DreamIt Ventures announces 15 companies in its Fall 2011 class

DreamIt Ventures, Philadelphia’s nationally recognized early-stage technology incubator, has announced the 15 companies that will make up its Fall 2011 class. Seven have roots in the Philadelphia area.

Based in the University City Science Center, the incubator takes six percent stake in each company in exchange for three months of rapid development, mentoring and collaboration. Past DreamIt companies include SeatGeek, SCVNGR and Notehall.

Different from other years, this DreamIt class is the first in Philadelphia to begin in the Fall as the incubator opened up shop in the 67th Ward in the Summer. Additionally, DreamIt has partnered with Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Comcast Ventures to offer additional funding and the introduction of the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program, respectively.

Previously Technically Philly had unearthed four of the fifteen including CloudMine, which we profiled last month.

The companies from the DreamIt press release, our comments in italics:

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Apple specialist Springboard Media to celebrate Gayborhood location opening Saturday

Updated Fri., Sept. 9, 8:00 a.m.: Added language that clarifies that the store has been open several weeks and that Saturday’s event is a Grand Opening celebration.

Local Apple specialist and retailer Springboard Media is set to celebrate the opening of its third location this week, perhaps putting to rest concern that the opening of an official Apple retailer on Walnut Street last summer might hurt sales.

The store’s Gayborhood launch on Saturday morning at 116 S. 13th St., will include a special two-day sale on previous generation MacBook Air laptops, external storage and iOS device accessories. You can see the list of offerings here.

In October 2009, the company set up shop in Exton, where it too saw potential competition from suburban-based official Apple stores in Ardmore and King of Prussia.

Then as now, the company has championed its own hardware trade-in service, which Apple does not provide.

Success might hinge on reports that one-fourth of Philadelphians are Apple users, according to a April 2010 report from Experion Simmons.

[Full Disclosure: Though Springboard Media does not currently sponsor or support Technically Philly, it has in the past.]

More photos of the new Center City location after the jump.

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Drink Nation: DrinkPhilly.com launches national expansion plan, including DC, Baltimore, NYC

TheDrinkNation.com will launch “in the next two to three weeks if all goes well”, beginning the national expansion plans of DrinkPhilly.com, says founder Adam Schmidt.

“That will serve as a nation-wide content site and parent site for all the cities we are in. The nationwide content will be aimed at being general enough that anyone could enjoy it and will help populate the content to the local city sites and those local sites will also have freelancers contributing local content. So the city sites will have a combination of local and nationwide content, as well as all the happy hour data like what we have for Philly,” Schmidt, 29, tells Technically Philly. “I think it will be a pretty new type of media model in this industry.”

The online bar guide and nightlife news site launched in 2009 as an expansion on Schmidt’s Excel spreadsheet of Philadelphia Happy Hours. Technically Philly has spotted splash pages for DrinkDC, DrinkBaltimore and DrinkNYC.

“We’re looking at launching DrinkBaltimore and DrinkDC in early-mid October. No firm dates yet as we are still working to organize the launch parties. DrinkNYC is a ways away yet, probably in the spring or later,” he said.

In May, Schmidt announced the site’s launch to the Jersey Shore. New DrinkPhilly Editor Danya Henninger, who replaced outgoing edit lead Justin Giza, will lead the DrinkNation editorial operation, she told Technically Philly.

Comcast ads misled consumers, regulators say: Roundup [VIDEO]

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 an email subscription for our weekly Comcast roundup or other news updates

• Internet Essentials from Comcast: Mayor Nutter, CEO Brian Roberts unveil low-cost internet option [Technically Philly] Find a Willow Grove Patch school angle here.
• Comcast Ads Misled Customers, Regulator Says [The Wrap] — “The advertising industry’s self-regulating division has said that Comcast should modify or discontinue claims it makes about its Xfinity service, including those that imply inaccurate comparisons between Xfinity and its competitors.”
• Comcast’s NBC Universal Takeover Approved With Continuing Court Oversight [Bloomberg]

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Internet Essentials from Comcast: Mayor Nutter, CEO Brian Roberts unveil low-cost internet option [VIDEO]

Mayor Michael Nutter praises the Internet Essentials program from Comcast. Photo by Brian Dzenis

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

Internet Essentials, the low-cost broadband Internet program from Comcast, was launched in Philadelphia Tuesday, after first launching in Chicago in May.

Making good on another of the many commitments Comcast made to the FCC in seeking approval of its majority-stake acquisition of NBC Universal last fall, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts and Mayor Michael Nutter were on hand to officially announce the program at the Salvation Army’s Kroc Center in Nicetown. The Internet Essentials program allows low-income families to obtain Internet service at a rate less than what Comcast normally charges.

In addition to Chicago and Philadelphia, Internet Essentials has launched in Georgia, Delaware and Miami.

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City of Philadelphia’s ‘fragile infrastructure’ causes 30 to 45 day moratorium on new technology, says CIO Adel Ebeid

New City of Philadelphia Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid, at right, attending his first PhillyStat assessment meeting last month, sitting next to 311 head Rosetta Lue, at left. Photo courtesy @RichNegrin.

Not a month on the job, and new City of Philadelphia Chief Innovation Officer Adel Ebeid says the ‘major issues’ around city IT are apparent enough that he’s calling for a moratorium on any new technologies there for at least another month.

“I came to this conclusion after it was clear to me that the organization does not have a solid understanding of priorities, projects in the pipeline, resources needed to support new services, and the strategy to move forward,” Ebeid said in an internal email sent to select city IT staff, deputy mayors and commissioners and obtained by Technically Philly through an anonymous source. In it, Ebeid references his fear of the perception this might cause, that the “new guy is going to slow us down.”

That the city infrastructure is dated enough to warrant security and upkeep concerns is not news. That a top IT head wants to do something about it isn’t either. The news here is that Ebeid is sounding the alarm far sooner into his tenure than expected because, as he says, building on the systems that are today in “an unstructured fashion would put us one step closer to a perfect storm.”

It’s worth pointing out that Technically Philly is told that the city often puts a lock down on many systems, processes and IT infrastructure right before elections and during some holiday seasons, to reduce the likelihood that a major failure would be made worse by politics or short staff.

In short, this move isn’t unheard of, though the timing is close to it. See the entire internal email below.

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HardMetrics: with its analytics solution, a call for the Enterprise

A column by Geoff McQueen of HiiveSystems published on TechCrunch in late August posited a challenge to the status quo of today’s startup ecosystem: though consumer web is an exciting marketplace, with the necessities of big money and a big market, it sucks to build products for consumers.

“In the United States, if you want to reach a million users in a consumer play, you need to convince one in 260 people to use your product,” McQueen wrote.

It’s something that is easy to miss between the headlines of TechCruch, that same publication that makes the startup environment seem so exciting.

The enterprise — the business-to-business marketplace for software — is gaining more and more attention. TechCrunch has devoted a section to enterprise news, and Technically Philly has done its fair share, like coverage of Emerging Technology for the Enterprise, an international conference dedicated to the space, which takes place right in our Old City backyard.

It’s a growing market. In June, Gartner reported that the industry is on pace to surpass $267 billion in international revenue in 2011.

And though Wayne’s HardMetrics isn’t rewriting the rules of enterprise software deployment, it’s a great example of the prowess of enterprise business and its Philadelphia impact.

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Monetate’s new digs: gongs, nerf battles and lots of growth

When you walk into Monetate’s new offices in Conshohocken, you’ll immediately notice three things: the company hasn’t quite unpacked, the entire company sits in a single room and there are Nerf bullets scattered everywhere.

Just before it landed a $15 million investment from Boston’s OpenView Partners, Monetate has been rapidly expanding into a new office space on Hector Street in Conshohocken. Technically Philly made a rare venture into the ‘burbs last week to check out the new space.

Disclosure: Monetate was a PTW 2011 sponsor and 2012 sponsorship was among the topics discussed at the visit.

The office was formerly occupied by PointRoll, a rich media company that exited to Gannett in 2005. PointRoll’s VP of operations Max Sobol has gone on to create Solve Media and PointRoll’s CEO Chris Saridakis currently works in the same role for nearby GSI Commerce, which recently sold to eBay.

See more photos after the jump.

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Apps for SEPTA: a hackathon to play with local mass transit data

Apps for SEPTA, scheduled for the weekend of Oct. 8 and 9, is a hackathon “focused on building web, mobile or social applications” around the regional transit authority.

For $10, developers will play with local data and APIs from SEPTA, be well fed both days and get all the usual camaraderie of a weekend of coding around other smart, civic-minded hackers, says co-organizer and Voxeo Labs open gov nut Mark Headd. Representatives from SEPTA will be in attendance.

The hackathon will take place at the Devnuts Northern Liberties coworking space, which we recently updated you on. This is meant to be the first in a series of related hackathons. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly is a sponsor of this event.]

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Startup Roundup: Why do startups fail? [INFOGRAPHIC]

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 a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’s RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

Visual.ly has a great infographic put together from data culled by Startup Genome, which researched 3,200 startup companies to figure out why some work, and others, well, don’t.

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