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

DailyWorth, the Philly-based startup that has raised $2.8 million and is focused on delivering practical financial advice for women, has recently formed a partnership with Mint, home to 8 million users, to provide it with content, TechCrunch reports.

Viddler launched a no-frills, less-is-more redesign last week that is seeing results. If it’s an inspiration for what a redesign of your site could bring, the company has seen a 30 percent increase in sign-ups.

TicketLeap has launched TicketLeap Anywhere for iOS, a new app which allows event organizers to sell, print and scan tickets on-the-spot at events with iPhone and iPad devices.

GIVE A GLANCE

Geekadelphia notes that Indy Hall will host a demo event for the games built during the Global Game Jam with the local chapter of IGDA. The event takes place this weekend.

The Inquirer’s Jeff Gelles covers Cliqsearch, which aims to utilize social media recommendations from trusted friends to curate a better search experience for local results. Only a few weeks ago, the company announced it had raised an angel round of $840,000, as we reported.

LoSo Inc. has launched version 2.0 of its app that aggregates news and social media check-ins at restaurants and bars and allows those locations to control their virtual identify for users. It’s available here.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Temple University will host an event on Feb. 22 dedicated to launching startups and commercializing.

CloudMine, the buzzed-about startup which started at Startup Weekend Philly, and which is focused on more easily delivering back-end services to other startups, is getting the message out by supporting Startup Weekend as a Global Sponsor. Insert here another sentence using the word ‘start.’

ElectNext, the recommendation engine for political candidates that compares itself to dating algorithms like OKCupid’s will present tomorrow at New York’s Paley Center for Media among a handful of exciting new startups.

You’ve probably seen Lokalty‘s promotions at the checkout of area retailers. Campus Philly is calling the company one of 10 new Philly businesses to watch this year.

The San Francisco Chronicle inks health news article aggregator Docphin in a piece about up-and-coming health startups.

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.

Five months after Comcast was mandated by a federal agency to institute a sweeping program to substantially improve Internet adoption rates for low income families, only 463 Philadelphia families have activated the service in the cable giant’s hometown, where more than 150,000 families are eligible.

A screen capture of the Internet Essentials report showing activations in top regions.

An internal report on Comcast’s Internet Essentials program issued last week shows 41,000 total activations across the U.S. from Aug. 16 to Dec. 22. The program, which launched in September, resulted from a mandate by the Federal Communications Commission as part of the company’s deal to acquire NBC.

Yet in Philadelphia, where 41 percent of citizens do not have access to the Internet at home — according to a 2008 report from the Knight Foundation — advocates are concerned about the program’s progress, and some experts say that a lack of support by the School District of Philadelphia is slowing its potential.

Because Internet Essentials provides discounted Internet access to families of students who qualify for free lunch at schools, the program appears to be seeing more success in cities where there is more school district buy-in, says the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition‘s Arun Prabhakaran, who is Director of Government and Strategic Partnerships. [Prabhakaran wrote about poverty and the digital divide here in October.]

In the Chicago region, for instance, where the Mayor Rahm Emmanual controls the school system, the Internet Essentials program saw more than 5,000 activations during the same period [pictured above].

“The mayor does not control the school system in Philadelphia,” Prabhakaran says. “When the school district is run by the School Reform Commission, and the SRC doesn’t necessarily report to the Mayor, you’re not getting that kind of system push.”

The School District of Philadelphia did not return a request for comment.

The Urban Affairs Coalition is working with the City of Philadelphia under the $25 million Freedom Rings Partnership funded by broadband stimulus grants intended to improve digital adoption in the city. The coalition advertises Internet Essentials to its constituents, but it does not not receive funding from Comcast.

Words from a local advocacy group that fights for low-income families were more critical of Comcast. Action United, which was formed in the state by former members of PA ACORN, last week called the Comcast program a “gimmick without real substance.”

“The simple fact is that there are too many hoops and obstacles still for anyone to believe that this program will address in any serious way the digital divide as it exists in low income cities across America,” the group said in a statement.

“Especially because this is Comcast’s home town, it’s kind of embarrassing,” says an Action United organization program director Elly Porter-Webb.

Comcast spokesperson Charlie Douglas pointed to the program’s significant progress across the U.S.

“This is a new program, but the digital divide has been around for a decade. We’re still really facing the challenges of relevancy and digital literacy. A lot of Americans don’t know what the Internet can do for them and why they should have it in their homes,” he said in a telephone interview last week.

Action United presented a nine-point proposal to Comcast in an early January meeting, before staging a protest in front of the Comcast Center later in the month, after Porter-Webb says the company failed to address those points.

The group proposed that Comcast institute specific goals and metrics for the program, a more active outreach strategy and a look at long-term viability for the program.

Comcast has so far committed to run the program for a total of three years, but Porter-Webb is worried that at its current rate, Philadelphia’s results will not add up to substantial change. “It’s only a three-year program and after first five months, we are a sixth of the way there,” she says.

Along with the report, Comcast announced several changes to the program last week, including expanding eligibility to students who receive reduced-price school lunch, which the company says makes 300,000 more households eligible across the country. It is also implementing a streamlined, instant approval process for students who attend schools with a high percentage of free school lunch provisions, which could help more easily connect Philadelphia citizens, Prabhakaran says.

The company also plans to increase bandwidth speeds for Internet Essentials customers, provide bulk purchasing for community partners, and expand its training efforts. FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski praised the changes in a statement issued last week.

“We’ve met with nonprofit partners and listened to all kinds of feedback from them, our customers and elected officials, and more. We’ve made a number of changes to the program from the initial launch,” Douglas says.

“We can’t solve the digital divide all by ourselves. We need as many other providers and community partners to get involved to help connect more Americans,” he says.

Porter-Webb hopes to see that the metrics match the message.

“Their take is that ‘we’re the biggest, most comprehensive program that’s ever happened,’” Porter-Webb says.

“We acknowledge that, and that’s great, but let’s make it real. Let’s really do this.”

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

Sink or Swim Productions, a group of Temple business school students, has launched a video series showing Philadelphia-area startups tech and not. See one of the episodes below. [h/t CityBizList]

Gamification startup Hoopla Software intends to hire at least a dozen employees as a result of its recent $2.3 million round of funding led by Safeguard Scientifics, according to Fins Technology.

According to the Business Journal, ChoozOn, which describes itself as a “deal-hunting concierge,” and not a daily deals site, raised a $1.27 million round after a $2.5 million round last summer. The company has workforce in King of Prussia, San Francisco and Jordan.

Wildbit describes the reasons for shutting down its $75,000 per year profitable email marketing service Newsberry. Despite a troubled history as a “stepchild” pet project, as the company puts it, the project was profitable but it wasn’t one the company was proud of.

GIVE A GLANCE

The 2012 Global Game Jam — a global hackathon event — took place this weekend locally at Indy Hall in Old City and at Camden County College in Jersey, the Business Journal reports.

FlyingKite covers Near-Miss Management, the risk management software suite coming out of Penn that debuted at Philly Tech Meetup last week.

Entrepreneurship will get its 15 minutes when the Kauffman Foundation airs a Super Bowl ad this weekend. The ad will support the foundation’s new Will It Be You campaign.

Ad network provider 50onRed is hiring a PHP programmer for its Cira Center offices, as well as a few other positions.

KeystoneEdge writes about Conshohocken-based vacation rental startup PackLate and its recent growth. The company will double its staff in 2012 and is looking to Center City for a possible move, before the company seeks a Series A round of funding, the publication reports.

PennLive covers Berwyn-based QR Pharma, a 15-employee life sciences startup that is working on a compound that can help Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s patients. The company recently received a $110,000 round from Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

Online medical research and news dashboard Docphin gets featured by new local healthcare industry news site MedCity News.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Neat Company will launch its cloud suite to Apple platforms this spring, AppAdvice reports.

ProtonMedia has launched PhotoSphere 2.0, its virtual collaboration software, with new features like deeper integration with Lync Server 2010 and Sharepoint 2010, better multimedia integration, a world editor, better metrics and reports and more.

Daily Deal API startup Sqoot has launched new features built around branded and customer-personalized email subscriptions.

Monetate says that it nearly tripled revenue in 2011, according to a press release.

Ohanarama has integrated real-time video chat into its family-safe gaming network, according to a press release.

CityRyde, the software platform for bicycle rentals that recently packed its bags for Boston, has rebranded as Zagster and has been accepted into the TechStars Boston incubator program this winter.

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.

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

Philly Startup Weekend confirmed that its next hackathon, which has seen the launch of several startups in the region, will take place during the kick-off weekend of Philly Tech Week, April 20-22. Tickets are on-sale here.

The Business Journal’s Peter Key reports that the clever CAPTA startup Solve Media that shows advertisements that are to be typed rather than words, raised a $3 million to $6 million Series B round of funding.

One of Poptent‘s user-generated commercials created for yogurt-maker Dannon will air during the Super Bowl, the Inky’s Joe DiStefano reports. Interactive Firm Red Tettemer was tapped to create a Super Bowl ad for Century 21 real estate. Supposedly, it’s the first time a Philly ad firm, no, two, have made the big show.

GIVE A GLANCE

A handful of funded startups are shown on the Business Journal’s fourth quarter venture capital investment interactive chart, including PlaySay, CloudMine, Burst Online Entertainment, Sidecar and DuckDuckGo.

Code collaboration platform Beanstalk, built by WildBit, has redesigned its automatic deployment feature with a slicker interface, SSH commands and automated release notes, among other features.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

The DreamIt Ventures startup Kwelia, a search engine for apartment rental value, has taken a desk at the University City Science Center. MedCity Media, an online news site focused on the healthcare industry, also moved into the Center.

Inhabi has setup shop at Novotorium, the new Bucks County-based accelerator. That’s the second company to move in, after Zuppler joined in early January.

TicketLeap is hoping to double its sales in 2012 from $35 million last year, according to an article published by funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners. The article notes that since 2008, BFTP has invested $525,000 in the business.

The San Francisco Gate covers Viridity Energy, the Philadelphia startup that has secured $24 million in funding for its energy management software solutions.

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.

Organizers are now accepting nominations for the 2012 PA Tech Awards across a handful of categories that we’d like to see Philadelphia sweep.

Now’s your change to vie for the winning spot as:

• Outstanding Leadership in Technology
• Technology Educator of the Year
• Technology Provider of the Year
• Best Application of Technology
• Public Service Innovation
• Technology Product of the Year
• Growth Company of the Year
• Technology Company of the Year

Also being awarded will be the People’s Choice Award, which will go to the company or organization with the most online votes.

The awards are hosted by TechQuest, a Harrisburg-based lobbyist group that works to protect the technology industry in legislation, according to the organization’s website. Ceremonies will take place Friday, March 30, 2012 at Whitaker Center in Harrisburg.

A list of last year’s winners showcases a number of companies from Central and West Pennsylvania. Nominations close on February 1.

The University City Science Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, but this month, Stephen Tang [Coverage] is marking his own anniversary: four years since being appointed President and CEO.

“I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is,” Tang said, followed by laughter, in a telephone interview last week.

It’s hard to imagine that his staff wouldn’t: the Science Center has an increasing connection to regional and national innovation under Tang’s leadership, and if its programming is as successful as it appears, a closer connection to the regional community that is impacted.

The Science Center has stepped up its game in helping to define University City as a vital technology corridor in Philadelphia. Tang is actively seeking $20 million to fund in perpetuity its QED proof-of-concept incubation model. The rebranded Breadboard program has become a celebrated and energetic arts and sciences intersection that grew out of a once stodgy art gallery space. NextFab Studio, a high-tech prototyping workshop created in partnership with the Center, is now expanding to South Philadelphia. And though it just launched in 2011 and the Center’s Quorum entrepreneur clubhouse has yet to be measured completely, the resources of support are there.

Earlier this month, Tang joined the Innovation Advisory Board — a national advisory committee to the United States Department of Commerce — in releasing a report [PDF] about the economic competitiveness of American innovation.

The board, comprised of 15 well-known innovators like Arthur Levinson, Apple’s new Chairman, and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, had a notable local presence. Tang joined Natalia Olsen-Ortecho of Center City-based EG.

For those with an understanding of the issues confronting American innovation competitiveness, the report was certainly not groundbreaking in its overarching research:

• Federal investments in research, education and infrastructure were critical building blocks for American economic competitiveness, business expansion and job creation in the last century;
• Failures to properly invest in, and have comprehensive strategies for, those areas have eroded America’s competitive position; and,
• In a constrained budgetary environment, prioritizing support for these pillars are imperative for America’s economic future and provide a strong return on investment for the U.S. taxpayer.

The outcome of the report now rests in the hands of the Secretary of Commerce, who will put together a plan to confront these challenges. But in an election year, as Tang puts it, that process “is likely to be highly politicized.”

After the jump, we caught up with Tang to hear his thoughts on the report and on the fourth anniversary of his joining the Science Center as President and CEO.

Tell us about the Innovation Advisory Board and the process of putting together the report—

First of all, it’s an honor. If you look at the 14 people other than me, I felt like Vance Worley in a pitching rotation of Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels. Arthur Levinson is the Chairman of Apple. I mean c’mon! Irwin Jacobs is a founder of Qualcomm. These are impressive folks to be around. My first inclination was to listen to them. I love the saying: “You’re given one mouth and two ears, use them proportionally.”

Well, you made the starting lineup. Why do you think that was? How did you use it to your advantage?

I was able to fit in that discussion by providing practical views of how innovation is done at the grassroots. I was also able to put a spotlight on the Greater Philadelphia region. I’m in a very fortunate role that I see the world through the eyes of all [of the Science Center's] stakeholders. Certainly entrepreneurs and innovators. Academics and people involved with R&D. People in industry and venture capital. I think that my participation gave a view of how those things fit together and how regional innovation strength plays into the overall map.

Having now seen the full report, what would you have added or changed?

The report is broken into sections: research, education, infrastructure, manufacturing. What was not called out was how those things come together to build strength in innovation and then convert that innovation to companies and jobs. If you think about how to make America more competitive in the global market for innovation then you have to think, ‘why does it matter that the U.S. is strong?’ The next level is what parts of the U.S. matter because they have uncommon strengths in research or education or infrastructure. You get into discussion of regional innovation clusters and strengths. We could have focused on that aspect.

Second, the U.S. is unique in that we’re a melting pot. We share a future and not a past. How do we encourage a constant flow and replenishment of people and thinking? That’s where immigration comes in. It’s a topic that’s very polarized and it’s confused with illegal immigration in the border states. In Philadelphia, there are a tremendous amount of students that come from abroad, many of whom who come to study in STEM fields. If we don’t create an environment where they can stay, they go back and build companies that compete us against. There’s a defensive and offensive reason that policy should be much more accepting of people who are going to create innovation through our education fields.

What are the outcomes of the report? What surprised you?

I want to elaborate what I told the Inquirer: that “the line between policy and politics is very fine.” As part of the advisory board of 15 people, I think the report would have been different if it had been written by those 15 people. There would have been a greater sense of alarm about how far we’ve fallen behind. There would have been much more pointed and detailed discussion about what to do in terms of policy. The reality is that the report is a result of legislation. It was written by the Administration and we accept that. Those of us that live and breathe this understand that there’s got to be more structural changes to make us more competitive with innovation in this world.

Is this report actionable? What are the next steps?

The next step from this report is literally that Secretary of Commerce is charged to create a strategy based on this document on how to address these issues. It’s finding common ground with the issues in order to develop those priorities. The challenge is, we can acknowledge as obvious that this is an election year, so that strategy is likely to be highly politicized. We don’t know who will be President or how much ownership that president will have in this strategy. Unfortunately because of politics, we’re building strategy in innovation in fits and starts.

How does the report impact us on a local level?

I think we are as a region under-appreciated in terms of our innovation capacity. There’s still a view that we’re a blue collar, bare knuckles town. The reality is that our strongest industries are education, health care and life sciences. Yet other regions like San Francisco, San Diego, the Research Triangle, Boston, get more airtime than we do. [Having two representatives from Philadelphia] really created an awareness that Philadelphia wants to be known as an innovation center and deserves to be. It allows us to have other conversations with government, other industry partners and foundation sponsors, to enhance our overall approach to innovation.

You’re celebrating this month your fourth year at the Science Center. How are things different now compared to then?

I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is [Laughs].

People tell me this is a tough job because you’re dealing with a lot of folks with different agendas. I knew that coming in to the job. What I’m most satisfied about is that Science Center is viewed as something that attracts people toward our mission of innovation entrepreneurship. That’s largely because we started out wanting to listen to needs. What I’ve tried to do, hopefully for many more years, is first fit in and then stand out. You can’t declare yourself anything in Philadelphia. You can’t impose yourself on the community. 

My most recent experience before the Science Center was a multinational company located in Japan [Olympus]. When you’re part of a subsidiary to foreign-based company, you learn as an executive that you have more influence than control over what’s going on. In Philadelphia, you’re better off trying to persuade people than to force people to do things. At all times, I want to be known that we’re under-promising and over-delivering. At end of the day, if people like us, they’ll gravitate toward us. If not, they’ll go some place else. 

What has changed across the city and region in the last four years?

We’ve survived some tough economic circumstances. I think that as a community you grow stronger through that because you’re forced to do more with less. Great working relationships are forged in those times. Sometimes when you’re in boom times, where there’s no need to work with other folks, you don’t develop that level of cooperation. I hope that we’ll come out of that downturn not just with stronger economic resources, but better relationships and better activity.

What do you hope to do in 2012? Any big changes on the horizon?

We’re beginning the process of raising $20 million to endow QED [proof-of-concept entrepreneur funding program] to make that sustainable in perpetuity. With Quorum, you have more great incubator companies that come through our facilities. We’re also planning our 50th Anniversary for 2013. We’re the third oldest research park in the country.

What’s your background? What got you to the Center?

Because I grew up in the area, and because I knew about the Science Center and knew its mission, I thought it was an intriguing blend of stakeholders that would be great to work with. My entire career has been in for-profit sector with exceptions of early stints in academia. I was leery of the nonprofit community but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the talent and commitment of people at the Science Center. And I’m able to sit at both sides of the table with investors and entrepreneurs. I’m able to bring all of this to the job every day.

Plus, I have a great passion and love for Philadelphia. I want us to do better than we’ve done before. It’s a matter of getting the word out there locally, nationally and internationally that we’re the place to be for innovation.

How’d you end up in Philadelphia?

I was the son of Chinese immigrants who both came to the county for education. I grew up in Wilmington and my first baseball team was the ’64 Phillies. Of course you know what happened to the Phillies that season— they were viewed as the greatest September collapse of all time. I grew to love baseball. I became a good baseball player in high school and college, and my parents encouraged me. You go to places that your parents didn’t go, just as they went to places that their parents didn’t go.

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

CliqSearch, the Philadelphia-based social search company that debuted at Philly Tech Meetup in September announced that it has raised a round of funding from angel investors to the tune of $840,000, TechCrunch reports.

PopTent, the crowd-sourced viral video creator based in Philadelphia, must be celebrating the fact that one of its user-generated videos made for Dell was aired during the BCS National Championship. The story also features an interview with the commercial’s creator Sam Akina.

GIVE A GLANCE

Chestnut Hill’s VirtualPiggy is hoping to target parents who want to let their children purchase goods online with privacy and protection. When a kid tries to buy something, parents can moderate the purchase on a mobile phone, and purchases are compliant with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. [h/t Allie Harcharek]

Valley Forge-based search engine DuckDuckGo has launched a redesign, featuring higher resolution graphics and a cleaner look. It’s not much of a departure, but it is certainly a sign of the company’s October investment.

If you’re just launching your startup or are looking to hire new employees, Joyce Akiko’s guide to Pennsylvania and Philadelphia regulations should help you cover the business end of the venture. Akiko’s site has a wealth of other valuable local information for the HR-uninformed, as well.

Wired writes in detail about Dell’s acquisition of Philadelphia‘s Boomi. A choice line: “Philly? Do you guys have internet there? Are you working in some sort of Amish commune?”

LifeShield Security, makers of wireless home monitoring and alarm systems, had its cellular ready Home Essential Kit reviewed by Endgadget this week. The online publication said the system was “highly recommended” for those in the market.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Omicron Shield launched earlier this month on iOS, a Megaman/Metroid-esque shooter from Philly arts educator Stefan Kietzman.

After launching in Canada, TrapCall has now launched its service in Alaska and Hawaii as well.

TicketLeap CEO Chris Stanchak was featured Tech & Biz on Spreecast to discuss some of the inner workings of the company’s growth.

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.

There’s examples that stretch to the origins of personal computing: Apple vs. Microsoft, Firefox vs. Internet Explorer, Adobe Flash vs. HTML5. Fire any of those into your search pane for a history.

The same is often true of competing programming languages and frameworks, like Python and Ruby.

An event that came together last year took the rivalry head on: RedSnakePhilly. It’s an annual conference of alternating lightning presentations that show off the two languages, together, in one room. This playoff season, try that with your friends that identify as Steelers fans.

This year’s upcoming February 21st event is free, and has limited seating. The organizers say to follow @redsnakephilly on Twitter for details on how to secure a seat.

Mat Schaffer, one of RedSnake’s organizers from the “red” camp of Ruby fans, compares the rivalry between Python and Ruby enthusiasts to the political spectrum. “We’re like the democrats and republicans of dynamic languages,” he says.

Schaffer knows the scene well. He’s a lead organizer at Philly.RB, a local Ruby user group, and he co-owns a Ruby consulting business called Mashion. We covered his work last April.

Unlike other programming-oriented user group meetups and conferences, Schaffer says that RedSnake is more technically focused. One person from each camp presents a 10-minute case study, getting specific with the technological implementation. The outcome usually lends itself to a familiar question for attendees: ‘should I be using Python or Ruby?’

Maybe it’s the technology press that is responsible for unfairly amplifying the competition between technologies.

Not to be outdone, Tom Panzarella, the RedSnake coordinator who represents the snakes (Python’s accepted mascot) — and who organizes Philly PUG (Python Users Group) and founded Love Park Robotics — says that it’s less competitive than is often publicized.

“What I’ve found amongst the larger Philadelphia technical groups is that there’s enough gray hair in the room that people know you can pick one tool for this, one tool for that,” he says.

At the end of the day, making that decision is “a matter of personal taste,” Panzarella says.

We’ll be checking the Daily News headlines for fisticuffs following the event.

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

GigaOm reacts to Philadelphia Media Network’s announcement that it has accepted three startups into its incubator program Project Liberty. ReadWriteWeb’s John Paul Titlow posts his notes, too. In related news, Peter Key writes about CloudMine and its recent inclusion in Philadelphia Media Network’s incubator.

GIVE A GLANCE

TrapCall, the New Jersey company that produces mobile software that allows consumers to unlock blocked calls, has announced that its service is now available on four major Canadian carriers including Rogers, Bell, Telus and Fido.

Final Form Games recaps some late 2011 news, noting that Jamestown was part of an indie game bundle that sold more than 435,000. The game is now also fully available on PC, Mac and Linux.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

myYearBook‘s Catherine Cook guest posts on TechCrunch to promote the importance of serendipitous encounters and their engineered possibilities on social networks. myYearBook appears to be angling itself for that future.

Over 2,500 pounds of been lost by users of Lose It or Lose It, the company says in a blog post.

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.

This summer, Langhorne’s Entertainment Games, Inc., a publicly traded company, announced that it had acquired Heyday Games, a social networking-focused gaming company.

Since June, we’ve watched as Entertainment Games has managed to quickly change its focus from the retail sales channel — essentially, getting gaming titles in the big box chains — to social networking focuses made famous by companies like Zynga, known for its FarmVille Facebook title.

This fall, the company launched Retro World, a series of Facebook games that hopes to tap into the increasing demographic of baby boomers landing on the social network. By acquiring rights to media that feature famous stars of the past, like Marilyn Monroe and Dick Clark, the company is hoping to create through Retro World a gaming experience that is a trip of nostalgia for the demographic.

So far, it seems to have been a success. In media alone, the company enjoyed a round of coverage from publications like VentureBeat, Inquirer, NBC10, CBS3, Games.com, Reuters, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others.

In the acquisition, Entertainment Games brought on much of Heyday’s management team, including Gene Mauro, who joined on as the company’s new President and Chief Operating Officer.

Mauro, who works from Connecticut, but bounces between that location and Entertainment Games’ locations in Los Angeles and its headquarters in Philadelphia, has been in the game business for close to two decades.

He says he had history with Entertainment Games as an outside director, a friend of the board since 2005. But because the retail sales channel has been in decline, he says, his task coming onboard to the company was to think about strategy and growth and how Entertainment Games could make an aggressive play in the emerging channels of social gaming and mobile.

Mauro says that adoption of Retro World has been strong, with over 30,000 active monthly users.

After the jump, we caught up with Mauro to hear about the acquisition, its new Facebook title Retro World, and the company’s new direction.

What have you been up to through the years?

In 2004, I founded Myelin Media out of Manhattan with Carl Icahn, a gaming company that worked on PC, console and handheld games. We had good successes. I was really curious and really following trends around social networks. MySpace was doing well and in 2006, I joined a small startup on the West Coast called Bunchball. We created web tools licensed by media companies to make their web sites more sticky, to almost feel like they play like games. In 2006, I ran marketing and business development for GamerDNA Inc., which we sold to Crispy Gamer.

Tell us about Heyday. What was the company’s interest in being acquired?

I also worked on PopTropica, which was engaged in story-driven experiences for kids ages six to 12. I saw that there was an amazing marketing blowing up in the 40+ demographic and thought, ‘if we apply popular game mechanics to an older demographic, how might that come together?’ That was the genesis of Heyday. We spent the first six months working on game designs and rather than fund Heyday with venture capital, we liked that Entertainment Games was a small public company, heavily discounted. We knew that we could launch a public product and create a lot of shareholder value.

Tell us about Retro World—

Retro World seeks to take two-dimensional images from the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, and bring them to life in an animated approach that looks a lot like multi-planing, where two dimensional images can move behind each other to create sense of fluidity. We write stories that play like interactive TV episodes.

We’re trying to take on the popularity of social games. Right now we’re playing games that feel like Saturday morning cartoon [like Farmville, others]. Instead, what if we show [boomers] a style that’s designed to appeal to their sense of sophistication or past experiences. We’re trying to weave the fabric of these past decades in a way that rings familiar to the consumer.

How have you measured success since launch?

We’re seeing our monthly active users continue to come up and to the right everyday. We haven’t had a non-growth day yet. Right now, we’re coming up on over 30,000 monthly active users. That’s a number we’re excited about because we havent marketed or advertised at all, and we don’t plan to do that until we get more features and content in the product.

We’re measuring success based on returning daily active users. That’s number one that’s important to us. Our core concentration is making sure that of that population, we have returning users with same level of frequency. We’re adding more episodes and opening “arcades,” where users can go in and play not just point-and-click-games, but also play standalone arcade games.

What is the revenue model?

Our revenue primarily comes through the sale of virtual items. You can earn ‘Retrobucks,’ but if you run out you can use a credit card to purchase more. Virtual items are avatars, functionality within the game, furniture for your room, items to build up your car. That’s the majority of revenue. That’s not unique to us: $3.5 billion in U.S. dollars was generated through the sale of virtual items this year alone and is projected to grow to $5 billion.

We also draw revenue from premium sponsorships and as audience scales up, we’ll monetize through subscriptions.

How many people work for the company and where are they?

We’re now up to around 23 people, and we’re hiring. It requires engineering talent to keep that pipeline. Engineering is coming out of Boston where there is a very strong engineering culture. We’re able to recruit out of schools like MIT and Northeastern. So much of what we do is very specialized in animation and writing. We also have a series of contractors, designers, artists in Los Angeles. Langhorne [where Entertainment Games was founded] is our admin and HR office that keep the machine running.

What’s next for the company?

Social and mobile really is the future. You’re seeing that reflected in sales of console and PC titles: it’s not growing at the rate that social and mobile are. Far more people are playing mobile than ever have been in the traditional PC and console world, who would never have considered themselves gamers.

The economics of the traditional game market doesn’t make as much sense. It’s much more compelling to have direct access to consumer, as opposed to working with a value chain that distances you from consumer. Walmart, Best Buy: this is where market started, but you have to print a disk, get it in the box, work with distribution. There are lots of pieces that erode margin and increase risk.

We still have legacy business. We’re still selling games at Target and Walmart, because they are still throwing off revenues . But my expectation is that numbers will continue to decline and we will continue to transition our focus and attention on growth verticals.

Do you think you’re bringing that social and mobile disruption to Entertainment Games?

I wouldn’t say it’s a function of disruption. We had enough discussion to know who each other was. I know how the business was being run and where opportunities are. It was an optimization adjustment rather than disruption. Helping the company to acknowledge the change and shifts away from retail and more aggressively toward social and mobile.