Originate Ventures gets Google money for RightsFlow

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 READ

RightsFlow, originally funded by Originate Ventures, has been purchased by Google. The company helps make the licensing process easier for music and film and will be integrated into YouTube.

In case you missed it, we wrote a recap of the Fall 2011 DreamIt Ventures Demo Day that took place at World Cafe Live last Wednesday. We wrote a short roundup of all 14 companies with a few anecdotes from the day. TechCrunch, Black Web 2.0, Philadelphia Business Journal and The Next Web also covered the event.

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Women entrepreneurs and technologists: a growing community more welcomed here than Bay Area, other tech hubs [VIDEO]

Kate Krauss, a sometimes entrepreneur, has been involved in startups in both San Francisco and Philadelphia and says the tech scene here is more welcoming.

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.

Kate Krauss did not anticipate getting involved in technology when she moved to Philadelphia 15 years ago. When she started working in communications for a friend’s Bay Area startup this past year, she noticed how female-friendly the Philadelphia tech community is compared to that of the male dominated tech scene in Silicon Valley.

Having lived in San Francisco for 10 years directly prior to relocating to Philadelphia, Krauss said she has seen a difference between the two cities and the way they treat the technology community.

“It’s not just the groups that are focused on women, it’s the whole community in Philadelphia that is really different,” Krauss said, suggesting that comes from a feminist attitude ingrained in the city years ago.

“It comes from friendliness and a charm that we have here in Philadelphia, and it kind of sends a mutual aid that I think comes out of our Quaker background. Whether you’re Quaker or not, it’s in the air here,” Krauss said. “We have hundreds of years of tradition of egalitarianism, and it influences everything we do. It’s in the water, it’s in the air, and it’s in the startup culture.”

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iPhones, happy hour and Tech Philly groups [Event Highlights]

It was a weekend that signified a return to normalcy: the weather cooled down to a very holiday-like 35 degrees and the Eagles handled their business down in Miami.

Speaking of returning to normal, we hope you had a wonderful weekend but now its time to get back to work and check out your packed calendar of technology events.

This week: learn iPhone development on the cheap, meetup with meetups and grab a beer with Philly Tech Meetup.

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Dr. Chad Womack: A vision for tech-based local development and the STEM education needed to get there

Womack in 2007.

Updated, Dec. 13, 2011, 12:41: Changed company named from NanoTec to NanoVec; corrected Dr. Nunery’s name.

When Dr. Chad Womack moved his nanobiomolecular startup company NanoVec to Philadelphia in 2006, he was working from an office located in front of University City High School.

Though he was born and raised in Philadelphia, he didn’t know the history of the school. Long drawn to education, he began wondering how the school was impacted by science, technology, education and mathematics (STEM) initiatives.

That was how he came to chair a School District of Philadelphia task force run by then Superintendent Thomas Brady to help shape a vision for boosting STEM opportunities.

“The school district was not prepared to address STEM as an initiative that would provide an opportunity for students to have a pathway into college, majoring in STEM, and then into careers,” Womack says.

It wasn’t the first time that he has been involved in the issue.

In 1999, Womack followed a health fellowship at Harvard researching HIV/AIDs to a research position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. His interest in STEM led him to D.C. Public Schools, where a year later, Arlene Ackerman would resign as Superintendent.

So it was that Ackerman’s departure from the School District of Philadelphia this summer was familiar to him. He was actively working to encourage STEM initiatives in the District, when he wasn’t working with The America21 project.

“Ackerman didn’t want to be bothered with it, but this is very typical of leadership in public education. To them, STEM is this special thing for whiz kids,” he says.

Womack’s The America21 Project is focused on empowering urban centers and communities through STEM education and workforce development, high-growth entrepreneurship and access to capital. With his new venture, he’s still actively engaging the District around STEM priorities.

After the jump, we caught up with Womack about the state of STEM education in Philadelphia.

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How to get involved with STEM education in Philadelphia

A child plays with one of the robots at the Philly Robotics Expo during Philly Tech Week 2011. Photo: Rachel Playe

Of the four parts of a series on science, technology, engineering and mathematics education that ran this week on Technically Philly, it was perhaps the fourth that grabbed our attention most.

Despite mounting problems in the School District of Philadelphia related to STEM education, many are beyond its immediate control, and citizens are taking action to get involved.

Throughout conversations with dozens of people involved with STEM education in Philadelphia it was said repeatedly: This is the city’s and nation’s problem, not the District’s alone.

That makes it a local technology community problem.

What is missing is a pipeline to connect that community of bright, active individuals in Philly tech with students. Second, we believe, entrepreneurs could use their experience with innovation to attack the problem with business plans.

It’s with that in mind that we’ve partnered with Teach for America’s Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education workshop series. Focused on innovation in education, the invite-only workshops, which will take place in 2012, are intended to inspire the creation of actionable nonprofit and business ventures to impact education.

When TFA launched a similar workshop series in the San Francisco Bay Area, it resulted in the launch of new startups, including Junyo, a tool to help teachers measure student learning, and Skoodio: a student portfolio platform for the social media age. Perhaps most interestingly, of 25 participants in the workshop series, a third were experienced in technology and business with little education background.

When we connected with the organization, it was abundantly clear that the entrepreneurial spirit of Philadelphia’s technology community could help create organizations that could inspire actionable change in education.

The workshops will lead up to a pitch event in May where participants will demonstrate their ideas.

We encourage you to apply for the workshops here. Mention that you saw the opportunity on Technically Philly. Deadline for applications is December 16.

If you’re not interested specifically in the workshops, there’s plenty of ways to get involved with STEM education in Philadelphia. After the jump, we point to some of the organizations that have mentorship, volunteering and sponsorship opportunities.

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Drexel, Penn, Swarthmore college presidents among nation’s best paid [LINKS]

• Phila. Sustainability Workshop tries to reinvent the high school [Inquirer]
• Entrepreneurs Flock to last month’s Rutgers Entrepreneurship Conference [Philly Tech News]
• Internet Access and the New Digital Divide [New York Times]
• How the Internet Is Ruining Everything [Bits: New York Times]
• Area university heads among best paid [Philadelphia Inquirer]
• Deadly streets: mapping road fatalities [PlanPhilly]
• Cipher Prime’s Fractal [Game Impressions] [Geekadelphia]
• Science Center opens the Bullpen for startups [Philadelphia Business Journal]

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:

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.

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.

Springboard Media — Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer with two locations in Center City, including its newest in Midtown Village. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500

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

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.

DreamIt Ventures graduates 14 startups on Demo Day

Managing Partner Steve Welch during the opening of DreamIt Ventures Demo Day.

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people braved the sometimes-torrential rain to file into the bottom floor of World Cafe Life. There was no concert, instead people came to see the culminating event of 14 startups working non-stop for three months with the hope of becoming the next great Philadelphia-born startup.

DreamIt Ventures held its fourth Philadelphia Demo Day in a year that saw the accelerator expanding to New York City for the first time garnering it significant national attention.

A chart demonstrating the progress of DreamIt companies. Dark orange = at time of acceptance into DreamIt. Light orange = at Demo Day. (click to enlarge)

As we wrote in this week’s VC Roundup, the current crop of companies weren’t using Demo Day to reveal products, many were actively raising money and some already had. After the jump, read our company-by-company synopsis of the day.

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Citizens work alongside the school system to strengthen District STEM education opportunities

This story is part of a series produced by Technically Philly. It is published in support of Teach for America’s 2012 education workshop series Greater Philadelphia: Innovation in Education. The series will run daily Dec. 5-9.

After graduating from Murrell Dobbins Career and Technical Education High School while living in a working-class neighborhood in West Philadelphia during the 1980s, Myreon-Michael Smallwood had a decision to make.

He didn’t have an interest in attending a four-year college, but his father, who worked as an inspector for the Philadelphia Water Department, wanted better for his son. They agreed to meet in the middle.

Having always liked to take things apart, Smallwood enrolled in a two-year electronic technology associates program at the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology outside the city in Media.

Smallwood

It was there that he learned computer-aided drafting, using an emerging software package called AutoCAD, which would shape the course of his career.

After graduating in 1989, he got a job as a technician at a small polymer processing plant. Five years in, outsourcing of industrial jobs began to impact the plant. But the computer skills that Smallwood learned at P.I.T. and in high school made him an indispensable asset to the company.

Today, Smallwood’s success, of graduating from Philadelphia’s public school system as an African-American and earning a degree at a two-year technical school in a field related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, known as STEM, would be considered a statistical anomaly.

As we reported Monday, between 2005 and 2010, less than one percent of African-American students — who make up more than half of the District’s enrollment of 150,000 — graduated high school and went on to earn college degrees in a STEM-related major.

Having later earned a bachelor’s degree from Drexel University, Smallwood now works at Boeing’s southwest Philadelphia location as an engineer, helping to keep track of the physics that enable the company’s helicopters to fly.

It was out of concern for the District’s STEM opportunities that he stepped outside of his daily routine at the company to address the situation that faced his own children.

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Let’s allow crowd-funding to help entrepreneurs: op-ed from Wharton lecturer

An op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle caught our eye:

With surprisingly little fanfare and even more surprising bipartisanship, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a crowd-funding bill this month that would allow startup companies to sell securities by way of social networking and crowd-funding websites.

In essence, crowd-funding affords the public at large the opportunity to provide small amounts of incremental funding to entrepreneurial companies. Think of it as charitable giving for startups, although the return comes not in peace of mind or a tax deduction but in the form of equity in the company.

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Patrick K. FitzGerald is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor and MBA lecturer on entrepreneurship at the Wharton School of Business.