Open call for events and sponsors for Philly Tech Week 2012 presented by AT&T

It’s that time again, Philadelphia.

Technically Philly has officially launched the open calendar of events for Philly Tech Week 2012 at PhillyTechWeek.com.

Events will take place Monday, April 23 through Saturday, April 28, 2012 with a kick-off weekend taking place April 20 through 22. We’re excited to launch the calendar with dozens of collaborative partners already onboard, and we’re eagerly anticipating the events that will come from Philly’s great tech community.

Philly Tech Week 2012 is presented by AT&T, the debut title sponsor, and is organized by Technically Philly. The annual week of events is intended to grow the impact of this innovative region through programming focused on technology, collaboration and improving Philadelphia. This year’s theme: “Making a better Philadelphia through technology.”

“AT&T is proud to be the first title sponsor of Philly Tech Week. We’re always looking ahead and we know our customers are too. They want to be amazed by ‘what’s next.’ It’s our job to support events and organizations that promote innovation and creativity in technology,” said Tiffany Baehman, vice president and general manager, AT&T, greater Philadelphia. “We recognize all that the Philly tech community has to offer and we are excited to see what the week brings.”

Technically Philly turned to Jarvus Innovations to develop PhillyTechWeek.com after the web development firm created the inaugural Philly Tech Week website and mobile application in 2011. The firm works with organizations like Consumer Reports, Philadelphia Eagles, The Roots and TEDxPhilly.

We’re launching with 23 events on the calendar, and several anchor events are confirmed thus far for Philly Tech Week 2012, including:

• A daily lunchtime speaker series at WHYY will take place again this year
• The week will be kicked-off by Startup Weekend, the entrepreneur bootcamp, followed by a block party hosted by globally-known coworking community Independents Hall
• Philly Tech Week’s Signature Event, a gala cocktail party, will gather hundreds of leaders in Philadelphia’s technology community
• The second annual Philly Robotics Expo will be held at Drexel University
• OpenAccessPhilly will provide lightning presentations on public-private partnerships
• Five Philly startups will compete for a prize pack at demo event Switch Philly
• The fourth annual BarCamp News Innovation, an annual, one-day unconference on journalism innovation, and the Open Gov Hackathon will be held at Temple University

To learn how to get involved with Philly Tech Week, read more after the jump.

Read more

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.

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.

Philly Tech Week 2012 will be April 23-28, 2012, last week of April

Yo Philadelphia technology community,

Remember the first ever Philly Tech Week, which featured 65 events across industry and organization throughout the city the last week of April? Well, that happened with just a couple months notice. What would we be able to do with a full year?

Here’s the opportunity.

Philly Tech Week 2012, an open calendar of events celebrating technology and innovation across the region, will be happening April 23-28, 2012, the last week of April 2012.

Your calls to action:

• Dream up the coolest events, biggest announcements and boldest ways to show off that Philadelphia has one of the world’s most vibrant technology and innovation communities. Tell us how to bring Philly Tech Week to a new level.
• Think about how your business, organization, group or, yes, you can help support this week and the humble technology news site that puts it together. (A revised sponsorship one-pager will find the light of day later this summer).
• Be prepared for more growth because — we know this is going to shock you — the technology community here is growing and can have as big an impact as you can make yourself.

Keep doing wonderful things to make Philadelphia better and follow @PhillyTechWeek and @TechnicallyPHL for additional updates.

Happy April Fool’s Day, Philadelphia

No, Technically Philly is not moving to New York to pursue an online news site in a new niche community, even if it meant the chance of running into Rupert Murdoch, pitching that media acquisition, and living the high life at News Corp.

Today was April Fool’s Day, after all, and we’re proud to be here in Philly’s tech community. Where else would we be able to make such crude jokes, rip-off the Onion, and take a day off from our editorial calendar?

To sum up our trickery [Updated: now all below], no, First Round isn’t investing in the food market, we’re more emotionally attached to Port Richmond than you could believe, Mike Werth beat the entire Mario Brothers series years ago, keep those urban farms at Ignite coming, the power of GIS will continue to amaze and excite us, yes, we’re still a little bitter about the Gigabit thing, and actually, the Comcast parade kinda sounds like a good idea.

Read more

Help inform the city’s comprehensive plan with our Broadband2035 project

It was in the first days of publishing Technically Philly two years ago that we came to understand that the city’s broadband infrastructure played a crucial role in our technology community.

Wireless Philadelphia, an effort to provide free, wireless access to city dwellers, had ended a failure. Verizon had only recently been allowed to expand its internet connectivity services to residents here, and Comcast had staked a much bigger claim over the city by altering its skyline with its tallest building.

So it was with much bewilderment that when we browsed through the Planning Commission’s comprehensive Philadelphia2035 plan, the first undertaken in more than 60 years, there was little mention of the copper, cable and fiber-optic lines that run deep beneath the city, helping connect it with a global economy. Though the plan is incomplete, summaries of the plan have under-represented what we believe is vital to the city’s economic growth: broadband connectivity. Without more detailed plans to implement next-generation connectivity, the city risks missing an important opportunity.

A few weeks ago, the Commission released the first draft of the plan [PDF], seeking comments from city residents.

That’s where you come in.

Today, we’re asking for some input that we can provide immediately to the Planning Commission on your vision of this city’s needs to support and expand broadband access. What needs are unmet for your individual or business purposes? What problems have you witnessed regarding broadband infrastructure that you’d like to see changed? What are other cities doing that are a benchmark for success? Respond in the comments below, or send an email directly to info@technicallyphilly.com before Monday, March 28, and we’ll make sure your comments are heard. Now’s your chance to help shape the future of Philadelphia’s broadband access.

And after the jump, more details on the Broadband2035 project, the editorial series that we’re officially announcing today, which will take a deep look at this city’s broadband infrastructure.

Read more

Philly Tech Week update: WHYY headquarters, civic hackathon and more

Philly Tech Week is starting to focus in on impact. Today we have four big announcements for the April 25-30 week of events.

HEADQUARTERS: WHYY, the region’s public media organization based in Old City, will be the official headquarters for Philly Tech Week, offering up its beautiful, modern Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons.

Working with TEDx, Barcamp Philly and Refresh Philly event planner and community builder Roz Duffy, WHYY will play host to a brown bag lunchtime speaker series that week, in addition to our Friday night signature event, which will serve as the week’s highlight. More details to come there.

CIVIC HACKING: In other exciting news, as part of the third annual national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday, April 30 at Temple University, we’ll also be hosting the Open Gov Hackathon organized by Tropo. Coders, designers and developers will be creating civic-minded tools, largely using newly shared government data. We want the hacker crew and journalists to work together to create projects that will be utilized and have the best chance to make impact. It’s a good fit with our Transparencity coverage. Find out more on the BCNI blog here, and expect more to be finalized soon.

GETTING THE WORD OUT: We’re also proud to announce that we’re working with Grid magazine publisher Red Flag Media to land the first Philly Tech Week print supplement on the streets that week, which will feature the week’s calendar, but also fresh content on our community and sponsor shout outs. That’s in addition to that hot Philly Tech Week website from the Jarv.us development team in Northern Liberties and the forthcoming Philly Tech Week app from Alkali Media.

NEW PARTNERS: New sponsors include the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department, Chariot Solutions, Reed Technology, the University City Science Center and Tropo, and new event organizers include Wharton, First Round Capital, the Philadelphia Science Festival from the Franklin Institute, Indy Hall, the African American Chamber of Commerce and more. Many, many more conversations are still alive.

Check out our Sponsorship one pager and Event organizer guide to become a part.

Expect lots more events, partners and details soon. Clear your calendar for April 25-30 and get involved!

Thank you for supporting us: today is Technically Philly’s second anniversary

As we tweeted this morning, today marks two years since we first launched Technically Philly with this post.

It was followed the next day by our first piece of news, an item on free cell service for low income Pennsylvanians and since then every weekday since, we’ve offered a little bit of coverage and clarity on a still growing technology community of creatives, entrepreneurs, technologists and geek heads. This is our 1,232nd post here.

Last year for our birthday, we celebrated with a Philly Startup Leaders Fishbowl to move on our building a business.  Plenty has happened internally since, and we’re tried to keep you apprised so our community of readers was part of our growth as a startup vying for sustainability like many of you.

Of our three founders, two of us are now full-time, and last month featured about 17,000 unique visitors to the site, clicking through to nearly three pages per visit, despite our 1,800 RSS and 500 email subscribers receiving a full feed. We have also long curated a conversation with our more than 3,000 Twitter followers.

In addition to covering this community and its trends, with your support we are proud to say we’ve done the following in the past two years:

• We launched Technically Media, a parent publishing consultancy company.
• We’ve started a grant-funded research project on the open data movement in Philadelphia.
• We have started organizing the first ever Philly Tech Week, to be held April 25-30.
• We kicked off a tech startup demo event called Switch Philly to help show off our scene.
• We’ve grown a national journalism conference called BarCamp NewsInnovation.
• We pitched a News Inkubator concept that is informing major investment in Philadelphia journalism.

Now we hope to move from startup toward established business and bring all of these concepts together. Thank you for supporting us. We look forward to many more years growing together.

Technically Media Inc.: We build Audiences (and publish Technically Philly)

Just a quick update for those of you who have long requested we keep you apprised on the startup business side of things.

Earlier this month, we more formally introduced Technically Media Inc., the media services company that publishes this rag you’re reading right now. Just so we’re clear, don’t be impressed. That isn’t some multinational corporation. It’s still a startup from three schlubs in Philly, but now we just are a little more legally sound.

In addition to squandering late night hours tracking venture deals, startups and the technology community in Philadelphia, we like building audiences online.

So, in the catering business to this retail shop, we will be helping nonprofits, businesses and other media organizations grow an audience online through meaningful content, in addition to keeping TP alive.

Any potential conflicts of interest, as always, will be disclosed, as noted in our ethics policy.

If you want more, founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink have all written about the move.

The Technically Philly ethics policy

In the 18 months of Technically Philly’s existence, we have operated with a strong internal ethics policy that has guided us as we cover this community. We sometimes find ourselves informing interview subjects, readers and advertisers of policies that are well established internally, but aren’t immediately apparent to those outside of TP.

Allow us to do something that is long overdue: share our rules and policies that are core to Technically Philly:

• Above all else, we value transparency. If we make any significant changes to a story, we’ll tell you. If there is a potential conflict of interest, we will disclose it.
• News should be a conversation. If a reader emails, comments, tweets or writes a blog post criticizing, seeking clarification or commenting on our coverage, we will do our best to respond.
• We correct factually incorrect information. If we get something wrong in a post, we will correct it as soon as humanly possible.
• We do our best to avoid editorial and advertising conflicts at all costs. If a TP staff member oversees the sale of an advertisement, he or she will be relieved of all future coverage of that company or person, within reasonable possibility. We will never withhold coverage or comment due to an advertising relationship. Again, any potential conflicts of interest will be disclosed.
• If it’s on the record, it’s on the record. We will not remove content and quotes of a conversation that happened during an on-the-record conversation. That said, like any other journalist, we regularly speak with sources ‘off the record for background,’ as that perspective can help us report our beats more exactly. A source on the record, though, is always the most transparent and something for which we strive.
• Sources do not read stories before they are posted. Please do not ask to see the story before we post, we will not honor any such requests. We may ask for clarification of a quotation or figure, reference or number. We often follow up to do our job more precisely.
• We give credit. We will always link to the sources of a tip or story and expect others to do the same when writing about a topic first reported by TP.
• Sponsored content and advertorial is clearly marked. From time to time we publish pieces written by advertisers. This is no different than an advertorial in a magazine, a traditional revenue stream in publishing. We clearly label all content with full writing credit and advertising disclosure.

We hope that sheds some light on how Technically Philly operates and we welcome your thoughts and criticisms and now back to your regularly scheduled technology news.