Thank you for supporting us: today is Technically Philly’s second anniversary

As we tweeted this morning, today marks two years since we first launched Technically Philly with this post.

It was followed the next day by our first piece of news, an item on free cell service for low income Pennsylvanians and since then every weekday since, we’ve offered a little bit of coverage and clarity on a still growing technology community of creatives, entrepreneurs, technologists and geek heads. This is our 1,232nd post here.

Last year for our birthday, we celebrated with a Philly Startup Leaders Fishbowl to move on our building a business.  Plenty has happened internally since, and we’re tried to keep you apprised so our community of readers was part of our growth as a startup vying for sustainability like many of you.

Of our three founders, two of us are now full-time, and last month featured about 17,000 unique visitors to the site, clicking through to nearly three pages per visit, despite our 1,800 RSS and 500 email subscribers receiving a full feed. We have also long curated a conversation with our more than 3,000 Twitter followers.

In addition to covering this community and its trends, with your support we are proud to say we’ve done the following in the past two years:

• We launched Technically Media, a parent publishing consultancy company.
• We’ve started a grant-funded research project on the open data movement in Philadelphia.
• We have started organizing the first ever Philly Tech Week, to be held April 25-30.
• We kicked off a tech startup demo event called Switch Philly to help show off our scene.
• We’ve grown a national journalism conference called BarCamp NewsInnovation.
• We pitched a News Inkubator concept that is informing major investment in Philadelphia journalism.

Now we hope to move from startup toward established business and bring all of these concepts together. Thank you for supporting us. We look forward to many more years growing together.

Startup Roundup: TicketLeap takes a plunge

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

TicketLeap’s exciting announcement last week that it would be ticketing ComicCon, the world’s largest comic book conference, took a turn for the worse this weekend as the site crashed from 9 to 4 on Saturday, after receiving up to 400,000 page requests per minute. Despite preliminary tests, the site just couldn’t handle the traffic load, and as TicketLeap explained in a statement, “In 2009, it sold out after 6 months. In 2010, it sold out in 2 months. On Saturday, Comic-Con International 2011 sold out in 7 HOURS (200x faster than last year if you’re keeping track).” The technological details of the mishap are here. If there’s good news, it’s that the company learned (the hard way) how to handle an incredible influx of sales, which could be a feather in its cap. Or as GigaOM put it, the company still has some homework to do.

Solar States, which received $500,000 in private investment and city grants to power the Crane Arts Building on 1400 N. American Street with an array of solar panels, will host a launch event with the Mayor on Feb. 24.

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Two percent of Philly IT jobs are freelance and other tech community Census data

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

The Greater Philadelphia area is home to the offices of technical industry giants such as Comcast, SAP AG, Unisys Corporation and Sungard Data Systems, among others, which hold the bulk of some 12,510 information technology jobs throughout the City of Philadelphia, according to 2010 American Community Survey data.

As U.S. Census data continues to be released, shaping funding and legislative redistricting, a new decade is always an opportunity to look to see just what a community looks like. Philadelphia’s tech community leaders are often considered entrepreneurs and freelancers but, truth be told, most of the IT jobs here are with the region’s big employers.

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Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance to increase collaboration, make beautiful data with Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project

By cross-listing social indicators and staff outreach, a Temple University-housed data shop is going to give the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance a tool to determine areas within this region where partnerships between arts organizations working on social issues and other activist groups are most likely to be successful.

“We tell stories with data and information,’ says Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project coordinator Michelle Schmitt. “This project is a perfect example of that.”

It’s called the “Road Map for Regional Activity Analysis,” and the tool, expected to be completed in the spring, does three main things:

• inventories existing partnerships between arts and activists groups, including various work
• surveys the education and outreach directors of member organizations on their priorities and programs
• documents and maps those results to help show trends for Alliance members

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DreamIt Ventures announces its NYC leader

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.

Note: this VC roundup encompasses news from two weeks, not one.

MUST READS

In an email newsletter, DreamIt Ventures has announced that Mark Wachen will lead its 67th Ward incubator. According to Venturebeat, Wachen is an early-stage investor through Upstage Ventures and has invested in DreamIt alum SeatGeek. TechCrunch also revealed the other advisors to the New York incubator, which include lots of familiar faces from Philadelphia. The incubator announced yesterday that it is now taking applicants.

Pennsylvania state treasurer Rob McCord sits down with Technically Philly’s Christopher Wink. McCord served as a senior executive at Safeguard Scientifics and founded the Eastern Technology Fund.

LLR Partners announced it has invested in Avenues: The World School. Its flagship campus will debut in fall 2012 in New York. According to the press release, tuition, if the school opened today, would be about $35,000 to $36,000.

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Jonny Goldstein: Philly “oozes with character”

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.

People leave and come to cities all the time. That’s just part of their natural ebb and flow.

And, Exit Interview was never meant to be exclusively about community members leaving in a huff, it was meant to get a pulse on the various reasons why different people have left. Sometimes those reasons are purely circumstance.

Jonny Goldstein didn’t leave in a huff when he moved in mid-August 2010. His wife got a job in Pittsburgh, and the pair still loves this city. But the graphic artist’s new perspective is helpful in garnering insight on the perception of our city’s tax structure, its place in this part of the country and, heck, even how the Steel Town sees us.

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DistrictBuilder: Azavea, Harvard and George Mason professors let you redistrict online

Let the people redistrict the land.

Azavea, your friendly Callowhill neighborhood geospatial analysis software development company, announced last week with professors at Harvard and George Mason universities, DistrictBuilder, an open source, web-based redistricting application designed to give the public access to online redistricting tools.

The web-based software can be configured to redistrict any state or locality within the United States, and is based on open source technology in order to make it transparent and accessible by a broad audience.

“While the 2010 Census apportionment data results were released in December, in a few weeks’ time the 2010 Census population demographic profile data will be made available,” reads the release [PDF]. “At that point, legislators along with political consultants will start shifting district boundaries according to their own political interests, often at the expense of the interests of the citizens they represent.”

More below.

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Introducing Technically Philly office space

As part of Transparencity, the grant-funded reporting project we’re leading, we’re proud to announce that Technically Philly now has Center City office space.

Based in Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street, we’re still figuring out some logistical hurdles — like security, schedules and actually having functioning internet that visitors can use — but we have notions of using this great space as another way to get to know our community better.

Give us a heads up if you want to visit and co-work for a day. We accept one form of currency: you have you to teach us something interesting. …You know, or beer.

Sean Blanda gives you the quick tour below.

Event Highlights: February 7 – 13, 2011

It’s Global Ignite Week and it seems all of Philly is getting involved. Three events on our events calendar this week are adopting the lightning talks-style including the original Ignite Philly, now in its seventh edition.

This week: Take a walk through Ignite history, the Perl Mongers will beat you in quizzo and Philly.rb collaborates.

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Reed Technology offers web archiving tool to beat Archive.org

Back in December, Reed Technology—a local firm that develops systems to assist clients with a high volume of documentation—launched its most market-facing service to date: a web archiving service that allows companies to store dynamic content for historical record keeping, and more important, to save face if they get hit with a suit related to their web content.

Using a white-labelled third-party service, the company is hoping to offer a more feature-rich and focused model than Internet Archive, a academic project that has been storing static HTML pages across the Internet since the 90s. Reed Technology Web Archiving Service offers a deeper repository, saving images and back-links that are missing from the Internet Archive.

The tool archives everything, including web site presence and social media channels, ensuring that any public-facing online communications are officially on-the-record.

“From a corporation’s point of view, someone can make a claim about something that was on their website two years ago,” says Reed’s Vice President of Operations and Technology Services David Ballai.

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