First Round Capital’s busy week

Welcome to the VC Round-up, 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

As we reported earlier today, ClickEquations was sold to Channel Intelligence and both companies have local venture capital ties. ClickEquations has been funded by Ben Franklin Technology Partners and First Round Capital. Channel Intelligence is an Internet Capital Group “partner company.”

Philly Tech News celebrates 40 years on the NYSE for Safeguard Scientifics. The firm will ring the closing bell next month and has set up a microsite dedicated to the anniversary.

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ClickEquations exits to Channel Intelligence

Conshohocken-based paid search company ClickEquations has been purchased by Orlando-based Channel Intelligence for an undisclosed sum.

Details were scarce in the press release, but according to CEO Lucinda Holt’s personal blog she will be staying on for “a month or so.”

“I plan to do one more company,” she wrote, “let me know if you have a great idea or know someone who does.”

Holt also announced she was changing her name to Lucinda Bromwyn Duncalfe. She is active in the local entrepreneurial community often speaking at DreamIt Ventures and investing in local startups such as Monetate.

The company was among the small handful of locally based companies funded by First Round Capital and received $50,000 from Ben Franklin Technology Partners last month. Read more about the company in our 2009 profile here.

Third public computer center launches, this time in West Philadelphia [VIDEO]

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

Recent data backs up estimates that more than half of Philadelphia households do not have access to broadband Internet.

According to a survey completed by the Knight Center and with U.S. census data, experts have determined that 41 percent of Philadelphia households do not have Internet and/or computer access.  Most of these households are in North, West and some parts of South Philadelphia and include mostly low-income African-American and Hispanic families, according to the data.

Hamidou Trare helping a student at the new PEC lab.

The City of Philadelphia is working to close the digital divide and for good reason.  In April of this year, the city’s unemployment rate hovered at 9.3 percent, nearly a half a point higher than the national average of 8.7 percent.  As Philadelphia’s economy continues transitioning from manufacturing to information technology, closing the divide could be key to attracting new jobs to Philadelphia.

“It’s a workforce issue,” said Andrew Buss, director of public programs for the City of Philadelphia’s Division of Technology.  “If we don’t have a trained, skilled workforce it will be difficult to attract employers to Philadelphia.”

Buss, along with Lindsey Keck, the program manager for the Public Computer Center Project, helped the City coordinate with a dozen partner community organizations to launch computer centers all over Philadelphia. These centers will offer public access to computers, the Internet and computer skills training.

“We recognize that in order for any Philadelphian or any American to compete in the 21st century they must have literacy skills and this includes verbal, written and computer literacy skills to survive,” said Mayor Michael Nutter during the press conference at the ‘wire-cutting’ launch ceremony of the People’s Emergency Center, located on Warren Street near Spring Garden Street in West Philadelphia.

“Computer literacy is no longer an option,” Nutter said.  “It is a true necessity.”

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Philly Geek Awards: Geekadelphia to honor geek, technology communities Aug. 19 at Academy of Natural Sciences

The team behind Geekadelphia, the playful geek culture blog, has announced the first ever Philly Geek Awards to take place Friday, Aug. 19 at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Free tickets, with a suggested donation of $5, are now available, as co-founder and lead organizer Eric Smith announced last week.

“A black-tie, red carpet event, we’re taking this ‘jawn’ seriously. Think of it as the local Daytime Emmy of the Webby Awards. Presenters will take to the Academy of Natural Sciences’ stage to talk about the nominees, open up an envelope to announce the winner, all that good stuff.  Expect beautiful trophies/plaques,  a fantastic pre-awards cocktail hour  thanks to National Mechanics and DrinkPhilly, and lots of laughs.”

[Full Disclosure: Geekadelphia has nominated Philly Tech Week and work we've done with the National Constitution Center; we can only assume to throw pie at us.]

Philadelphia Geek Awards
Friday, August 19th, 2011
www.phillygeekawards.com

Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 299-1009 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (215) 299-1009 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
www.ansp.org

Naked Philly outed as OCF Realty, to launch real estate tool

According to folks at OCF Realty, real estate technology hasn’t changed much in recent years: clients give agents a set of criteria and the real estate agents use a program (typically Trend) to return a set of listings.

Founded in 2008, the Graduate Hospital-based agency set out last year to make a better listing service, based on a map that would geocode listings so realtors could no longer fudge the neighborhood in which a given property was located.

According to OCF founder Ori Feibush, the service will complete the original vision for Naked Philly as alluded to in March by then-anonymous site editor Caitlin Conners. OCF says it will populate the map with Naked Philly content to help buyers see the narrative of each of the city’s neighborhoods and act as a service to find listings from OCF and other city realtors.

The site also aims to eliminate the ambiguity with the city’s neighborhood boundaries that often lead to realtors liberally applying neighborhood names with higher values to properties outside of those traditional neighborhood bounds.

“Every realtor cheats,” says OCF’s Feibush, who has also opened up a series of coffee houses in neighborhoods poised for development.

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Philadelphia business taxes, a complete digest [chart]

Our friends at It’s Our Money compiled the taxes and fees that Mayor Michael Nutter could raise.

CLICK THROUGH TO SEE THE FULL LIST OF PHILADELPHIA TAXES

Event Highlights: June 13th – 19th, 2011

Happy Monday, Philadelphia. We hope you made it through last week’s heat wave because this week’s event slate is as diverse as they come. And don’t forget, you can get these event highlights delivered to your inbox every Monday at noon.

This week, pow-wow with creatives, bone up on your Python and dress as Spiderman (but not at the same time).

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Thaddeus Squire: CultureWorks to train Philly arts to do more with less funding; Hidden City to return in 2013

Thaddeus Squire in Girard College, taken in 2009 for CityPaper. Photo by Neal Santos, from whom we lovingly stole this. Click to enlarge.

This is not about technology.

This is about learning lessons from the technology community and a broader entrepreneurial spirit and taking those lessons to a decidedly foreign place: arts and heritage institutions.

And nobody seems more interested in doing that than Thaddeus Squire, the refined founder and president of CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia, a new iteration of his 2005-founded Peregrine Arts and its triumphant and sprawling, summer 2009 urban exploration art showcase Hidden City.

Squire, turning 39 on July 26th, grew up in Merion near the Barnes Foundation, about which he penned an ‘incendiary’ letter to the Inquirer in 1999, criticizing its coverage. It was loud enough, he said, that it helped him land a development job with the Museum of Art, having had just moved back to Philly, after Princeton and serving a Fulbright scholarship at the University of Leipzig in Germany. Through that work at the Museum of Art, Relâche and elsewhere, he became quite focused on the entirely unsurprising notion that arts organizations aren’t, on the whole, very good at funding what they do.

“We’ve over estimated the need for research and best practices for creating sustainable and resilient arts and heritage groups. We have more research than actual labor to run any of these programs using the best practices we research,” said Squire, a Brewerytown resident since 2002. “I’m interested in a model that brings the research and the labor together.”

And that’s just about how Peregrine,  which did work in the arts consulting space, became the three tiered CultureWorks program, which is only now readying for the public and, Squire says, could reshape how art gets done and sustained in Philadelphia and beyond.

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Philly fifth best city for IT jobs [infographic]

CLICK THROUGH TO FULL INFOGRAPHIC from Modis, focusing on the best IT jobs for growth.

Lower Merion webcam suit brought back to life: Links

• Former Harriton student files new webcam suit against Lower Merion [Main Line Media]
• Build Your Own FM Radio Transmitter @ the Hacktory [Geekadelphia]
• GSI Commerce Selects Tobias Hartmann as Chief Executive Officer of GSI Commerce’s Global Operations Organization [Press release]