’s latest operating system, breakfast included.

Or, you can get suburban and attend the Main Line’s first ever Tweetup.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more.

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Friday Q&A: Sherrill Neff, founding partner of Quaker BioVentures

Sherrill Neff

Thanks to the city’s glut of local universities and pharmaceutical companies, Philadelphia is a wonderful environment for a biotech startup to begin and to exit.

However, with the lack of an IPO market and current economic conditions, statups often need hundreds of millions of dollars to see their idea from research product to sale to big pharma.

And that’s where Quaker BioVentures steps in.

Founded in 2003 by Ira Lubert, Brenda Gavin and Sherrill Neff, Quaker takes pride in keeping all of its investments local — and for good reason. Philadelphia benefits from being in the center of the perfect storm of plentiful university research combined with a large number of pharmaceutical companies having major local operations.

“It’s important we get to know the [big pharmaceutical companies] really well, that they are our friends socially and professionally,” says Neff. “It’s easier here than if we were sitting on the West coast trying to have that interaction.”

After raising $280 million in 2003 and an additional $420 in 2006, Quaker has invested in over 25 companies, most based in the tri-state area.

We talked to Founding Partner Sherrill Neff about why Quaker only invests locally, how the citiy’s biotech market has evolved and why he credits lion slaying as one of his hobbies.

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Links: Philly Startup Leaders get blanket praise, Pittsburgh G-20 roundup and More

n 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.

DEFINITE READS

• Philadelphia Business Journal Editor Bernie Dagenais gives much love to the Philly Startup Leaders, even if he does so by trumpeting a Virginia group of a different incarnation.
• Interesting coverage of the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh by the Inquirer’s Mike Armstrong here, here, here, here and here. The Inqy runs a wire L.A. Times story with an Andy Warhol lede. The Philadelphia Business Journal’s Jeff Blumenthal reports that law firms closed up shop, among others, to avoid security. The CityPaper was on the ground there too, though I’m not yet sure why. The real news out of the summit was that there wasn’t much news, and Pittsburgh seemed emptied and stark because of hyper security.

After the jump, an online face of Comcast gets married and three other picks, including our most trafficked story of the week.

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Comcast Roundup: Net Neutrality, raising prices “because it can” and More

Every Thursday morning, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription to our Comcast news updates.

Net neutrality and Comcast’s role in that debate’s recent-most incarnation dominated mentions of the telecommunications giant this week.

The Federal Communications Commission will keep Comcast and others from limiting user Web traffic, according to sources of the Washington Post, which owned the coverage and suspected that decision as early as last week.

But the FCC’s call that they have the authority to rule that ISPs like Comcast cannot create user limitations is muddy, considering other recent actions from the bipartisan governing body, as Wired magazine reported. The pushback came from Comcast, by way of an open-letter written by company executive vice president David L. Cohen, as reported by the Inquirer.

CNet reported on growing House support for a net neutrality bill. MacWorld talked on just how quickly you could breeze through Comcast’s monthly 250-gb limit (H/T Philly Tech News).

We’ve said before that you know the Comcast story is big when Joey Sweeney gets in on it.

After the jump, Comcast raises prices “because it can,” Hulu trades business ideas and seven other Comcast news items for your perusing.

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Shop Talk: Orpheus Media Research music analysis tool Clio

Dr. Greg Wilder says that he’s created software that can dissect and analyze music so deeply and powerfully that music copyright litigation, discovery and automated composition will experience a paradigm shift.

He’s beaten researchers at MIT and Stanford who have been researching similar technologies for years, he says. And he was able to beat them because they’re computer scientists with an interest in music.

He, on the other hand, is a classically trained musician with an interest in computer science.

Wilder, who is the co-founder and chief science officer of Orpheus Media Research, received his piano performance and composition doctorate from Eastman School of Music, a top nationally-ranked music conservatory in Rochester, New York. He says he’s been playing piano since he was three.

“I spoke music before I spoke English,” he says. “Computer stuff, at this point, is out there for the taking. The music stuff is not.”

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City CTO: “We have a heck of a shot” for federal broadband stimulus money

From left to right: Doug Faith, Derek Pew, Bill Green, Allan Frank, Todd Wolfson.

Five known members of Philly’s technology community discussed the impact of Wireless Philadelphia, the city’s digital divide and its application for federal broadband stimulus dollars Tuesday evening.

Local technology leaders and policymakers agree that lessons learned from the failed initiative put the city in a unique spot to advance its technology foundations, and they are hopeful that the city is awarded federal grants for the Digital Philadelphia Broadband Initiative.

Read about the history of Wireless Philadelphia.

More than 75 business leaders, policymakers, academics and activists filed into the Connelly Auditorium at the University of the Arts’ Terra Hall to hear the panel discuss broadband policy in the city.

“There’s really no other municipal network that has quite the resonant experience, not only in the tech side of networks but of its downfalls,” said Derek Pew, CEO of Network Acquisition which now owns the Wireless Philadelphia assets.

“Something can happen. We’re in a unique place, where a large asset, history, experience and desire have come together.”

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