Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Caffeine Fish — Caffeine Fish develops iOS apps including Trainboard and PhillySubway and offers consulting in the Philadelphia area.

MOGO Media — MOGO Media provides best-of-class training for designers and developers through world-wide conferences and seminars. The organization will host a Dreamweaver seminar on December 15 in Philadelphia.

Newsworks — NewsWorks is the online home of WHYY News and its growing network of journalism partners. This public media service covers the Philadelphia region, Delaware and South Jersey, with a focus on regional issues, neighborhoods, health and science, and arts.

Morgan Lewis — Morgan Lewis provides comprehensive transactional, litigation, labor and employment, regulatory, and intellectual property legal services to clients of all sizes—from global Fortune 100 companies to just-conceived startups—across all major industries.

Reed Technology — Reed Technology’s Web Archiving Service is a litigation protection, web compliance and e-discovery solution for all your online assets.

Your Local Security — Providing affordable home security systems in Philadelphia. Top of the line equipment and monitoring services from ADT keep your home and family safe.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

Drexel is making waves in Philly’s entrepreneurial community

During the past two weeks at Technically Philly, we couldn’t help but notice Drexel University being mentioned with increasing frequency in our interviews with local entrepreneurs and investors.

We don’t have the resources to rank the region’s schools like U.S. News and World Report, but anecdotally, Drexel is making waves:

• We’ve been told by one source that the college is planning to launch the Center for Visual Decision Informatics. Similar to Wharton’s Consumer Analytics Institute, the group will help analyze large data sets for corporations and government.
• LewBow School College of Business was ranked the #13 best entrepreneurial program for undergrads by the Prineton Review (Temple ranked #11).
• ApprenNet founder and Drexel Professor Karl Okamoto has just launched a entrepreneurial law clinic.
• Drexel is the site of the upcoming Startup Weekend.
• Drexel will be providing interns to Project Liberty, the Philadelphia Media Network’s new incubator.
• According to our interview with Ken Kay, founder of Ecelerator, Drexel will likely provide Ecelerator with interns as well.

Great work, Dragons. Dr.Papadakis would have been proud.

Change by Us: Philly version of web tool to crowdsource civic action projects launches beta

The Philadelphia version of Change by Us, the “online marketplace for volunteer initiatives” built by a firm from the 67th ward, has launched in beta.

VISIT IT HERE.

The web tool asks users to submit project ideas for their neighborhoods or the city — think ‘plant more trees in Brewerytown’ or ‘convert a portion of the Reading Vidauct to an elevated park’– and to connect and collaborate on suggestions from others. The concept is that city officials and other decision makers would monitor the site to garner insight about what projects have community buy-in. Short of official support, residents can organize and act on their own.

The local version is being developed by the Code for America fellows. See more features listed on the CFA Google Group here.

What ideas will you submit? How can this project be improved in future versions? Do you think any real action will come out of this?

Hacks/Hackers Philly launches, will host first meetup to connect journalists, technologists

Hacks/Hackers, the grassroots national chapter-based organization that brings together journalists and technologists, now has a Philadelphia group.

Hacks/Hackers Philly, organized by Public School Notebook web editor Erika Owens and Azavea GIS analyst Dana Bauer, will host its first meetup next Tues., Oct. 18 6 p.m. at the Municipal Services Building. RSVP here.

“Anyone with an interest in technology and/or journalism should attend, in particular people with ideas, questions, enthusiasm, and persistence,” said Owens. “We’re thinking the first meetup will be a chance for people to get to know each other and learn about the hacks/hackers concept. We want to see what types of things people in Philly are interested in. Do they want to build projects? Do they want to skill share? Both? Something else?”

Read more

Universal Studios changes course on early movie release due to theater concerns: 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 an email subscription for our weekly Comcast roundup or other news updates.

• Comcast’s MyTV Choice: Is this the future of pay TV bundling? [Gigaom] — “Comcast is testing out a new type of pay TV bundling that gives users the ability to pick and choose which types of content they want to pay for month after month. The MyTV Choice trial, which was just introduced in Comcast’s Charleston, S.C. market, isn’t true a la carte offering, as some folks like to think of it, but it’s a step toward more personalized programming choices becoming available to customers.”
• Universal Delays On-Demand Test Plan [Media Decoder: New York Times] — “For Comcast, it was a hard lesson in movie industry politics: on Wednesday its Universal Studios unit, under severe pressure from theater owners, suddenly tabled a plan to allow the early release on video-on-demand of its forthcoming film “Tower Heist” in two test markets.” We first told you about the plans last week.

Read more

What will be the impact of Philly Tech Week 2012?

“To make a better Philadelphia through technology.” That’s our call to action and the motto of Philly Tech Week 2012, now only six months away.

Today, we’ve launched the Philly Tech Week media kit, which you can flip through by clicking the embed above to active full-screen mode, or by clicking this link.

Using data and information we collected from attendees, this publication will help you understand the value of the inaugural Philly Tech Week, held in April, which brought together 4,000 people at 65 events and had city-wide impact.

The big takeaways are in the 2011 numbers:

• 65 events across broad range of technology industries
• More than 4,000 people attended events throughout the region
• Featured in more than 50 stories in newspapers, radio, television and blogs
• 35 participating sponsors signed on for inaugural year
• 30,000 unique visits to PhillyTechWeek.com and TechnicallyPhilly.com during month of event as well as 1,000 social media mentions

We hope this media kit shows why we need your help to make a success out of Philly Tech Week 2012, to be held April 22 through April 28, 2012. Check out the media kit here. Sign-up for email updates and look for a Fall launch of the 2012 website here.

If you’re already interested in getting involved, learn how to organize an event or how to sponsor Philly Tech Week.

RJD2, Philly musician and DJ, builds his own synthesizers

Photo Credit: Wired.com / RJD2

Wired has a great piece published yesterday showing how Philadelphia musician RJD2 builds his own modular synthesizers. The artist says that 90 percent of his samples are from vintage or DIY synth gear. That’s cool.

From the article:

“To have a piece of plastic with a bunch of copper traces on it and then drill some holes in a piece of sheet metal and silkscreen it, then you wire this whole thing up and send some voltage through it — I know this might sound silly, but that’s the most fascinating and addicting process you can possibly imagine,” RJD2 told Wired.com by phone, discussing his process.

Read the whole thing here.

New incubator Ecelerator wants to play match maker between entrepreneurs and corporations

Ecelerator founder Ken Kay is a big believer in taking elements of regional startup ecosystems such as meetups, hackathons and accelerators and morphing them to appeal and benefit corporations as well as entrepreneurs.

After a visit to DreamIt Ventures earlier this year, Kay said he was inspired to create Ecelerator, a B2B-focused incubator in Hoboken, New Jersey.

We know, we know. Hoboken is much more 67th Ward than City of Bortherly Love. But Kay resides in Princeton and has been active in Central Jersey angel investor circles. He’s also the founder of icihere, an iPhone app that powers Philadelphia arts events.

“[Ecelerator] takes advantage of this region’s very vibrant corporate community. When I reached out to folks like Merck, Dow Jones… they were very hungry to connect to the broader tech scene,” says Kay.

The incubator will act as an outsourced research and development department for nearby corporations. Coporations will be “members” of the accelerator that will tell Ecelerator the technology needs it has as well as products that specific business could use. For example, Kay says, a business could say “we want to streamline our payment system on the iPad.”

Read more

West Philly Hybrid X team earns Popular Mechanics Next Generation Breakthrough Award

Clockwise from left: Jeffrey Johnson, Stefon Gonzalez, Brandon Ford, Shamere Palmer, Adam Mitchell, Sydney Dickerson, Azeem Hill, Morris Bailey and Ciera Williams Dennis Kleiman Read more: The West Philly Students Who Build Supercars - 2011 Breakthrough Award Winner - Popular Mechanics. Photo by Dennis Kleiman

The respected West Philadelphia High School Hybrid X team has been given the Next Generation Breakthrough Award from Popular Mechanics magazine:

Of the 111 Teams that competedfor the $10 million purse in last year’s Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, only one was from a high school—West Philadelphia, where85 percent of students are economically disadvantaged. West Philly entered two vehicles—a Factory Five GTM biodiesel hybrid kit car and a converted Ford Focus gasoline plug-in hybrid—and made it to the semifinals with both. “We were going up against teams that had dozens of engineers, and we had 15 students, a couple of teachers and a dream,” says adviser Simon Hauger, a teacher in the school’s Academy of Automotive and Mechanical Engineering. “One of the marvelous things about teenagers is they’re not daunted by that.”

MORE

‘Philly Finds’ scavenger hunt from Hotel Palomar this weekend to win iPhone 4S and free hotel stay

The trendy, boutique Center City  Hotel Palomar, operated by Klimpton, is launching its first-ever “Philly Finds” scavenger hunt for locals and hotel guests this weekend.

Using the iPhone and Android mobile application “Scavenger Hunt with Friends,” Hotel Palomar Philadelphia will put all willing participants on a weekend hunt, Fri. Oct. 14th through Mon. Oct. 17th, seeking out everything from historic landmarks to famous Philly food spots.

See details below.

Read more