55 percent of Philadelphia households lack access to Internet: new early data shows rate higher than previously thought

Sources: U.S. Census; FCC. Map courtesy of American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop.

Last week at an event hosted at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication and put together by the New America Foundation, academics, dataheads, advocates and media met to discuss the many data and mapping efforts that have coalesced recently around digital access and adoption issues in Philadelphia.

Much of the evening was spent debating the statistics: primarily, the oft-quoted stat that 41 percent of households in Philadelphia lack access to the Internet.

We’ve used that figure on many occassions. This reporter was a panelist at the event, there to promote the organization’s new Connect Philly tool.

So, where does that figure originate, and with what methodology was it calculated?

Well, as Pew Charitable Trusts project director Larry Eichel said at the event, it started with a joint poll developed in 2010 by the now defunct Pew Internet & American Life project and the Knight Foundation.

In an email to participants after the event, Eichel wrote: “In that poll, 66 percent of respondents said they used the Internet, and 90 percent of them said they use it at home. That means 59 percent use it at home, meaning that 41 percent do not.”

As he noted at the event, it’s not a completely pure methodology: the question asked did not take into account smaller details, like the possibility that they just might not use a home computer to access the Internet, despite having access at home. The question is what it is.

That’s perhaps the least of the city’s worries, if some additional data evaluations turn up valid.

Jacob Fenton, formerly of the Investigative Reporting Workshop, based in Washington, D.C., who spoke on the panel, ran some preliminary “sitting-at-the-kitchen-table-running-some-code” analysis and found that, based on 2010 Census data, only about 45.2 percent of households in Philadelphia have the Internet, based on a “broadband” standard of 768Kbps download / 200Kbps upload.

That analysis, though back-of-the-envelope, would suggest that 55 percent of city households dont have access in the home.

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Get your digital art displayed on the PECO Crown Lights during Philly Tech Week 2012 with Breadboard Art in the Air

Photo credit: Flickr user FourthFloor

Calling all digital artists: here’s your chance to have one of your works displayed on the PECO Crown Lights during Philly Tech Week 2012.

The University City Science Center’s Breadboard Art in the Air program is partnering with Philly Tech Week to offer a member of Philadelphia’s creative technology community an opportunity to create content for the famed LED light system atop PECO headquarters at 23rd and Market from April 23 to June 29. Art is the Air is sponsored by PECO.

There’s one catch: deadline is April 16!

After the jump, find the submission guidelines or see Breadboard’s full guide to applying.

To see Technically Philly’s previous coverage of an Art in the Air exhibit, see this article.

Below, see a video of a previous Art in the Air exhibit.


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Wharton Venture Award winners announced with a focus on healthcare [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

The Wharton Venture Award, which has seed-funded successful startups like Warby Parker and Invite Media, has announced this year’s award recipients, many of which are focused on healthcare technology.

• 1 Doc Way: Video conferencing between doctors and patients.
• Rajiv Mahele won across his two ventures: accessMD.com, which helps patients seek a second opinion from doctors, and Catalogue.com, a marketplace for interior design inspiration. Neither URL currently work for the proposed businesses.
• Cloudable.me: A social and sharing hub.
• Grant Round Table: a collaboration and resource platform for doctors.

The Phorum 2012 Demo Pit, which showcased cloud-based startups and services awarded UXFlip as the “Best in Show” winner. Finalists included cWyze and ReadySetWork. We covered the conference last week. The Business Journal has more.

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Announcing Ph.ly: Philadelphia’s URL shortener and a weekly email showcasing Philly’s best journalism

Technically Philly parent company Technically Media is excited to announce Ph.ly, a new URL shortener dedicated specifically to Philadelphia links and stories.

In one month of existence in soft launch mode, more than 250 links have been shared and clicked 20,000 times.

Alongside the URL Shortener, we’ve also announced the Ph.ly News Weekly, a weekly newsletter of Philly’s most important journalism. By signing up using the form at Ph.ly, you’ll receive a weekly email highlighting the three best stories in Philadelphia journalism from every source, curated by the team at Technically Media. It will always remain a free service.

In soft launch, more than 100 locals have already signed up. We’re hoping to grow the list to a few thousand users by April 30 before we start sending out the weekly email. Call it an email Kickstarter campaign.

The Ph.ly service features all the bells and whistles you’ll find with other URL shorteners: you can create custom vanity URLS (like ph.ly/keypulp) and you can check click statistics (like http://ph.ly/st9lp+). You can even add a custom this bookmarklet to your browser toolbar to instantly shorten URLs using the service, seen in the sidebar above.

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PhilaSoup, Springboard Collaborative take home prizes at Philly SEED education pitch event

Springboard Collaborative won in the Established category during the PhillySEED pitch event

Considering the School District of Philadelphia’s ongoing $700 million budget crisis, education news of late in Philadelphia has had a tendency to be grim.

But that wasn’t the tenor Wednesday night, when 12 ambitious, local education ventures competed for prize packs of entrepreneurial resources.

PhilaSoup, an emerging, public dinner party discussion group dedicated to investing its proceeds to startup education ventures received a $5,000 check to strengthen its efforts. And Springboard Collaborative, which engages students through the summer months to help retain knowledge received a suite of pro-bono services to help it grow.

Those winners presented polished pitches to hundreds of young Philadelphians gathered at WHYY headquarters for Philly SEED (Supporting Entrepreneurship in Education) to see emerging or established education startups that are hoping to, or already are, impacting city students.

The dense, interested crowd was emblematic of the new role some Philadelphia citizens are playing in order to help shape education reform: taking action with or without the permission of the School District of Philadelphia.

The event was put together by the new PhillyCORE Leaders (Coalition of Rising Education Leaders) group, whose aim it is to promote the dialogue coming from younger members of Philadelphia. The group hopes to engage the education community, encourage education innovation in Philadelphia and reform schools. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly was an in-kind sponsor of the event.]

The idea started in GChat, primarily, said organizer Claire Robertson-Kraft in her opening remarks, before it moved to coffee shops and landed at WHYY, with an opening from Newsworks head Chris Satullo and from Councilman Bill Green.

“We hear from education colleagues in other cities, Philadelphia is a really hard place to change. We get that pat on the back. But that’s not what we see from this community,” she said, referring to the active, engaged participants.

After the jump, Technically Philly dishes out its own awards to participants.

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Tonight: 12 local education ventures will compete for prizes, including $5,000, at PhillySEED [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

This evening, Philly SEED ((Supporting Entrepreneurship in Education), a crowd-sourced platform to help fund education entrepreneurs, will host a competition for a $5,000 prize pack and pro-bono services, which will go to two of several new or established Philly-based ventures aimed at improving education.

Those competing, announced by Councilman Bill Green on Saturday, include, in two categories:

Emerging Entrepreneurs:

• ApprenNet – A learning platform for mentoring and collaboration. We covered the venture last July.
• Investing in Ourselves – Community organization growing strength in nutrition, fitness, finance, workforce development and leadership. WHYY covered the organization earlier this month.
• Lessonsmith – Collaborative platform for lesson planning and material development, which is based in the new Venturef0rth accelerator space, as we reported. The organization’s conception story is here.
• PhilaSoup – Education entrepreneurs pitch for modest micro grants at these $5-admission dinner parties. See previous winners here.
• Teacher Action Group Philly – Hoping to educate educators on the value of policy-making. Coverage in the Inquirer, here.
• YES! for Schools – Healthy bodies, healthy minds, and healthy lifestyles for students in 10 major U.S. cities.

Expanding/Established:

• Education-Plus Inc.’s High School – Nonprofit celebrating three decades of existence, which helps schools determine best-practice needs for improvement.
• Springboard Collaborative – Helping create education programming for students throughout the dead months of summer, where, advocates say, learning is often lost.
• Startup Corps – Installing the value of entrepreneurship by way of launching an actual business. We covered the organization in July 2010.
• the school collective – An online network for education professional development. The founders are helping to organize PhillySEED.
• The Student Leadership Project – Empowering student leaders at Philadelphia charter schools.
• Urban Blazers – Science-focused organization that introduces students to nature through volunteer efforts.

RSVP for the event, which costs $40 (proceeds of which go to the winners) here. Hosted at WHYY in Old City. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly is a sponsor of the event].

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Tonight: Technically Philly talks digital access at Penn’s Annenberg

This evening at 5pm, Technically Philly’s Brian James Kirk will discuss digital access and mapping at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication. The details of this free event are below.

Who’s Online in Philadelphia?
Broadband Mapping, Internet Access, and Emerging Digital Participation Research

This Tuesday the 27th, a group of researchers, thinkers, planners, and policymakers will talk about broadband access for Philadelphia’s communities. The panel discussion will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, 3620 Walnut Street, on Penn’s campus. It is sponsored by the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation and the Annenberg School for Communication.

RSVP for this event here.

The full list of panel participants after the jump.

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7 Regent Lane tries on affordable custom-tailored suit market

Suits don’t come cheap.

Well, European and Western suits made custom-tailored for men, aren’t often cheap, so it seems.

7 Regent Lane, a new startup based in Philadelphia founded by Wharton graduates, is hoping it can tap into a growing market that is trying to change that.

By reducing overhead with technology and by moving manufacturing overseas, these companies can create custom-measured suits, often for under $600. 7 Regent’s suite start at $395. Compare that to higher quality bespoke and made-to-measure suits that can range in the thousands of dollars. And the fit beats off-the-rack solutions, built exactly to someone’s custom measurements.

There are emerging competitors in the space, like Indochino, which starts its suit collection at $399.

While studying for her business degree at Wharton, Karen Chung took a trip to Shanghai, China, where she was familiarized with the well-known, affordable tailoring tradesmen there. Chung was stunned how well a custom tailored suit looked on her husband, says Dave Reynolds, the company’s chief technology officer.

To set their product apart, the team purchased suits from competitors and had professional tailors inspect them for potential quality improvements that they could make while still keeping costs low.

“We’re a little paranoid about differentiating ourselves,” Reynolds says.

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Join Mayor Michael Nutter, KEYSPOT, Free Library, Knight Foundation and Technically Philly for the public launch of Connect Philly

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it once more: helping bridge the digital divide in Philadelphia will need to be a concerted city effort. As vital members of Philadelphia’s technology community, you can help.

Join Technically Philly, the City of Philadelphia, KEYSPOT (Powered by the Freedom Rings Partnership), the Knight Foundation and the Free Library of Philadelphia for the launch of Connect Philly at City Hall’s Conversation Hall on April 5 at 3:00 p.m.

Mayor Michael Nutter and the Knight Foundation’s Donna Frisby-Greenwood will help kick-off the launch of the new set of tools, followed by a panel discussion about digital access in Philadelphia. Experts in the fields of broadband infrastructure and broadband adoption will help us understand how Philly is working to bridge the digital divide.

Earlier this month, we announced Connect Philly, a new set of tools which can help citizens find free and affordable access to the Internet and computer training.

The response has been astounding: citizens and stakeholders have come forward to express their intent to spread the word, to help make sure this tool gets in the hands of those that need it most.

Our panel will include Siobhan Reardon, President & Director of the Free Library of Philadelphia; Brigitte Daniel, Executive Vice President, Wilco Electronic Systems, Charles Kaylor, Visiting Assistant Professor at Temple University; and Bryan Mercer of Media Mobilizing Project.

The event is graciously catered by Saxbys Rittenhouse, which is doing its part to bridge the divide by providing free computer workstation access, free printing and more.

At the panel, we’d like to learn how far have we come since a 2008 report that 40% of Philadelphia households lack access to the Internet. What has changed? What can be improved? RSVP here to discuss.

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Tech firms in Philly growing fast, former Philly startup Sqoot in hot water over sexist remarks on hackathon flyer [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

The Business Journal’s Peter Key penned a print piece in-depth on tech companies that are hiring at an accelerated pace in 2012. On his blog, he writes about some of the factors behind the report and some of the great stuff that didn’t fit in the print edition.

Sqoot, the DreamIt Ventures-based startup that moved to New York after graduating from the program, has been in some hot water for sexist remarks it made on an event flyer promoting a hackathon. ReadWriteWeb has a good roundup of the situation, noting that even the company’s apology fell short, leaving one person to begin collecting negative response to the apology letter. Ouch. CloudMine, the locally-based development toolset pulled sponsorship of the event and penned a thoughtful response to the situation.

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