Shop Talk: FreedomPay settling quickly into SaaS transaction market

Having spent than 20 years in the electronic transaction industry, Sam Bellamy has done his time.

With those two decades of experience, he’s helping pushing Wayne-based transaction firm FreedomPay in a new direction.

And what he’s amazed about today includes a much smaller time investment: fractions of a second.

The privately-held company, which provides payment and transaction solutions to small and mid-sized businesses with a Software as a Service platform, has six patents pending for its processing technology, which can provide real-time feedback at the point-of-sale for companies with thousands of products in their inventory.

“It’s massive amounts of information analyzed in milliseconds,” Bellamy says.

Read more

The Technically Philly ethics policy

In the 18 months of Technically Philly’s existence, we have operated with a strong internal ethics policy that has guided us as we cover this community. We sometimes find ourselves informing interview subjects, readers and advertisers of policies that are well established internally, but aren’t immediately apparent to those outside of TP.

Allow us to do something that is long overdue: share our rules and policies that are core to Technically Philly:

• Above all else, we value transparency. If we make any significant changes to a story, we’ll tell you. If there is a potential conflict of interest, we will disclose it.
• News should be a conversation. If a reader emails, comments, tweets or writes a blog post criticizing, seeking clarification or commenting on our coverage, we will do our best to respond.
• We correct factually incorrect information. If we get something wrong in a post, we will correct it as soon as humanly possible.
• We do our best to avoid editorial and advertising conflicts at all costs. If a TP staff member oversees the sale of an advertisement, he or she will be relieved of all future coverage of that company or person, within reasonable possibility. We will never withhold coverage or comment due to an advertising relationship. Again, any potential conflicts of interest will be disclosed.
• If it’s on the record, it’s on the record. We will not remove content and quotes of a conversation that happened during an on-the-record conversation. That said, like any other journalist, we regularly speak with sources ‘off the record for background,’ as that perspective can help us report our beats more exactly. A source on the record, though, is always the most transparent and something for which we strive.
• Sources do not read stories before they are posted. Please do not ask to see the story before we post, we will not honor any such requests. We may ask for clarification of a quotation or figure, reference or number. We often follow up to do our job more precisely.
• We give credit. We will always link to the sources of a tip or story and expect others to do the same when writing about a topic first reported by TP.
• Sponsored content and advertorial is clearly marked. From time to time we publish pieces written by advertisers. This is no different than an advertorial in a magazine, a traditional revenue stream in publishing. We clearly label all content with full writing credit and advertising disclosure.

We hope that sheds some light on how Technically Philly operates and we welcome your thoughts and criticisms and now back to your regularly scheduled technology news.

Philly awarded $11.8 million by feds to bridge digital divide

A Philadelphia coalition of private and public entities was awarded a $11.8 million stimulus grant on Monday to help bring the Web to the city’s low-income residents.

The grant has been awarded to the Urban Affairs Coalition, a group that includes Drexel University, Media Mobilizing Project, Philadelphia FIGHT, Wilco Electronic Systems and others.

According to a press release, the group plans on using the money to create 5,000 new home broadband subscribers while providing training and equipment to residents and businesses.

This isn’t the first time Philadelphia will receive federal money to help bridge the digital divide. And, although the city was denied its initial application for stimulus money, Philadelphia has seen an influx of federal dollars. In March, the city took a piece of a $3.7 million grant. In July, the city’s Division of Technology was awarded $6.4 million to help modernize and build computer centers around the city.

Startup Roundup: EvolveIP raises $8.7 million, Proton Media featured by Scoble

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

The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that communication firm Evolve IP has raised $8.7 million in capital for expansion, though the company would not confirm funders.

Proton Media CEO Ron Burns gets featured in video by tech guru Scoble. The 26-minute video demos the technology and the two talk about the company’s large clients.

Read more

VC Roundup: Get your Switch tickets, Safeguard invests $18 million

Welcome to the VC Roundup, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

DEFINITE READS
If you read this roundup, then we think you’ll really enjoy Switch, our latest event that has five companies demoing their products for 7 minutes each. So far, Packlate, Orpheus Media Research and P’unk Ave are set to show off their latest and greatest. Come see Philly’s next big thing and snag your tickets today.

First Round Capital has decided to follow on its initial investment of Backupify, a service that backs up cloud computing data. After contributing to the company’s original $900,000 angel round, First Round is one of four firms investing $4.5 million in the Series A.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Safeguard Scientifics is hosting InvestorDay, an event to help investors learn more about the company. There’s just one problem: the event is in New York. We know, as a publicly traded company, Safeguard must handle some of its business in the 67th Ward. But would it kill New Yorkers if they took a 90-minute Amtrak ride?

Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Northeast Pennsylvania announced $480,000 in new funding today. Most of the companies receiving investment are in the environmental sector.

GIVE A GLANCE

GAIN Capital, portfolio company of Edison Ventures and Cross Atlantic Capital Partners has acquired the foreign exhcange business of MG Financial.

In other Safeguard news, the company recently closed an $18 million Series A round with Good Start Genetics. The Massachusetts-based company develops genetic tests for prospective parents.

It’s an oldie, but it just came across our inbox today. Last year, ChubbyBrain took a look at the business incubation community in Delaware. The most incubated sector? Healthcare.

The Wall Street Journal reports that despite the overall shrinking of the VC industry, many new firms are emerging. We’d guess that it’s because that investments are getting cheaper and cheaper these days.

Indy Hall co-founder Hillman leads effort for Coworking.com, building broader community

The minds behind coworking often laud it for its organic and authentic growth.

That’s how the country’s more respected communities of shared, collaborative workplaces, like Independents Hall in Old City, differentiate themselves from a growing commercial extension of the concept.

But as those communities continue to grow and its members number in the thousands, there has been something of a push to create a more national — and, indeed, international — cohesion.

Last week, the Coworking Database initiative launched, hoping to, as the site suggests, create “a simple, neutral, extensible database for coworking spaces around the world.”

It was the latest in a series of projects that connected coworking outposts that had, in recent years, focused on building their own local communities.

Read more

Event Highlights: September 13-19, 2010

Update: fixed ALT.net. See comments for details.

Morning Philadelphia, we hope you enjoyed the first unofficial weekend of fall – and how couldn’t you?

The weather is nice, the Phillies are in first place and the Eagles… well, they’re still the Eagles. But Fall also means that we continue the uptick inour calendar’s tech events, forcing us to make some tough choices about our highlights.

This week’s lucky three: Philly.rb’s hack night, Social Media Day and the ALT.Net meetup.

Read more

Liz Spikol, former Philadelphia Weekly editor, leads Tek Lado, Hispanic tech magazine

When new print magazines are announced, reporters usually write about the irony of the startup amid a decades-long decline in publishing dailies and weeklies and monthlies.

The future of print is certainly a scattered one, but one that will probably involve novelty and specialty, in addition to the current clearing of the brush the past decade has shown.

Somewhere in there, Tek Lado, a quarterly, bi-lingual geek culture magazine with its setting in the Philadelphia region, either makes sense or it doesn’t.

Regardless, 20,000 32-page inaugural issues will land in honor boxes, cafes, bars, restaurants and waiting rooms throughout the region on Sept. 22, with plans to move to every other month in 2011. Funded by advertising and supported strictly by freelance contributions, the magazine will be free and pick-up only.

[Full disclosure: Technically Philly is a promotional partner for the magazine's launch. The two publications exchanged advertising space. This Q&A is an independent editorial choice.]

Southwest Philadelphia-based Bartash Printing is bankrolling the project, a company that handles printing projects for others but didn’t have one of its own, until Tek Lado, which was first conceived in March. The publisher is Bartash’s own Mel Gomez.

To make their first foray into magazine publishing a successful one, Gomez brought on last month one of the more familiar names in Philadelphia media, tapping former Philadelphia Weekly senior editor and columnist Liz Spikol to lead the project’s editorial product.

Based out of Bartash’s building at 5400 Grays Ave., near Bartram’s Garden, until moving to independent offices if things go well, Spikol, 42, is now charged with growing the reputation and editorial product of a magazine with at least three niches: geeks and gadgets, Philadelphia and, while stories will appear both in English and Spanish, a natural Hispanic target.

Why does the city suck at Twitter? Will it take a drunk to fix it?

If we were to make a list of things we’d like to change about the Philadelphia city government, its social media strategy would likely be far down the list after taxes, a new logo and crushing bureaucracy.

A tweet from the parody account @DrunkPhillyGov.

However, the city’s terrible use of Twitter has been an embarrassment to Philadelphia for too long. Created in January of 2009, the city’s @PhiladelphiaGov account has left us all puzzled as it constantly tweets in all caps, posts links to Facebook (which then link to a press release) and sometimes it just spits out a link with no explanation or surrounding text.

Read more

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Tek Lado Magazine: technology and pop culture magazine for the new bilingual generation, TekLado –  published in English and Spanish – caters to Hispanic and non-Hispanic geeks, gamers, techies, comix fans and more. The mag hits the streets of Philadelphia on Septempber 22, 2010.

Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce – The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to promoting growth and economic development, advocating for sound public policy, and serving its members with outstanding programs and benefits. GPCC is the premier advocate of the region’s business community, representing members in 11 counties across three states with one voice.

Brolik Productions Customers visit your website and immediately judge your company. Will they stay or will they go? Brolik delivers innovative design, original content and a tasteful product that equals long-term loyalty for your brand and sour grapes for the competition.

Caffeine Fish – Caffeine Fish develops the Trainboard iPhone app and offers iPhone development consulting in the Philadelphia area.

NextFab Studio — NextFab is a membership-based, high-tech workshop and prototyping center. Our facility provides comfortable, clean, and safe workspaces with hand tools, 3D printers, computer controlled machine tools, software, and electronics workbenches. Expert instructors and a community of collaborators are on hand to help you problem-solve and achieve your vision. NextFab Studio has everything necessary for you to invent, repair, create, and innovate!

Springboard Media – Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer based in Center City and now, in Exton. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500 when you’re ready to upgrade.

Volpe and Koenig, P.C. — Since 1987, intellectual property boutique law firm Volpe and Koenig has provided guidance on matters relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, e-commerce, technology joint ventures, non-disclosure agreements, technology acquisitions, licensing and litigation. Whatever your intellectual property law issue… Volpe and Koenig bring law to your ideas.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.