Code for America Philadelphia fellows start work with City: Video interview

Mjumbe Poe, one of the Code for America Philadelphia fellows, speaks with John Mertens looking on. Photo by Nicholas Vadala

Aaron Ogle was quite taken with Philadelphia’s first Deputy Mayor for Public Safety.

“Man, you need a Youtube channel,” Ogle told Everett Gillison in a meeting.

Ogle, 30, is something of the leader of the seven-pack of Code for America fellows that parachuted into City Hall earlier this month.

Ogle, a former developer for local GIS shop Azavea, is one of two Philly natives in this, the inaugural year for an experimental program that offers chosen cities a team of coders for a year to create open source products that make government more efficient, transparent or ideally both.

In January, Ogle and Mjumbe Poe, 27, who was formerly doing contract code work for the University of Pennsylvania, landed in San Francisco to meet their new teammates and more than a dozen other young developers who would be working for the other inaugural CFA cities Washington D.C., Boston and Seattle.

After a month of training in relevant skills, style and city government, all of the fellows are being put up for the month of February in their respective cities. In March, all the fellows will make the pilgrimage back to the CFA headquarters in San Francisco where they will all presumably hold hands, share what they’ve learned and by September have an alpha version of some kind of application.

That’s what brought Ogle, Poe and the rest of the team in the gaze of Gillison.

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Jake and Amanda Feifer O’Brien call Philadelphia gritty, challenging, and home

Another in the Entrance Exam series, as part of the Why I Love Philly campaign from Young Involved Philadelphia and Indy Hall. Tell the world why you love where you live by tweeting #whyilovephilly.

Tonight at National Mechanics in Old City is the campaign’s kickoff event from 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. RSVP here.

How did a girl from Michigan and a guy from California end up living in the Italian Market?

I met Jake (@flailmonger) and Amanda Feifer O’ Brien (@forkspoonknife) in early 2007, soon after they moved to Philadelphia. We were enrolled in a continuing education class called Center City Savvy. The class was epic – our persistent teacher managed to secure us private audiences with the Secret Service, Le Beq Fin chefs, and Mayor Nutter, among others.

Four years later, Jake and Amanda could lead their own tour.

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NBC Network turnaround will take years, says Steve Burke: Comcast Roundup

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 ane-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

• Comcast Posts 7% Increase in Revenue [New York Times]
• New NBC Universal CEO Steve Burke: NBC Network Turnaround Will Take Years [Hollywood Reporter]
• Update: McDowell: Deal Desperation Fueled Comcast Acquiescence to Net Rules [Multichannel News] — “Republican FCC commissioner Robert McDowell said Wednesday that Comcast told him the reason it agreed to voluntarily abide by the FCC’s network neutrality rules whether or not they were overturned by the courts was because it was desperate to get the deal approved.”
• Is TV Everywhere Working For Comcast? [Gigaom] — “Comcast had some good news for investors this morning, with news that the number of subscribers lost to pay TV competitors and online-only services had slowed dramatically in the fourth quarter. Could Comcast’s slower subscriber losses be evidence that its TV Everywhere initiative might actually be working?” H/T Philly Tech News
• Comcast, Time Warner join IPv6 test program [Cnet]

Cira Center’s Leadnomics is expanding quickly

If you were to ask the folks at Leadnomics what their company does, the answer would pretty much boil down to “it’s complicated.”

The four-year-old company based out of the Cira Center is a statistician’s dream using a complex process to deliver high-quality leads to large companies like banks and insurance companies.

If it sounds technical, it is. But behind it all is a 11-person company co-founded by two recent Rowan University graduates that is expanding fast, looking for developers and new verticals to conquer.
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City Controller: 80% Non-Compliance with Sales Tax Laws; Philly Car Share owes $260k

A report claims to show the city’s top state sales tax delinquents, including $258,287  from Philly Car Share.

City Controller Alan Butkovitz today released an investigative report entitled, “Tax Discovery: Sales Tax Cross-Checking,” that found almost 80 percent of sampled businesses not licensed for a state sales tax were in operation but were not paying the state tax.

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Startup Roundup: Tap DJ makes top 10 paid apps list in App Store

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

Five weeks after launch, Laan Lab‘s Tap DJ is currently the #9 highest downloaded iPhone/iPod Touch application, the 11th highest-grossing app, and the #1 music category app. It’s like a sweep at the Grammy’s, only—these days—much cooler. We had a chance to play with the DJ mixing app this weekend, and despite the occasional crash hiccup, it’s slick enough to make Schoolly D jealous.

A Groupon for monthly utility bills? It could work, at least in states like Pennsylvania where energy is sold in a free market. Paoli’s AlphaBuyer, which launched late last week, is hoping to give consumers a competitive edge, and hoping to provide utility companies with access to new customers, with a model similar to GroupOn’s discount service. During a quick test, we found that we could save 1.35 cents per kWh, with a preliminary offer, which on average is a little more than $100 per year.

A smart piece on CenterNetworks on Viddler‘s role in the HuffPo/AOL deal, given the video platform’s integration with Endadget and the lack of video player standards throughout the network: Should Viddler be AOL’s next acquisition?

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ENIAC: 10 things you should know about the original modern super computer 65 years later

Photo courtesy of the Penn Library

Sixty five years ago today, the first newspaper accounts of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer hit newsstands.

From the Feb. 15, 1946 New York Times, a page one headline reads: ‘Electronic Computer Flashes Answers, May Speed Engineering’ and its true power is being said to have introduced the modern computer.

Below, we share 10 things about the ENIAC that you really ought to know.

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Michael McLarnon ‘hit the limit’ with his development in Philly

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.

Michael McLarnon says he just needed to try some place out to grow.

The Media native graduated from Drexel in 2005 and worked with GIS firm Azavea from then until this past July. That month, after living in Philly permanently since 2006 (and living carless since 2007) he took the familiar trip north to the 67th ward.

McLarnon says he’ll be back, and we wanted to know why.

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Campus Sponsorship looks for 750k, 3 other local startups raise cash

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

Ben Franklin Technology Partners was feeling generous this week. The group announced that it plans on investing $250,000 in clean energy companies and then went and awarded $2 million to seven companies, including LoSo Inc. a mobile application development company.

First Round Capital was plenty busy this week investing in luxury goods “flash sale” company One Kings Lane, re-upping on demand taxi cab service Uber and watching one of its companies exit to Tremor Media.

Campus Sponsorship, a recent DreamIt grad, is looking to raise $750,000 according to a Form D filing. Edit: The first $5,000 was from friends and family and the group hopes to raise $100,000 in angel money.

Levvitown-based Peervyne, a startup that promises to revolutionize social networking has raised $100,000 according to a Form D filing.

MIGHT ME WORTH YOUR TIME

Peter Key writes about wining and dining at the Early Stage Venture Showcase. One of the presenters, Farid Naib was featured in a post about his company on Technically Philly yesterday.

West Philly-based mobile payments company eZuza has raised $837,000. There are already two major players locally in the mobile payments market: Venmo and XIPWIRE.

Someone on Quora wants to know the reputation of DreamIt Ventures. Speaking of Quora, Edison Ventures lets the world know that it is, in fact, looking to invest in financial services companies on the question and answer site.

GIVE A GLANCE

NY Convergence notices that Originate Ventures makes companies move to Philadelphia before giving them funding.

Safeguard Scientifics, a publicly traded private equity firm, is trading at 52-week high.

DreamIt Ventures is ready to party at South by Southwest … and in the 67th Ward.

Why DDC CEO Farid Naib wants to save you $3.5 million

Document Depository Corporation CEO Farid Naib keynotes the 2010 Philly Startup Leaders Founders Factory. [Speech starts at 15:00 mark]

Cristina Greysman likes to say that DDC was born out of pain, the kind that once cost her boss $3.5 million.

In selling a previous company, CEO Farid Naib was unable to find important documents like lease agreements and contracts to close the deal. “The [purchasing] company held $3.5 million of the purchase in escrow until he produced the documents,” says Greysman the director of business development at DDC. “He took a hit on the valuation because no one knew where these documents were.”

The disorganization led Naib to found Document Depository Corporation a service that helps large companies keep track of important documents by leveraging the cloud and lots of metadata in ways that would make Google Docs jealous.

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