By 2030, 600k Philadelphians won’t have basic skills for work, report says; fight for digital literacy

Digital literacy, the whisper seldom heard beneath the yell of digital access issues in Philadelphia, might be getting a megaphone.

A report issued last month by a partnership between IBM and the City of Philadelphia says that by 2030, an estimated 600,000 Philadelphians will lack basic skills needed to work in a technology-inclusive, if not then exclusive, economy.

That is the battle cry for Lisa Nutter, who is leading the new Digital On-Ramps initiative, a city-wide collaboration to use technology to improve workforce development, which was announced alongside the report.

“We have history in the city through programs like Wireless Philadelphia, where we’ve worked hard to get people hooked up around an inclusion agenda,” says the mayor’s active and public wife.

“But, inclusion to do what? Education to do what? What we’re really trying to do is allow employment and increasing skills to help define a learning plan. That becomes the carrot. ”

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Google’s 2011 Zeitgeist report shows change in Philadelphia search users

Google's regional Zeitgeist for Philadelphia.

Each year, Google tries to capture what’s on people’s mind internationally with its Zeitgest report, an insightful look at culture and mood based on a measure of the company’s gigantic search history.

But Google also completes regional evaluations, which shed light on local zeitgeist. You can see the interactive regional report here.

Google’s annual evaluation of search data shows a common thread in Philadelphia: queries on Google by locals appear to be driven by informational resources, not the news cycle or by memes, like is common nationally (Rebecca Black was the fastest rising search).

And in comparison with 2009, Google’s Philadelphia audience is changing, or its wants are. Dominated that year by requests for information related to the city’s universities, 2011 data shows an audience hungry for information about major public institutions, hospitals, retail outlets and landmarks.

Dwarfing other search queries, SEPTA claimed the highest searched term during the year. It stands alone at the top, owning what appears to be at least three times the next most-searched phrase, Philadelphia School District, as pictured above.

Third on the list, perhaps not unsurprisingly, was PA unemployment.

Following those top searches were, in order, Penn In Touch, Jefferson Hospital, Penn Blackboard, Franklin Mills Mall, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sesame Place and Reading Terminal Market.

For more detail, view the Philadelphia zeitgeist report at Google.

Connectify funded by CIA’s strategic investor In-Q-Tel, but not the team’s first state-backed project

In October, TechCrunch broke the news that In-Q-Tel, a private investment firm spearheaded by the CIA had made an undisclosed investment in a Center City-based networking software product called Connectify.

In-Q-Tel’s press release made clear that the investment was to improve the security and connection aggregation capability of Connectify, a consumer software solution that can turn any Windows 7 computer into a wireless hotspot.

What wasn’t reported is the reach of that product.

Connectify co-founder Alex Gizis told Technically Philly in September that the software has over 3 million downloads, including more than a million in China, where Internet censorship is a storied issue.

And though the company has turned its attention to commercial technology, and changed its name to reflect that shift, the investment isn’t the team’s first venture into state-backed tech development.

For nearly 10 years, the company has been known as Nomadio, Inc., based at the Marketplace Design Center, not far from 30th Street Station, where it has had transit access to U.S. military organizations outside of Philadelphia. Much of its work over the last decade was in creating technology to solve “super hard” networking problems in the defense field, Gizis says.

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One pivot and $2.5 million later, Sidecar automates marketing for e-commerce

If you follow our VC Roundup, you may have noticed something strange a few weeks back. The long dormant Snipi suddenly raised $2.5 million and seemed back from the dead. Except it wasn’t.

Snipi, the Evernote-like application that allowed users to collect and organize web content, had pivoted to become Sidecar, an automated marketing tool for e-commerce companies.

“We’re building a system that helps e-commerce companies leverage a lot more information than what the average worker can handle on a day-to-day basis,” says Founder Andre Golsorkhi.

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Saxbys in Rittenhouse: A new, free, kind of Internet cafe

Store manager Lynh Pham holds up one of the coffee shop's tethered iPads.

In Rittenhouse, a young, corporate world expat is hoping that his experience with technology will help boost sales at his new franchise coffee shop.

Andrew Kupiec, who opened a Saxbys located at 20th and Walnut with several business partners in April, says it was the real estate potential of the location that really caught his eye when he first noticed the vacant property while he was the regional General Manager of wireless Internet provider Clearwire. In November 2009, we interviewed Kupiec in his role at Clearwire.

“I thought it could be a Clearwire retail store,” he told Technically Philly on an early morning last week, as customers filled the spacious shop.

But new leadership at the investment-backed WiMAX Internet provider brought with it a new vision which changed things for Kupiec. He left the company, and using his contacts in the real estate and investment worlds, he pitched the idea that the block could use a high-end coffeeshop. They looked to Saxbys as a Philly-known brand, and have added a custom food menu and catering opportunities to set it apart.

But the shop isn’t just high-end, it’s also high-tech. The model that Kupiec is most excited about is that the coffee shop’s tech amenities come at no cost.

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The Jawn: a local business listings service to compete with Yelp, others

Over the last two years, Jeremy Sanchez has walked Philadelphia streets from the Schuylkill to the Delaware, systematically gathering by hand the information and resources that power his startup The Jawn.

What he and co-founder Marc Levy have to show for it is more than 7,200 photographs of Philadelphia businesses and institutions, a number which is growing fast, and which serve as the foundation for The Jawn’s 11,000 business listings.

“I’d start with Walnut Street, for example, and it would take me about 2 hours to walk, stop, shoot, walk, stop, shoot,” Sanchez says. He’d gather 300 to 400 business locations on a street through this method.

The service, which launched two years ago and has made some more notable headway in 2011 (the company has been able to produce about 2,000 user reviews from more than 400 users) — is similar to Yelp and other mapped listing services, which they hope will be made more powerful by local perspective.

“A lot of these websites that give this information are really crap. I thought we should create something that people can use and benefit the city,” he says.

“We wanted to create something that wasn’t the Silicon Valley one-size-fits-all model.”

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HardMetrics: with its analytics solution, a call for the Enterprise

A column by Geoff McQueen of HiiveSystems published on TechCrunch in late August posited a challenge to the status quo of today’s startup ecosystem: though consumer web is an exciting marketplace, with the necessities of big money and a big market, it sucks to build products for consumers.

“In the United States, if you want to reach a million users in a consumer play, you need to convince one in 260 people to use your product,” McQueen wrote.

It’s something that is easy to miss between the headlines of TechCruch, that same publication that makes the startup environment seem so exciting.

The enterprise — the business-to-business marketplace for software — is gaining more and more attention. TechCrunch has devoted a section to enterprise news, and Technically Philly has done its fair share, like coverage of Emerging Technology for the Enterprise, an international conference dedicated to the space, which takes place right in our Old City backyard.

It’s a growing market. In June, Gartner reported that the industry is on pace to surpass $267 billion in international revenue in 2011.

And though Wayne’s HardMetrics isn’t rewriting the rules of enterprise software deployment, it’s a great example of the prowess of enterprise business and its Philadelphia impact.

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WeatherTrends360 helps consumers and companies predict the weather

Don’t call it the Farmer’s Almanac 2.0.

That historic publication, founded in 1818 in New Jersey, seems to have met its match. Bethlehem-based WeatherTrends360, a service provider and, now, consumer product offering, is doing something similar: trying to predict the next year’s weather.

Unlike the Almanac, which relies on predictions around the solar cycle, WeatherTrends360 is using complex algorithms based on historical weather data. And the company is helping large companies plan business strategies by understanding what they weather will be like during important sales cycles.

The company claims that it can predict weather with 80 percent accuracy.

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Skillshare educational marketplace to launch in Philly on August 16

Updated, July 27, 1:49 p.m.: The company says its moved its launch to August 16.

If you’re wondering how to scale a company fast, take a look at the trajectory of Skillshare, a New York-based startup intent on creating a market for educational classes in major cities across the country and globe.

The company, which began gaining public attention in April, is opening its service to Philadelphia as soon as August 16, organizers say.

Skillshare allows anyone to create a class or enroll in someone else’s, essentially creating a DIY education marketplace on a local level. The company suggests that its classes could be a potential business channel for companies or freelancers, and could be a revenue stream in and of itself. In New York, where the site has already launched, the site recommends that teachers set an average admission price of $25.

The classes could be a boon for local tech education, but it’s perhaps the company’s nimble scaling with seemingly modest publicly-known investment which make it more interesting to entrepreneurs.

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The hand-painted production cycle of mobile game Catball Eats It All

The concept of Catball Eats It All, a developing new mobile game with ties to Philly, is simple.

Your goal is to eat everything in sight. The more you eat, the bigger you get. And the bigger you are, the more you’re able to eat.

There’s not a lot innovative about that.

The members of the development team Broken Compass Studios, coordinated by Project Manager Jeff Hsu, were inspired by games like Katamari Damacy, where players collect objects on a sticky ball that gets bigger and bigger, and Super Mario Galaxy, where the player inhabits small orbiting worlds instead of recognizable two-dimensional Mario levels.

But where Catball is unique is in its art direction.

The concept art and mockups created for this in-progress development are all hand-painted, which gives the game a feeling of unpolished yet sophisticated perfectionism.

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