Independence Blue Cross announces winners of its $50,000 healthcare venture competition [Startup Roundup]

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

Healthcare startups 1DocWay, QuickSeeMD and Kitchen Cred won Independence Blue Cross’s healthcare venture competition, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. Each startup won $50,000, office space at Callowhill incubator Venturef0rth and mentoring. The Inquirer article focuses on 1DocWay, a company that aims to connect psychiatrists with patients who live in rural areas. Check out videos from all the winners here.

Continuing the social entrepreneurship conversation in Philly, Flying Kite features three “Philly Social Entrepreneurs to Watch,” including GoodCompany Ventures alum Pledge4Good. Parick FitzGerald, a Wharton professor who co-founded social startup RecycleBank, tells Flying Kite that though social entrepreneurs are still hard to find in the city, the field is on the rise, adding that compared to larger cities, “the advantage of social entrepreneurship in Philadelphia is that you can make a dramatic difference much faster.”

Two former Philly startups made major moves in the past week: mobile payment service Venmo, which relocated to New York City last year, was acquired by Chicago-based PayPal competitor Braintree for $26.2 million, reports BetaBeat.

And startup launch service LaunchRock, which left Philly after the company was founded at last year’s Startup Weekend, acquired “collaborative gifting service” Giftiki for an undisclosed amount, Tech Crunch reports.

GIVE A GLANCE

Marc Weil, CTO of mobile backend service Cloudmine, is on a three-month  business development trip in San Francisco, he tells us via email. “There are a LOT of opportunities to be had in SF,” he writes, “and we’d be remiss if we ignored them.” No word on any intentions on leaving their offices, which are also the aforementioned Venturef0rth incubator.

Pinterest analytics firm Curalate won Startup of the Year at last weekend’s Philly Geek Awards. The shop also continues to grow. The Wall Street Journal mentions Curalate in a piece about startups and venture capitalists betting on Pinterest’s success, noting that Curalate has 500 clients, up from the 400 it had when we last featured the company.

Leadnomics, the Cira Centre-based marketing company that generates online leads (yes, it’s complicated) is named one of Inc. Magazine’s 500 fastest growing companies for the second year in a row, according to a press release. This year, Leadnomics was ranked #26 up from last year’s ranking of #48 and is ranked #1 in Philadelphia companies.

The guys behind GraphMuse, the Facebook invite app co-founded by a Penn undergrad, built MyFriendMosaic, a tool that creates mosaics of your Facebook friends. Tip of the hat to Dan Shipper’s Twitter for alerting us.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Gabriel Weinberg, founder of search engine Duck Duck Go, does an in-depth Q&A with TechSpot on how his service differs from Google and why you should use it.

Relay, a Radnor-based customer engagement service, is out of “stealth mode,” reports the Philadelphia Business Journal.

The business-focused Q&A site Quewey pivots to a networking matchmaking service inspired by an idea tested by Curalate, we reported last week. Here’s Quewey’s blog post about the pivot.

Mitesh Patel, co-founder of the medical news and research aggregator Docphin, does a Q&A with iMedicalApps.

Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a Philly startup story left to link to on the Internet. See others here, or sign-up for its email newsletter.