Knight Art Challenge announces 63 finalists, including Indy Hall and theartblog

The Knight Arts Challenge announced 63 finalists for its Philadelphia call for 150-word grant applications.

See all of the finalists here, which include applications such as:

• African American Museum in Philadelphia: to share the unifying power of the arts by showcasing commissioned dance and gospel performances through free weekly concerts at the museum’s Seventh Street Plaza.
• Indy Hall: to strengthen the city’s creative community by turning an entire city block into a creative co-working community center.
• Kimmel Center: to use the arts to revitalize neighborhoods by transforming a vacant lot into a community center for performance art.
• theartblog.org: to broaden participation and excitement in the visual-art scene by creating a smart phone app that gives a comprehensive, up-to-date listing of Philadelphia art galleries.

[Full Disclosure: Yes, this author applied. No, he didn't win. Yes, he can still report on and think the Knight Arts Challenge rocks.]

Startup Roundup: PennApps developers favor Android, PhillyHistory.org gets augmented reality

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

At PennApps Mobile this weekend, a hackathon we covered earlier this month, several winners took home prizes. MeepMe, Ambiance and Decider, which were each developed in under 48 hours, took the best of show awards. The bigger takeaway was that though a majority of the developers participating owned iPhones, an overwhelming majority chose to develop in Android. It’s gotta be that Java.

PhillyHistory.org is moving toward augmented reality, according Azavea. Yes, please.

Alex Hillman has joined Wildbit, the Indy Hall-located company that provides the Beanstalk collaborative code platform and the NewsBerry email marketing service. Hillman will help the company market its services through conferences, outreach and creative marketing, according to a company blog post.

Read more

VC roundup: Wikipedia snubs Robin Hood Ventures

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.

MUST READS

Somebody created a Robin Hood Ventures Wikipedia page and then it was deleted because the article “does not indicate the importance or significance of the subject.” Poor Robin Hood. We covered local tech entities that don’t have Wikipedia pages a few years back.

In case you missed it, Christopher Wink interviewed DreamIt Ventures alumnus NoteHall about moving out of Philly.

Edison Ventures continues its amazing year with another exit. Portfolio company Presidium Inc, based in Reston, Virgina has sold to BlackBoard Inc. for over $20 million. Presidium, which also has an office in Reston, “provides enrollment, financial aid and educational technology services” according to the release.

Read more

Comcast, NBC Universal deal gets FCC approval

More than one year after the deal was first announced:

The Federal Communications Commission and the Department of Justice on Tuesday approved — with several conditions — a merger of the country’s largest cable operator, Comcast, and broadcasting company NBC Universal. The FCC voted 4-1 in favor of the deal.

Comcast pledged major commitments in protecting online video competition, bolstering local news coverage and improving digital divide web-access to earn approval.

Megan Wendell: “I felt that Philadelphia taxes were significantly holding back” our business

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Megan Wendell has an interesting story, and she knows it.

As shared in our March 2010 interview with the indie record label executive turned Canary Promotions + Design chief and her web developer husband Mason, Wendell had very deep professional and personal relationships with the Philadelphia arts and creative technology communities.

A couple months before husband Mason joined Old City development firm Zivtech, the couple had moved their home, their young daughter and, by extension, Megan’s promotions business out of Mount Airy in northwest Philadelphia to nearby suburban Glenside.

Megan is very careful in pointing out that this move was all business. She still has nothing but love for the Philly arts scene, but there has to be something to be learned from the move by this young, educated, creative family.

Technically Philly talks to Megan below, in another installment of Exit Interview.

Read more

Technically Media Inc.: We build Audiences (and publish Technically Philly)

Just a quick update for those of you who have long requested we keep you apprised on the startup business side of things.

Earlier this month, we more formally introduced Technically Media Inc., the media services company that publishes this rag you’re reading right now. Just so we’re clear, don’t be impressed. That isn’t some multinational corporation. It’s still a startup from three schlubs in Philly, but now we just are a little more legally sound.

In addition to squandering late night hours tracking venture deals, startups and the technology community in Philadelphia, we like building audiences online.

So, in the catering business to this retail shop, we will be helping nonprofits, businesses and other media organizations grow an audience online through meaningful content, in addition to keeping TP alive.

Any potential conflicts of interest, as always, will be disclosed, as noted in our ethics policy.

If you want more, founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink have all written about the move.

Tom Thunstrom of PhillyWeather.net: Forecasting weather in Philly is tougher than in Minneapolis

Tom Thunstrom’s interest in meteorology ‘blew up’ in to a fascination as a kid growing up in Minnesota.

He was interested in the snow and the cold, but there was something about watching a tornado pull debris into the sky that changed his perspective.

Today, Thunstrom, in his mid-30s and living Royersford in Montgomery County (after moving here for his wife), has kept that fascination alive. This summer, Thunstrom, who is the Philadelphia senior program manager of Operation HOPE, an economic tools and services providers for the underserved, celebrated five years publishing PhillyWeather.net, a blog featuring surprisingly detailed, lucid and informative writing on the region’s climate and weather. Now he’s in the thick of his busy season — a snowy winter.

“In the end, I want us to be good at what we do and keep the masses informed without hysterical levels of hype,” he says, noting hopes to dive deeper into the sharing of information and data in new ways in the future.

If it’s going to snow and you want to really understand why it will and how you can follow the science of it all, PhillyWeather.net is where you want to go. A guy with a bow tie in front of a green screen Thunstrom is certainly not.

Read more

400,000 more Facebook users list Philadelphia as their location today than in 2010

Some 400,000 more Facebook users listed Philadelphia as their location earlier this month than did in January 2010, according to much trafficked data from iStrategy Labs that circulated it way across the web.

As can be seen in the chart above, Philadelphia had a middling rate of growth during that time period — 32.4 percent — in comparison with other big cities. There is no clear mention of expected margin of error, considering these are self-reported location statistics.

It’s interesting to note the dramatic plunge for all listed cities in their overall percentage hold of U.S. Facebook users from last year to now, due to continually fast growing user-ship. It’s not just all youse damn urban elites.

Get more perspective from iStrategy and from AllFacebook, which, perhaps dubiously, claims these figures suggest 71 percent of all Americans have Facebook accounts. We wonder how many fraudulent accounts are included, considering we at TP have more than a few Friend requests sitting in our queue from friends’ pets.

What else do you think is wrong with these numbers? Or are the potential flaws just more apparent but no more damaging than in other collections?

Event Highlights: January 17 – 23rd, 2011

We hope you cleared your schedule Philadelphia, because we have a packed week of technology events to get excited about. And for our readers in the ‘burbs, this one’s for you.

This week, the return of Mobile Monday, the latest Drupal Meetup and Philly Build Guild gets together.

Read more

Susan Kare, Regional Rail and the original Macintosh fonts

Rosemont. Ardmore. Overbrook. Paoli. Locally, they’re second nature. Simply, stops on the Regional Rail.

But in the early 80s, as Apple was preparing its original Macintosh personal computer, the names nearly became titles for several typefaces in its operating system.

Susan Kare, the prolific typeface and icon designer—who now works for clients like Facebook, Chumby, PayPal, AOL and others—remembers it well. She was in Cupertino, California, designing that first set of legendary typefaces.

She and a colleague, Andy Hertzfeld, named them after local transit stops between their hometown of Narberth and Center City.

Until Steve Jobs stepped in.

“Jobs thought that our idea of city names was fine, but suggested that “world class cities” would be better than suburban towns,” she said in an e-mail to Technically Philly.

So it is that the original macintosh fonts—Chicago, New York, Geneva, Venice and a handful of others have roots in Philadelphia. And by association, so do some of the classic designs shown above, created by Kare, like the designs for Microsoft’s Solitaire, the Happy Mac icon, and even the obscure Swedish symbol that Apple still uses for its Command key.

A conversation with Kare, to get this bit of Philly folklore on the record, after the jump.

Read more