Event Highlights for September 7-13, 2009

Fall weather is in full force and Philly’s tech events are starting to light up the calendar like summer fireflies.

This week has a handful of events that sound right down our alley, and we have a feeling you won’t have trouble finding one that interests you – or at least awakens the good person within.

Drew Olanoff’s tongue-in-cheek, not-sure-if-we-should-laugh-about-cancer fundraiser Blame Drew’s Cancer has made us re-think charity. It’s not about guilt anymore! It’s about Doing The Right Thing. Join Drew along with organizations like Open Chefame, Two Guys On Beer, IndyHall, LiveStrong, Taco Bell and more than a dozen musical performers on Wednesday for the Blame-A-Thon. The 24-hour fundraiser will happen throughout Philly and should be a blast, while simultaneously scaring the pants off that jerk called Cancer.

Also on Wednesday, don’t miss Creative Connects hosted by the BOSS Group, a mixer of local media professionals and Web developers. We’ll be darned if we said we don’t love the idea of those two getting together. Fall in love please, it’s a match made in heaven.

This Weekend, join Hacktory heads and analog and early digital computer enthusiasts at the Vintage Computer Festival in Jerz, a two-day event devoted to all things pre-Pentium. We recommend buying up some old tape drives and 2400 baud modems and trying to hack NORAD Wargames-style. The government will never expect an attack from a brute force app made in QBASIC.

Also on Saturday, join fellow Twitter folk at the Philadelphia Twestival. Hosted by Lucky Strike Bowling, this is the only chance you’ll have to play a game with fellow followers that isn’t hosted by Facebook. Damn if we don’t love us some Mafia Wars, but you’re gonna look great in those bowling shoes, we promise.

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: J.P. Toto and Roz Duffy of BarCamp Philly

The schedule board from last year's BarCamp Philly. Photo courtesy of Roz Duffy.

Last November, 180 people awoke on a Saturday afternoon and gathered at the University of the Arts to attend a conference. Except not one person had the slightest clue about how the day was to transpire. There was no plan, there was no agenda. Just a blank bulletin board and a stack of index cards.

By the end of the day, BarCamp’s schedule board was filled with subjects ranging from “How to make your own business cards” to “Rethinking the EDU.”

Since last year’s BarCamp Philly, HealthCamp, HigherEdCamp and our own BarCamp NewsInnovation have since popped up, and the monthly Refresh Philly event even has roots in BarCamp.

This year, organizers J.P. Toto, co-founder of Collegeville-based Cognis IT, and Roz Duffy, Web developer at Comcast Interactive Media, are back for round two, this time with Kelani Nichole, a Web designer at M. They hope to beat last year’s attendance while attracting attendees from other cities.

“I want it to be a bigger draw and to be well-established. I would love BarCamp Philly to be an industry standard,” says Duffy.

We spoke with Toto and Duffy about what will be different at this year’s BarCamp, what first-time presenters should know and the story behind BeerCamp.

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Friday Tech Links: Unbreaded’s Ben Kessler could be leaving, Peter Key almost dies and More

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.

DEFINITE READS

• Geekadelphia launches its new Geek of the Week department with the co-founder of food blog Unbreaded, Ben Kessler, a freshly graduated Drexel University marketing major with brains, drive, personality and a total social media obsession. But here’s where it gets juicy. As Kessler implies in the interview, his hunt for work in Philly has proven unsuccessful. The word we’ve heard? That the first Geek of the Week interview from Philly’s premier geek blog is considering a move to the 67th ward. Guys, if we can’t retain someone like Kessler, we have a real problem here. Can someone do something about this?

• Philly Tech News reports that rumors have put Google CEO Eric Schmidt‘s recent interest in acquisitions directly in Center City, namely in online advertising startup Invite Media, yeah the company whose offices were caught up in a fire scare in February.

• The Business Journal’s Peter Key, who, we’re telling you, in any other city would have a cult following, regales us with an admittedly strange story about how he was almost killed by Leap Wireless 20 years ago. The next time someone criticizes social media, just mention to them that blogging brought you the chance to read a Peter Key story in which he mentions Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

After the jump , video of a South Jersey Apple store robbery and more than 10 other Philly tech reads that you just might need to know about, including our best read story of the week.

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Community gathers for IndyHall anniversary and Two Guys’ 100th episode

Photo from Flickr user dirty_jerzee99

Tucked away in Old City bar National Mechanics, more than 100 gathered on Tuesday night to celebrate the second birthday of the East Coast’s premier coworking space IndyHall along with the 100th episode of Two Guys On Beer, a local beer podcast.

It was Philly’s first foray into fall weather with temperatures dipping in to the high seventies and giving the city a much needed respite from overbearing heat and humidity only a week ago.

Free pints of Flying Dog Brewery’s Dogtoberfest surely didn’t hinder the festive atmosphere.

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Comcast Roundup: FCC 30 percent cap dropped, why Verizon stock sells higher and More

Every Thursday morning, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup.

Updated: 8/3/09 11:04 a.m. on search

paidContent reports that a federal appellate court overruled the Bush-era FCC mandate limiting a 30 percent cap on cable ownership, suggesting the door is left open for more consolidation. All eyes turned to Comcast, who the Silicon Valley Insider outright called a winner on the outcome and for whom the Inquirer story suggested it was a “moral” win. Reuters reported that the Philly MSO’s stock saw an uptick.

In this month’s Philadelphia magazine, stringer Vicki Glembocki profiles Andrew Beecham, the 46-year-old Brit turned Main Line-resident, who brought the Wiggles to Sprout — and gave Scott McNulty the chance to interview them — the preschool TV channel he created in 2005 and now for which he serves as vice president of programming. It’s an interesting piece on what is proving to be a big success in Comcast’s push to be a major player in content creation. We’d share a link, but couldn’t find it using a decidedly abysmal Phillymag search. So, buy a copy for goodness sake, or, you know, wait until I dig the link up. Update: The interesting profile can be seen here.

After the jump, interesting research on what keeps Comcast stock lower than those in less profitable markets, why some say TV Everywhere is bound to fail and three other Comcast pieces for the faithful.

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Shop Talk: Specticast streams Philadelphia Orchestra performances to seniors

Chief Conductor Charles Dutoit leads The Philadelphia Orchestra. | Photo: Chris Lee/The Philadelphia Orchestra Association

For seniors living in retirement communities, getting out to attend cultural events can be a demanding task.

Mark Rupp, one of the co-founders of Rittenhouse-based Specticast, is hoping to change that.

Launched in May, Specticast broadcasts live high definition performances and speaking engagements from the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Free Library directly to those communities around the country.

The company, which held its inaugural event with the Philadelphia Orchestra in June, had an overwhelming response, Rupp says.

“We’ve surveyed residents, even people that have been going [to the Philadelphia Orchestra] for years. When they see our broadcast live, it is often that the thing they enjoy the most is being up on stage with the performers,” Rupp says.

“Now they’re able to get up-close and personal and see the conductor’s face.”

According to surveys conducted in 2008, seniors rave about the service. More than 60 percent said they’d be willing to spend more than $16 dollars on a performance. Sixty-seven percent said that the event was more enjoyable than other events scheduled by the community.

They’re certainly not kicking themselves for choosing the senior market.

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What happened to Phillyblog? A rival, Philadelphia Speaks and other online forums

Five years ago yesterday, Wil Reynolds was named the executive director of the nonprofit that operated Phillyblog, the widely popular online discussion forum.

Wil Reynolds

But rather than celebrating a milestone at the head of the most popular Web forum in Philadelphia, Phillyblog.com was rather suddenly closed in July, Reynolds is trumpeting a new forum, a third has risen from the ashes and questions surround it all, except, Reynolds says, the importance of a place for like-minded Philadelphians to meet online.

“When you have a city of neighborhoods, it’s hard to find one site that covers that phenomenon,” says Reynolds, who founded Northern Liberties design firm Seer Interactive in 2002, the same year Phillyblog first hit the Web. “We figured we’d create that around a kind of interaction, instead of the one-to-many platform of a blog.”

The 2,000 members shared links, discussed news, offered opinion and, in their own way, added to Philadelphia’s landscape of hyper-localized content, but that all ended earlier this summer.

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Knowledge@Wharton expands to rural India, Australia; Penn opens African hospital

Knowledge@Wharton, the bi-weekly web-based business publication of the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, has expanded to Australia and rural India.

According to a press release, K@W has published in India since 2006 but will enlist the help of the News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal to help cover the country’s rural areas. Despite India’s designation as an “emerging market,” 70 percent of its residents still reside in poorer, rural towns and have become the target market for much of the country’s new commerce.

In Australia, K@W will be partnering with The Australian School of Business at the University of New South Wales. The new publication will also cover business news in Southeast Asia.

The rural Indian edition is available now, while the Australian edition is due to be released early next year. And all of this expansion news comes on the heels of the University’s recent opening of a hospital in Botswana.

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