Gigabit Genius Grant winners announced

It’s one team from Baltimore and a technologist from the other side of the globe that will be benefiting from a Philadelphia-based fund to spur innovation around gigabit ultra-high speed broadband connectivity.

This morning, Philly Startup Leaders announced the two winners of its Gigabit Genius Grant, a contest put together by several businesses and organizations in the region. The bulk of the funds, $7,500, will go to a teleradiology technology in Maryland and $2,500 to an education innovation initiative in Israel. That money will help specialists collaborate on radiology scans in real-time from around the globe, and it will help enable technology to improve the virtual classroom experience.

The Startup Leaders’ grant came together in April as the City of Philadelphia was preparing an application to become a pilot for Google’s Gigabit ultra-high speed Internet connectivity. Then PSL President and Founder Blake Jennelle pushed the startup organization to donate a charter $5,000 which was followed by additional investments from the community.

Read more

Human Network Labs working on mobile social networking products at Enterprise Center

Human Network Labs CEO Carlos Garcia with interns Shu Wen Yang and Natalie Chew.

This story is completed in partnership with Temple University’s journalism capstone class Philadelphia Neighborhoods. Students Tracy Galloway and Maria Zankey will cover technology issues through December.

In the basement of the Enterprise Center, located at 45th and Market streets in West Philadelphia, Shu Wen Yang and Natalie Chew are working on a new technology that could transform the meaning of social networking.

Yang and Chew are interning for Human Network Labs, a company that has developed a new technology for localizing persons and objects without the use of the Internet.

“Human Network Labs has come up with its own technology and it is something really different from other companies that I’ve seen so far,” said Yang.

Read more

Good Company Ventures graduates 11 today

There’s one event we didn’t include in our events roundup that deserves some extra attention.

After a summer of incubating and mentoring 11 social entrepreneurs, Good Company Ventures will be sending its 2010 class off into the wild at its graduation today.

The startups, which include Switch demo company Zecozi, will be presenting to investors and others in the hopes of securing additional funding and coverage. Presentations start at 1:30 p.m. at the Offices of Morgan Lewis.

After the presentations, GCV will be hosting cocktails at the University of the Arts, where the incubator was housed for the summer.

GCV is just another piece of the ever-expanding Philadelphia social entrepreneurship ecosystem that includes B-Lab, Research Human Development, Missioneurs and many others.

Comcast Roundup: Stephen Burke will lead NBC, Comcast.net hackers sentenced and more

Every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

DEFINITE READS

• Burke to lead NBC Universal after Comcast deal [paidContent] — 52-year-old Comcast COO Stephen Burke will be made NBC Universal CEO after the acquisition is approved. Burke recently made the most expensive rowhome purchase in Philadelphia history.
• Stepping Down, NBC Chief Relishes His Long Tenure [New York Times] — Embattled NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker announces leaving his post, acknowledging the decision is not entirely his own, but part of a desire by Comcast leadership to have “their own team in place” with the close of the Comcast-NBC acquisition.
• Comcast Spends Big in Pressing for Merger [New York Times] — The piece questions whether the tens of millions of dollars that Comcast is spending on lobbying for regulatory approval of its taking a majority stake in NBC is an expensive form of machine politics or something more democratic.

Below, more details on the NBC executive shuffle, Comcast.net hackers sentenced and more.

Read more

Switch Preview: Myna Music is iTunes Genius on steroids

If you’ve ever hit the “next” button on Pandora, you’ve likely been wowed by the service’s ability to dig up music that you like based on the “seed” artist you give.

However, in order to draw connections between songs, Pandora relies on human beings individually tagging every song with metadeta. For movie studios and large music libraries, an army of metadata taggers isn’t a realistic (or cost effective) option.

Enter Myna.

“With Myna, we offer a digital solution for digital files,” says Greg Wilder, founder of the Indy Hall-based Orpheus Media Research.

Thanks to a wicked smart team of composers and technology, Myna can automatically scan a library of music tracks and make connections based on mood, “texture,” note pattern, instruments used and more to offer similar songs. No human taggers needed. (Get the nitty-gritty on Myna, then called “Clio,” in our September 2009 Shop Talk)

At Switch, Wilder said he is planning to show how Myna is used to help set the mood for movie soundtracks using example’s from movies like the Bourne Supremecy to make his point, and he may just get down and dirty in the program’s terminal.

So far, the music industry is catching on to Myna: Wilder has fielded calls from all over the world and while attending a recent industry event, he says that people from all over the country were familiar with OMR’s work.

“This is a big play,” he says, adding that he hopes Myna touches half the music we interact with by the end of next year.

See Myna at work in the video above. and come get inspired by OMR and four other Philly innovators at Switch on October 6th at the Levitt Auditorium.  Get your tickets today.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center,MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Corzo Center for the Creative Arts, and University of the Arts.

Devnuts: the youngest collaboration and incubation workspace in Northern Liberties

The two dozen 20-somethings behind Devnuts are organizing.

The Northern Liberties collaborative workspace is aiming at being seen as a more comprehensive collection of professionals.

Announced with a sleek new website launch yesterday, the Devnuts crew is abutting its form of co-working with a heavier focus on incubation and selling its pooled talent.

“Devnuts does three things,” says John Fazio, one of the co-founders. “First, it’s a co-working space that you can apply for a desk space to rent. Second, it’s an incubator [for young startups]. Third, because we’ve built a talent pool around us, we’re selling development talent.”

With a contractor circle of 22, including seven employees and at least that many interns, in addition to others on the periphery, relationships with Drexel University and the Science Leadership Academy to bring in new startups to house and testimonials for building homepages for the Roots and TEDxPhilly to name just two , the Devnuts crew seems to be doing well with all three.

Read more

Startup Roundup: Lessons from the Cupcake Lady

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated newsletter or RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

A big local win for XIPWIRE—the company announced by email that Stephen Starr’s Pod restaurant is accepting payments from the mobile payment platform. Customers can pay for their meals at the restaurant with their mobile phones.

GIVE A GLANCE

Cashless vendor payment technology company USA Technologies says in a press release that it in the first fiscal quarter ending in September, the company processed 14 million transactions, a total of $25 million, across its 1,200 clients.

Beyond.com has announced this week that it has launched further internationally in Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, France, Spain, Germany and Italy. More to come, the company tells us.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Last Friday, Kenexa completed its Texas Roadhouse has acquired one of the company’s commercials.

RailBandit has officially launched the iPhone version of its RailBandit transit application, as we previewed last week.

StarCite will begin providing industry-specific meeting tools for Life Sciences companies. Having worked closely with healthcare phrmaceutical and life sciences clients, the company developed ways to incorporate regulatory demands of expense tracking, Switch, our tech demo presentation event that happens tonight. After all, we think that its event like this that will help make Technically Philly a sustainable news resource that can keep that tech coverage comin’. But what the writer of this column is most excited about is the great startups presenting: Don’t miss Azavea, Orpheus Media Research, P’unk Ave, PackLate and Zecovi. And if you can’t make it out, catch the livestream at SwitchPhilly.com.

Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a Philly startup story left to link to on the Internet. See others here, or sign-up for its email newsletter.

FoundedinPhilly.com from Gabe Weinberg serves as community stake in the ground

It’s about perception.

Sensing that the perception of Philadelphia’s startup community in the minds of entrepreneurs hasn’t grown with the community itself, Duck Duck Go founder and Hacker Angel Gabe Weinberg launched this week a very small, very simple stake in the ground.

FoundedinPhilly.com is nothing but a few logos and a block of text, linking to some choice businesses and organizations that make up the community:

We have hackers. We have hackathons. We have real hackathons. We have mailing lists. We have super angels. We have hacker angels. We have open angel forums. We have VCs of all kinds. But enough about money. We have big events. We have cool events. We have lots of events. Hey, all you can handle bro’. We have multiple accelerators. We have co-working space. We have startup news. We have traction. We have exits. So join us already…

“I think most people outside Philly think the idea of a Philly Web startup scene is a joke,” Weinberg tells Technically Philly. “Inside Philly, I hear a lot about missing pieces, but from where I sit, we have the puzzle solved at this point.”

So he tossed online the simplest, most direct message to others, conveying that Philadelphia has all the parts of a foundation for one of the great entrepreneurship environments.

“If anything, we need more ambitious startup founders,” Weinberg says.

10 coolest (mostly interactive) online maps of Philadelphia

This 1838 map of Philadelphia from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania didn't make our list of the 10 best maps of Philadelphia.

We love maps.

For hundreds of years, they have helped us better understand our world. That understanding has grown wildly with time and technology, but, still, maps help.

In a place as inwardly focused, we have plenty of maps in Philadelphia. You also may know that we have something of a technology community here.

So there are resources like the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access, or PASDA, which offers just a wild glut of GIS shape files for mapping geeks. We’ve seen cool mapping tools that are of broader scope though Philly got some love: from the addition of bicycle directions to Philadelphia Google Maps to the Google Building Maker to mapping the homes of those in the U.S. armed services who died in the Mideast this decade and many more.

But we wanted to highlight the coolest maps made for Philadelphia of Philadelphia.

Taking into account our own map obsessions, suggestions and calling out our community, we took on the task of listing, in no particular order, the 10 best online maps of Philadelphia.

Read more

YIP business panel discussion: Public schools and growing our startup community will save Philadelphia

Business and Entrepreneurship panel on Sept. 27, 2010, as part of the Young Involved Philadelphia's State of Young Philly. From left: David Calabrese, an investment and market strategy executive; Kevin Dow, the acting Chief Operating Officer of the city's Commerce Department; Bernie Dagenais, the former editor of the Philadelphia Business Journal; Ahsan Nasratullah, the founder and president of real-estate finance and brokerage firm JNA Capital and Pat Gillespie, the business manager of the Philadelphia Building and Construction Trades Union

The perception and practice of Philadelphia public schools and the depth and widespread recognition for the city’s startup communities are two issues that need the most addressing to develop the future of entrepreneurship here, according to a panel and breakout group discussion held Monday night by Young Involved Philadelphia.

The Business and Entrepreneurship night, which drew more than 50 young Philadelphians and a handful of prominent members of the city’s business community, was  in conjunction with Young Involved Philadelphia’s two-week State of Young Philly series.

“We’re looking for ideas that we can walk out of here tonight and do something about,” said Bernie Dagenais, the former editor of the Philadelphia Business Journal who last month became president of the Main Line Chamber of Commerce.

[Full Disclosure: Technically Philly was a sponsor of and active in last night's event. YIP is also a supporting organization for next Wednesday's Switch Philly business demo event. TP will also be present at Friday's series showcase.]

Read more