Three new fellows for the citizen hacking group Code for America were introduced Tuesday to OpenAccessPhilly stakeholders to kick-off their year with the City of Philadelphia.

OpenAccessPhilly, a public/private stakeholders group convened by the City of Philadelphia, worked with the inaugural Code for America fellows last year. Nearly 30 OpenAccessPhilly members, including city employees and other technologists, met in the PhillyStat Room in the Municipal Services Building Tuesday evening. The internal meeting was followed by a good old fashioned happy hour at Ladder 15 on Sansom Street.

All of the CFA fellows, Michelle Lee, Elizabeth Hunt, and Alex Yule, chose to spend their Code for America year in Philadelphia — Technically Philly wrote more about the trio here. Hunt said she chose Philly because the city demonstrates “the most focus on civic engagement.”

Philadelphia is the only participating CFA city to welcome fellows in each of the program’s first two years.

“Philadelphia was chosen for a second term because of the strength of its partnerships,” said Lee. “Particularly in city government.”

The City of Philadelphia isn’t another rust belt city and shouldn’t be treated like one. That about sums up the wide-ranging, tone adjustment that served as Mayor Nutter’s Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce annual mayoral luncheon address Monday.

“We can no longer measure ourselves as compared to other cities in the Mid-Atlantic or even throughout the United States,” tweeted:

Referencing Rome and Paris more than he mentioned Chicago or Baltimore, the half-hour speech, which addressed development, investment and a stake in the ground for Philadelphia as international city, featured a call that the technology and startup community is a means to continue to change perception. Read a transcript of the speech here.

“One of the best things to happen to Philly over the last decade has been the growth of organizations that bring big thinkers together such as our own Philly Startup Leaders,” tweeted:

It was the first time tweeted:

“But not the last,” she added.

Soon after 2 p.m., a crush of bankers, lawyers, nonprofit leaders and other corporate managers hit the escalators and spilled out of the Center City Sheraton at 17th and Race streets. The broad business community hasn’t always agreed with the administration, though Chamber chief Rob Wonderling lauded the mayor in his introduction. Still, a different tone is taken by some in the narrow technology business community, according to at least one voice.

“I really think you’re going to see a focus on entrepreneurship and economic development in his second term,” said Bob Moul, the recently named CEO of AppRenaissance and Philly Startup Leaders chief who Nutter mentioned as a model for the city’s future. “It’s an exciting kind of progress.”

Other news from Nutter’s speech:

• Comcast Executive Vice President and Chamber board chairman David L. Cohen kicked off the event by tweeted:
  .
• New Urban Outfitters CEO Richard Hayne was awarded the $100,000 Powell prize, which he donated to Drexel University.
• Mayor Nutter tweeted:
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• Among other development claims, Nutter pledged movement on three long-stalled efforts: to tweeted:
  of the Divine Lorraine Hotel and to move forward the revitalization of Market East.
• Among other broader efforts, he discussed the expansion of the Philadelphia International Airport.

Now that the Super Bowl is over, we’re all counting down to pitchers and catchers, right? Before you dust off your Chase Utley there are lots of technology events happening in Philadelphia to keep your mind off of the Winter doldrums.

Also, before we get to the events, the kind folks at the Wharton Entrepreneurship Conference have extended a discount for Technically Philly members to attend the conference. The promo code “tech5off” will give you $5 off, bringing the “professional” ticket to $80. Buy your tickets here.

This week: find your co-founder in Philadelphia (not King of Prussia), learn HTML/CSS and shop our user groups.

Co-Founders Wanted – You may remember from our profile of the group last year that CFW was looking to bring the event from the ‘burbs into the city. This week marks the first time ever the entrepreneurial meetup with be held in city limits. Join the group at Quorum to talk about creating the next great company. Wednesday. 6:30 p.m. University City. RSVP.

Intro to HTML/CSS - Designer Jen Lukas of award-winning design firm Happy Cog will be on hand to give you the basics of front-end web development starting with HTML and CSS. The class, organized by Girl Develop It is a bargain at $80 and is intended for those who need  to start from square one. Monday. 7:00 p.m. University City. RSVP.

TP Groups – The user groups of user groups meets again in the Municipal Services building. Come out to sample the best of Philly’s technology scene and cross-pollinate with other meetups. To get involved, drop a line to the Google Group. Tuesday. 6:00 p.m. Center City.

Photos by Matthew Albasi and Erica DePascale for Technically Philly.

Hotdog hats, bright white lab coats and Rosie the Riveter costumes set the atmosphere Saturday for the Penn First Lego League Championship Tournament, held in the Irvine auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania Saturday.

FLL, a robotics program designed for kids ages 9 to 14, aims to get young students excited and involved in science and technology. Fifty-two teams from across the tri-state area traveled to University City to participate in FLL’s annual championship tournament after advancing in regional qualifying rounds in December. Like elsewhere in the region, the City of Philadelphia’s School District is grappling with the need for strong STEM education.

This year’s theme was ‘Food Factor Challenge’, where judges evaluated elementary and middle-school teams on three events.

“It’s basically an exhibition of elementary and middle school students to show what they’ve learned in the area of robot design, core vales, project presentation and robot performance,” said Kendrick Davis, the head judge advisor.

Photos by Matthew Albasi and Erica DePascale for Technically Philly.

The Robot Game challenged teams to create a Lego-based autonomous robot that performs on a playing field in order to score points for their team. The project portion allowed teams to create a solution to a food-based problem they have identified, all while following FLL’s core values.

“It’s a little overwhemeling, we’ve never been in such a huge competition,” said Marlene Houlihan, the mentor for Beck Robotics Team from Beck Middle School in Cherry Hill, NJ. The competition provided pit areas for teams to practice with their robots and fix potential kinks in their designs before heading to the main stage competition. On stage, rounds of three teams cheered on their teammates while judges evaluated robotic performance. Separate judging allowed individual teams to present their Food Factor topic in conference rooms.

“They’re amazing, look around at all these kids. All they have is me. I don’t know much about this stuff, it’s all them,” Houlihan said.

After a day full of judging, teams finished out the day with a ceremony in the main hall. Awards went to teams with best performance, design, project, and core value.

“The most exciting part for me is when the kids feel like worked so hard and they don’t have everything together as much as they would like and they win an award and they’re like ‘Oh my god!’” Davis said.

This week: learn Python, learn how to develop on a Windows phone and then put your Ruby to the test.

An introduction to Python for women and their friends - The Philly Python User Group joins Web Start Women and Girl DevelopIt in its quest to even the gender ratio in the development world. Head on over to Devnuts to practice Python basics during the two-day workshop. Friday. 6:00 p.m. Northern Liberties. INFO.

30 Days to Launch - The city’s newest new incubator, Seed Philly, is hosting a series of Windows development courses. Join Brian Johnson, Senior Developer Evangelist at Microsoft in a four week course on making an application from scratch on the growing Windows Mobile OS. Wednesday. 7:00 p.m. Center City. INFO.

Philly.rb Hack Night – At Technically Philly we know from experience: learning Ruby is hard. Learn by doing at this week’s Ruby hack night at CloudMine, located in the Inquirer building. Monday. 6:00 p.m. North Broad. INFO

Sizeseeker co-founder Mona Safabakhsh demonstrates her company's measuring process using an XBox Kinect.

Sizeseeker co-founder Mona Safabakhsh stood in front of a hundred people in her pajamas and began flailing her arms around.

It wasn’t a bad dream, it was the night’s only live demo. Safabakhsh, along with co-founder Ian Campell, were demonstrating  Sizeseeker, the fledgling Wharton-born company that helps users find their clothing size using an Xbox Kinect.

The first Philly Tech Meetup of the new year kept the now-familiar format of last year: startups meet at the University City Science Center’s Quorum space and each get 20 minutes to present and launch their new startup to a room packed with the city’s technology community. Each demo is followed by a brief question and answer session and the night is capped off by a happy hour at nearby Mid-Atlantic.

After the jump, we offer recaps of each company: Kurbi, Sizeseaker and Near-Miss Management.

KURBI

Founded by Wes Garnett during a University of Delaware Startup Weekend, Kurbiaims to help people with multiple sclerosis log their activities and symtoms daily us a four-minute questionnaire. The idea, he said, is that patients can have all of their symptoms boil down to a simple score that they can then send to their doctors to help measure progress.

Garnett said he has several family members who have MS and has already partnered with Christina Care and the MS Society.

SIZESEEKER

Sizeseeker's representation of the images captures by the XBox Kinect

In a night otherwise filled with PowerPoints and mockups, Sizeseeker’s demo drew several “oohs” and “aahs” from the crowd.

The platform was still in its early stage but the demo using co-founder Mona Safabakhsh was within one inch of measurements of hips, waist and bust. The measurement took a bit of manual input, but the duo hope to fully automate the measurement process.

“What we’re building is an API of measurements. When the user logs on to a partner website, the sizing chart will automatically be filled,” said co-founder Ian Campbell. The service also helps users that switch bands between retailers that often have “vanity sizes,” or sizes that make the customer perceive themselves as being thinner.

“At least 30 to 50 percent of all online sales are returns,” said Campbell. “Retailers are really excited at reducing these costs.”

NEAR-MISS MANAGEMENT

A slide from Near-Miss Management's presentation

According to Near-Miss Management co-founder Ulku Oktem the imfamous BP Gulf Oil spill may have seemed sudden to outside observers, but the company had several warnings that an explosion was coming. “Some alarms were going off a year before the accident,” she said.  ”Every time before an accident, the data often shows near misses.”

Industrial workplaces, like oil refineries, often collect huge amounts of data, like temperature, to help signal when a plant shutdown is required. Near-Miss has created a “Risk Predictor Suite” to analyze risk based on these data sets and alarm companies when it notices a troubling pattern, helping to warn businesses long before a shutdown.

Near-Miss Management demo was solely in PowerPoint.

Tim Bieniosek, of the Hacktory, explaining his plans for LED matrices, at Saturday's art hackathon.

Arduino boards, Kinects and LED matrices littered the tabletops. UV laser pointers and photochromatic powders were being mixed like magic potions inside Hive76′s Spring Garden studio space this weekend.

The Hacktory and Hive76, two Philadelphia-based DIY groups, joined together for a hackathon on Saturday to discuss their upcoming installation at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts for its After Dark: Turned On exhibit.

Turned On focuses on Henry Ossawa Tanner, a Pittsburgh-born black artist who studied at PAFA in the 1880s. Hive76 and the Hacktory will be creating the interactive exhibits that will be on display.

“We’re exploring themes of transcendence, light as a metaphor for mystery and making the invisible, visible,” said Stephanie Alarcon of the Hacktory.

The resulting projects will allow visitors to draw with light-sensitive ink and lasers and also play with an interactive projection. Their goal is to provide a fun, safe and educational piece that teaches visitors the importance of technology in art and society.

“We want to take a more modern look at the historical context of Tanner’s work,” said Alarcon.

Just in time for you to dust off your car and shovel your sidewalk, here are our reccomendations from our always-packed event calendar: Listen to local startups, save TV news and make a video game.

Philly Tech Meetup – The Philly Tech Meetup format is simple: three companies each get 20 minutes to show off what they’ve been working on to the community. Companies up this week: Kurbi, SizeSeeker, Near-Miss Mgmt. Wednesday. 7:00 p.m. University City. INFO.

ONA: NBC 10 Showcase talking web strategy and the future of TV news – Head on up to City Line avenue at NBC 10′s headquarters to talk about the future of TV news with your fellow media geeks. Station empoyees will be on hand to describe the strong turnaround of its online business after a radical shift in web strategies. Wednesday. 6:00 p.m. City Line Avenue. RSVP.

Global Game Jam – Just like its distant cousin Startup Weekend, the Global Game Jam challenges game-makers worldwide to produce a working game prototype in 48 hours. The local edition is hosted by Philly IDGA Philly Game Development Meetup and will take place at Indy Hall. Friday. 5:00 p.m. Old City. INFO.

You can stay warm with hot chocolate or that new coat you purchased, but nothing warms the soul like hanging with your local tech community. Lucky for you, we have a packed event calendar.

Our picks this week: get happy with Girl Develop It, get familiar with Philly Startup Leaders and mingle with the city’s user groups.

Girl Develop It Happy Hour – Girl Develop It, the group dedicated balancing the gender ratio in tech, is kicking off the week with a no-pressure Happy Hour. Come and see what the group is all about. If so, you won’t have to wait long to get involved, the group is hosting a WordPress 101 session the next day. Monday. 5:30 p.m. RSVP.

Bob Moul’s PSL Welcome Party – Philly Startup Leaders has some much-needed stability with its new president, Bob Moul. Moul, former CEO of Dell Boomi, has been active in the local community of late, but if you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the next PSL President, we suggest you pay a visit. Tuesday. 6:00 p.m. Center City. RSVP.

TP Groups meeting – Evert third Tuesday of the month a handful of local user groups gather at the Municipal Services Building to have a shared meet up. Come explore the city’s user groups all in a single night. Tuesday. 6:00 p.m.. Center City. RSVP.

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.