Should Center City be a technology business hub?: other neighborhoods compete

Cristina Greysman from Document Depository Corporation explains some of the setbacks young entrepreneurs face in Center City.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

For Paul R. Levy, the president and CEO of the Center City District, the transformation that area has experienced over the last 20 years has been a huge success story amid the backdrop of serious economic troubles. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

It’s the outdoor cafes. All 213 of them.

“To me, that is the ultimate vote of confidence in downtown. People think it’s clean and safe,” he said.

Currently holding 214,433 jobs and paying over $12 billion in salaries annually, Center City relies primarily on the health care and education industries for the bulk of its economic drawing power, Levy said.. While not an alarming statistic on the surface, one need look no further than Detroit to determine what happens to a city that puts all of its progress behind a limited number of industries.

“We cannot rely on health care and education as the primary means of support,” Levy said.

So how about a move to the tech industry? Well, that’s a little easier said than done.

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How do we retain technology startups in Philadelphia? [VIDEO]

Strangers become coworkers at Indy Hall, a coworking space located in Old City. Co-founder Alex Hillman says building community is the best way to retain talent and business. Photo by Sarah Schu.

The argument of whether Philadelphia’s technology community is growing doesn’t seem to be the live one much anymore. The collection of 65 events celebrating Philly Tech Week last month was surely a small answer to that.

Rather, the questions left seem to revolve around the magnitude of that growth and if Philly, like other hopeful regions across the country, can have a significant share of the investment, jobs, revenue, reputation and cache that often follow leaders in that space. Philadelphia missed it’s shot 50 years ago at being Silicon Valley but is there room to be a serious player?

A Philly startup can get investment, something seen weekly. A Philly company can become a top-dollar acquisition, like the $2.4 billion eBay buyout of GSI Commerce, Dell taking Boomi or Eli Lilly snatching Avid Radiopharmaceuticals. Those examples from the last year can help shape the narrative around entrepreneurship and technology in Philadelphia, but, in the end, that just creates a lot more middle managers, not c-level leaders — see Tastykake’s submission to Flower Foods. Recent reports show brain drain here has largely been stemmed, but the tech community has still lost its fair share of stars who could be building the job drivers of the future.

So what’s next for retaining startup talent, sustaining their growth and, dare we suggest, keeping them around long into their future?

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Predicting future crimes in Philadelphia

Jeremy Heffner, product manager for Azavea's crime forecasting software Hunchlab, explains the program's potential to aid in making law enforcement more effective. Photo by Nicholas Vadala.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

The term “crime prediction” often evokes the pop culture memory of Steven Spielberg’s 2002 science fiction film Minority Report. In the popular movie, the government polices its citizens with the help of a trio of psychic beings that can predict who will commit a crime in the future.

Throughout the film, which was based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick, future offenders are arrested before they actually commit the crimes they were predicted to perpetrate.

Ralph Taylor, a criminal justice professor and crime trend researcher at Temple University, was quick to dispel that connection in a recent interview with Technically Philly.

“With Minority Report, you have what is called, in techno-babble, an idiographic prediction,” he says. “And what that means is that you can say this person is going to do this [crime], at this time, in this place.”

In reality, “crime prediction” is more appropriately termed “crime forecasting” and is far less nefarious than its fictional, more clinical counterpart, researchers say.

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Nonprofit Technology Resources leads digital literacy training, facing tightening budget

Aisha Moody, 33 of North Philadelphia, receives help from instructor Stanley Pokras during a computer class at Nonprofit Technology Resources located at 1524 Brandywine St. Photo by Sarah Schu

A sign reading “NTR Computer Thrift Store” is mostly all that welcomes visitors to the modest headquarters of Nonprofit Technology Resources on Brandywine Street in Spring Garden. Budget concerns have raised fears in recent months that the sign won’t be needed there for long.

Farther down the building’s brick façade are arched and rectangular cutouts that have been replaced with art installations of meticulously arranged motherboards, floppy disks, computer mice and other assorted discarded gadgetry.

The result is a kind of DIY memorial to forsaken technology that has largely been abandoned in favor of the best, the newest and the fastest. A fitting message, given NTR’s overall operating model. [Full disclosure: NTR is a former advertiser]

“We recycle computers instead of throwing them in the scrap yard,” said sales associate Melvin Bonilla, 24, of Kensington. “Someone’s got to do it.”

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Philly Data Camp: City Council legislation email blast, Philly API and other civic projects

Peter Fecteau, one of seven Code for America Philly fellows and an organizer of Philly Data Camp, explained how volunteers offer various ideas and then collaborate throughout the day to develop and design several new applications. Photo by Sarah Schu

If the seven Code for America Philadelphia fellows have their way, residents here will be soon follow City Council legislation in the form of a customizable e-mail, fitted with a subscription-based game with achievements and hopes for higher levels of participation at the core of its design.

That is just one of the projects that came from this past Friday’s Philly Data Camp, a one-day hackathon co-hosted by the seven CFA fellows and GIS shop Azavea. The event was something of a send off for the CFA pack, who are now back in San Francisco to begin planning and developing a project for the City of Philadelphia as part of their year of service.

Some 25 volunteers showed up to Azavea’s Callowhill offices to devote their Friday to the development of applications based around civic and geospatial data sets that can help Philadelphia citizens. And be created in a day’s time.

“We’ve got people from all walks,” said Pete Fecteau, 27, one of Code for America’s Philadelphia fellows and organizer of the event. “Developers, designers, researchers and people who don’t even know why they’re here. But they want to be here.”

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TalkChalk: In education, “If you take the approach that Facebook is evil, you will lose,” says David Simnick

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

Social networking hasn’t hit education like it could, says David Simnick.

“The beauty of this idea is in its simplicity,” said Simnick, 23, a first-year social studies teacher at Young Scholars Charter School in North Philadelphia through the Teach for America program, in an interview with Technically Philly. “We want to unleash the potential of social media in the classroom.”

Simnick’s vision to maximize social media’s educational potential has come to be known as TalkChalk, an online education platform that debuted at Philly Startup Weekend late last month and is aimed at teachers and professors who want to reach their students where they already are. Namely, Facebook.

“If you take the approach that Facebook is evil, you will lose,” said Simnick, originally from Illinois. “So turn it into an educational tool that you can use.”

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ENIAC: What is the future of preserving Philadelphia’s super computer legacy? [Video]

Engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania walk by the ENIAC. Photo by Sarah Schu for Technically Philly

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

In a small corner of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, marked by a small paper sign, sits Philadelphia’s portion of the remains of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or the ENIAC, what many say is the world’s first general use electronic computer.

A small panel of what used to be a massive 30-ton machine rests off in that corner in the Moore Building while engineering students sit a few feet away, browsing Facebook, chatting and eating lunch. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which technically has ownership of all of the ENIAC, has a majority of the remaining pieces of the super computer, but much of it has either been destroyed or otherwise lost.

Last Tuesday, Feb. 15, marked 65 years since John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert debuted the ENIAC in Philadelphia at Penn’s Moore Building in 1946, an event that Bill Mauchly, a Video Architect at Cisco Systems and son of John Mauchly, said in an interview with Technically Philly marked a massive shift in technology’s history. Learn 10 things you need to know about the ENIAC.

“It was like if today you could walk, and tomorrow you could fly at 5000 miles per hour,” explained Mauchly.

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Hive76: “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t be hackers, We’d be engineers”

Hive76, a community hacking space, is located at 915 Spring Garden Street. Photo by Sarah Schu

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

The walls of the Hive76 headquarters are lined with part bins containing all types of electronic doodads from circuit boards to transistors in a kind of organized chaos that bespeaks the organization’s DIY cyberpunk attitude.

Off in one corner of the workshop, Hive76 Quartermaster Brendan Schrader toys with a series of gutted drum machines and mixers plugged into a suitcase that has been converted into a four-speaker boombox.

“A lot of us don’t know what we’re doing,” Schrader says, while generating an organic-sounding beat on the post-apocalyptic dance machine. “If we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t be hackers. We’d be engineers.”

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Two percent of Philly IT jobs are freelance and other tech community Census data

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

The Greater Philadelphia area is home to the offices of technical industry giants such as Comcast, SAP AG, Unisys Corporation and Sungard Data Systems, among others, which hold the bulk of some 12,510 information technology jobs throughout the City of Philadelphia, according to 2010 American Community Survey data.

As U.S. Census data continues to be released, shaping funding and legislative redistricting, a new decade is always an opportunity to look to see just what a community looks like. Philadelphia’s tech community leaders are often considered entrepreneurs and freelancers but, truth be told, most of the IT jobs here are with the region’s big employers.

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