A screenshot from Zonoff's iPad remote control software.

Mike Harris has been down this road before.

The former CEO of AnySource Media has been laying low after his last company exited to Divx in 2009. The company helped make software to connectt TVs to the Internet, a precursor to the long-rumored Apple TV set. But now, he’s taking that idea to the next level.

“Zonoff is the next frontier of that, connecting everything else in the house to the Internet,” says Harris. And he means everything. “Thermostats, blinds, refrigerators .. you name we want to connect it.”

Zonoff CEO Mike Harris

Zonoff (named for connectivity protocols that often start with “z” combined with “on and off”) is a platform based on Drexel University technology to create a network of all of your household objects so they can interact with the Internet and each other. This means blinds that automatically adjust to the sun’s position when the TV is turned on or a security system that is smart enough to text you when someone enters your front door.

The concept of connecting our homes to the web, often called the “Internet of Things,” is a growing trend says Harris. Yet there’s not a system to make it easy on hardware makers.

Zonoff debuted its latest “Intuitive Home” product at CES that Harris calls the company’s “coming out party.” The company set up a small model home to demonstrate its iPad home remote control, among other products, the result of nine months of tinkering with the platform, designing a UI and tinkering with a business model that relies on licensing fees, web service fees and sales commissions. Eventually, we won’t need remote controls or iPads. Our home will just know what to do.

The company is now trying to raise a $5 million Series A round and is actively hiring in its Malvern offices that are down the street from the fast-growing search engine DuckDuckGo.

“The plan is to grow rapidly,” says Harris. “We need product and project management, engineers, software development, UI and web development expertise. Everything.”

Even in the company’s infancy, Harris says he feels good and hopes to bring another success story to Philadelphia.

“I think we’re building another big winner in the Philadelphia area,” he says.

Edit, 12:48 p.m.: added context, corrected Drexel note.

Chatter about the need for a post-incubation home for technology startups outside of the life sciences realm in Philadelphia has been a topic of conversation among investors and entrepreneurs since at least the late 1990s.

In the past year, the seriousness of those conversations has grown, with a handful of new initiatives launching in recent months focused on the concept of offering support to build largely fledgling consumer-facing efforts seeking investment.

The long-rumored startup accelerator Seed Philly is aiming to differentiate itself by placing mission over profit and featuring a heavy reliance on data, Technically Philly has learned.

At the helm of Seed Philly, a Center City nonprofit accelerator that has been kept quiet in its pre-launch phase, is Brad Denenberg, a familiar face on the Philadelphia startup circuit and part of the pack that launched Philly Startup Leaders in 2007. Denenberg, who has until now personally financed the effort, has built a small team of other familiar faces in and around PSL.

“This is an invite-only community that is going to build better businesses,” said Denenberg, noting he and his colleagues have done more than 200 interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and service providers to create a resource of best startup practices.

To officially launch the effort, Seed Philly is partnering with Microsoft around a Windows Phone development course, launching Feb. 1.

Seed Philly aims to do two things: (1) house and connect startups with services at the seed stage and (2) offer and maintain a dashboard of deep business analytics tracking decisions by industry specific startups to grow smarter companies.

View from Seed Philly, on the 19th floor of 1650 Arch Street.

To start, the accelerator, which is being registered as a nonprofit, will not take equity as part of its relationship.

Instead, Seed Philly will charge what Denenberg describes as ‘break-even’ rent prices, likely featuring one of 11 small offices, seats in the central bullpen and access to conference rooms, host events and, when appropriate, partner around grant funding from government and entrepreneurship efforts. Mentorship opportunities and networking events will be a staple, he adds. An investment arm could be a future output, but Denenberg is careful to make clear in its current incarnation Seed Philly is a mission-orientated nonprofit devoted to education and connection.

Below, watch a quick peek at the inside of the main bullpen room of Seed Philly, as seen Tuesday afternoon before furniture delivery.

In recent months, Philadelphia has seen the launch of the investment-driven, Bucks County Novotorium, which is housing a single company, the Venturef0rth accelerator near Chinatown and Green Village, which is adjacent to Seed Philly on the 19th floor of 1650 Arch Street.

The competitive real estate and built environment news community of Philadelphia has a new player.

Curbed.com, the New York City based blog network, which also has regional versions in nine other markets, today launches Philly.Curbed.com. The local site will be edited by Liz Spikol, the former Philadelphia Weekly columnist and editor of the now defunct Hispanic tech magazine Tek Lado.

“Curbed marries an obsession with real estate and neighborhoods with wit and entertainment,” said Spikol. “It’s fun.”

The site was launched in Manhattan in May 2004 by writer and sometimes entrepreneur Lockhart Steele, who has since built a small empire of focused niche sites beyond the Curbed network, which also has local versions in Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and the Hamptons.

The display advertising model will be tested, following the path of the short-lived Philadelphia expansion of Brooklyn-based real estate blog Brownstoner. Since then, the niche has been attacked locally by Naked Philly and Plan Philly’s Eyes on the Street, in addition to historically-focused Hidden City and others.

[Full Disclosure: PlanPhilly has retained Technically Media, this news site's parent company, for web strategy work in the past.]

It’s a place that Spikol says Curbed can distinguish itself with her local leadership, noting her “thorough knowledge of the city and its quirks.”

“People should come to the site if they have a sense of humor and if the following things make their hearts pound faster: castles in Mt. Airy; Frank Furness; confusing neighborhood renamings; community forum threads; mysterious new construction; urban ruins; street art; the fate of the Reading Viaduct; historical architecture; catchment issues; remarkable houses and apartments; hideous interior design; economic development; urban planning; sexy floorplans; Ed Bacon’s interest in skateboarding—and so much more,” Spikol wrote Technically Philly in an email. “I look forward to Philly readers helping us define the site.”

Below, watch Curbed.com founder Lockhart Steel talk real estate blogging.

Updated 2/9/12: The MyHeartMap Challenge will run for six weeks beginning Jan 31 through March 13, 2012. Applications to participate in the challenge are now open to the public. The application was developed by GIS firm Azavea.

Automated external defibrillators are life-saving devices located in buildings and public spaces like fire extinguishers across the country. But no one really knows where they are in any broader way.

With the MyHeartMap Challenge, launching this week, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania is hoping to crowdsource the location of every AED in Philadelphia and raise awareness about the tools, as Technically Philly previously reported.

Here’s how the challenge will work: interested participants should register at the MyHeartMap site and download the contest app to a smartphone. If you find an AED, take a picture of it. The app will geotag the photo for the Penn researchers who plan to use the information to create a database and comprehensive map of all the AED’s stashed throughout Philadelphia county.

There may be as many as 5,000 AEDs tucked into nooks and crannies around the city, reports the Inquirer. The winner — whoever finds the most — stands to collect $10,000, but smaller prizes will also be awarded.

According to Penn Medicine, you don’t need a medical degree to use one of the devices: “Used in conjunction with CPR, AEDs are an important part of the “chain of survival” needed to save cardiac arrest victims. Even people with no medical training can easily take those steps to help, since many AEDs provide audio instructions that talk users through the process of performing CPR.”

The Penn Researchers are starting the challenge in Philadelphia, but if the contest is successful, they have plans to make the contest and ultimately, their database, national.

From the release:

“Philadelphia is home to a vibrant medical community, some of the nation’s top institutions of higher education, and is a growing hub for new technology development. The MyHeartMap Challenge brings all those elements together to improve the health of our people,” said Donald F. Schwarz, MD, MPH, Health Commissioner and Deputy Mayor for Health and Opportunity for the City of Philadelphia. “The city has a rich tradition of innovation, and we have what it takes to lead the nation in this new form of lifesaving community engagement.”

To download the app and participate, visit the MyHeartMap Challenge website, follow them on Twitter, or visit the Facebook page.

To learn more about the Penn’s AED research check out the Penn Medicine News Release.

University City developer Griffin Boyce built Soapy, a SOPA work-around browser plugin.

Before the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) blackout took hold last week, Griffin Boyce, a University City-based web developer, thought up a more practical way to protest a piece of legislation that many believe would amount to censorship — create some software to work around it.

In less than three hours, the self-taught Boyce built Soapy, a web browser plug-in that would allow a user to see a website blocked under SOPA by automatically redirecting the user to the site’s IP address. Designed to be easy to use and open source, the software is free, can be downloaded by anyone and has caught attention nationally.

Download it here.

The idea, Boyce explained to Technically Philly, was to build and publish the software as soon as possible before a Senate vote on SOPA’s sister bill, Protect IP Act (PIPA), originally scheduled for tomorrow, knowing that if the bill passed, distribution of Soapy would be illegal. Though the legislation has been shelved for now, the issue will likely be heard again.

“With Soapy,” Boyce said, “you’re popping the censorship bubble, and slipping past information blocks.”

Though SOPA and its Senate sister bill PIPA have both been put on hold for now, there is little doubt that the concept behind the tool is still valuable.

Online piracy will likely find legislative opposition again and it’s a problem most agree needs a solution.

Still, Boyce says, “There’s a world of difference between fighting piracy and restricting liberty. These bills fail to fight piracy in any meaningful way, but make stifling personal liberties trivial. There’s the old saying that ‘Information wants to be free.’ Information doesn’t want to be free, people do.”

Boyce says that Soapy has already been downloaded upwards of 9,000 times, including by users outside the United States, especially in Spain, Chile, and Malaysia.

Part of the motivation to create and name Soapy stems from the developer’s passion for the free flow of information and his concerns about censorship, Boyce told TP.

“Activists, hackers, coders, and business owners came together in a big way in 2011 to help fight abuses of power in the Middle East. If we can help Middle Eastern activists fight for free speech, then why not spend a little time working on these issues at home as well?”

Boyce, who hails from Tulsa, Oklahoma, now calls University City home. Though originally planning to move to Seattle, Boyce ended up falling in love with Philadelphia. Since arriving in Philly, Boyce has developed a penchant for “hipster watching, bouncy squirrels, and Tofu Hoagies from Fu Wah.”

Want to know a little more about how Soapy works? Here are the details from the release:

“Soapy is written in JavaScript and XML. The code is available on GitHub for programmers, activists, and informed consumers. Every site that Soapy unblocks has a set of XML rules that are tailored to the quirks of that specific site. Much of the code has been borrowed from HTTPS-Everywhere and NoScript. Templates are available so that unblocking future sites can be crowdsourced by hacktivists inside or outside the United States as quickly as they are identified.”

From 550 applicants, there are 26 Code for America 2012 fellows to be broken into teams for eight partnering cities this year. This month, the fellows are in San Francisco in a CFA bootcamp before landing in their cities for the month of February for research and finishing out the year back on the West Coast building and working with the city from afar.

Though they don’t land until Feb. 1 and Technically Philly will speak to them in greater detail, here’s an introduction to the three 2012 Philadelphia fellows. (Remember the 2011 fellows here.)

Elizabeth Hunt is a user experience strategist and designer. Elizabeth has worked with top digital agencies and has designed online and mobile experiences. During the past ten years, she has worked for companies such as American Express, Microsoft, and Target. Elizabeth earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of New Mexico. @ezoehunt

Updated, 1/12/12, 1:08 p.m.: The base price for Venturef0rth’s rental fees is $395, not $345 as previously reported. A 12-month commitment brings the fee down to $345.

A new early stage incubation space opened its doors for the first time last night in what could have been a familiar setting for some in the creative realm of Philadelphia.

Venturef0rth — with a zero, not an ‘o’ — offers cheap, collaborative space for a curated group of small entrepreneurial teams and access to the initiative’s three founders, all of whom have experience in building and exiting technology businesses in Philadelphia.

The freshly painted new space adorned, fittingly enough, with a ping pong table and bean bag chairs, is the former home of Razorfish, the digital marketing firm that was scooped up and then sold again by Microsoft, at the 417 N. 8th building above Callowhill Street with a water tower on its roof featuring an aging Philly.com advertisement. Venturef0rth is across the hallway from nonprofit IT services program NPower PA. Though pitched as Center City, the neighborhood is often described as Callowhill, just north of Chinatown, and is home to a bubbling creative sector.

The new space’s three founders are friends Elliot Menschik, who exited on his healthcare services startup Hx Technologies Inc. in May 2009, Jesse Kramer, who leads marketing for AWE Tuning, and Jay Shah, president of consulting firm Star Advisory Services.

The flexible space, with a dozen workstations for teams of up to a half dozen, will cost $395 on a month-to-month basis, with discounts for longer three, nine and 12 month leases. The costs include utilities, like internet.

“We even throw in the coffee,” said Menschik, 40. The event space was opened up Wednesday night as a Founders Happy Hour from Philly Tech Meetup. Venturef0rth organizers are seeking applicants for the space, Menschik said.

Below, watch video of Technically Philly talking to Menschik about the initiative. Above, watch a video tour of the space, during last night’s happy hour opening.

Members of Indy Hall all seem to agree that what makes the Old City coworking space so great is, to summarize, themselves. That’s the takeaway from “IndyViews,” a rough cut of Indy Hall member interviews conducted as part of an introspective analysis of its impact.

An earlier draft of the report was released in July, without the video accompaniment, which is the first step in a new effort by the four-year-old coworking scene to brand its impact. More on that effort will be announced next month, said Indy Hall co-founder Alex Hillman.

“The people here are the best around,” said freelance designer Johnny Bilotta, who is also one half of the “Two Guys on Beer” podcast. “The people that come here and stay here and contribute to it, they’re second to none in Philadelphia as far as I’m concerned.”

From the beginning, co-founders Hillman and Geoff DiMasi have made great pains to stress that Indy Hall is less a building and more, to use their feel-good word of choice, “a community,” which they say is a testament to their growing success.

Cliff Stevens, serial entrepreneur and CEO of startup Lokadot, called Indy Hall a “people platform” and, based on this series of nearly a dozen interviews, his description is apt.

Check out the early video, produced by Real Arts Media, above to hear more about what members say makes Indy Hall a hotbed for all kinds of creative-types, technology and otherwise, in Old City.

pureNANO leaders: CEO Lev Davidson and Eric Borguet

If you want to talk about the Philadelphia region’s distinction for startups, it lies in the slice of life sciences called nanotechnology, says Lev Davidson.

Davidson is the CEO and co-founder of pureNANO Technologies, which produces proprietary, ultra-pure carbon nanotubes said to be some 50,000 times narrower than a human hair and 100 times stronger than steel.

How do you make money on really tiny tubes?: by producing “the world’s most energy efficient flat-panel displays, high-performance flexible thin-film solar cells and advanced mobile water filtration systems,” boasts the company’s promotional materials.

“pureNANO will be the Intel of nanotechnology by providing the material that will enable technologies which will fundamentally disrupt innumerable industries,” said Davidson, 28, who lives in Center City and grew up in Lafayette Hill, Montgomery County. “We will do for nanotech what the Intels of the world did for computing.”

To start, in May, the company took top honors and $125,000 in cash, prizes and services at Temple University’s Fox School of Business 13th annual Be Your Own Boss Bowl. With co-founder, chief scientist and Dublin-native Eric Borguet, 48, pureNANO was also a standout in the last GoodCompany Ventures incubation class.

That’s a good start but not yet the global disruption that Davidson is seeking. So what’s next?

The problems that pureNANO’s technology is said to answer are what has prohibited the industrial scale of top level nanotubes on today’s market: purity, cost and production time.

“There is a timely, critical need for ultra-pure nanotubes to enable the next wave of disruptive innovation,” Davidson said. “We have it.”

In the spirit of nanotechnology, watch a portion of this TED talk about the impact of working on the nano scale.

The company’s next three milestones are familiar ones: technology, funding and users.

“Because the development work was done and the purification process was invented at Temple, for which a full U.S. patent was filed based on provisional and PCT applications, the university owns the IP, and we are currently negotiating with their Office of Technology Transfer for exclusive global rights to it,” Davidson said.

Davidson, a former JP Morgan analyst, is the business side to chemistry professor Borguet’s science side. So, while Borguet makes the process sing, Davidson is beginning conversations with investors and early customers, expecting 2012 to be an explosive year for the company.

Davidson said his company has no intentions of leaving Philadelphia, largely because he says the mix of life sciences, top talent and an improving true city is a bet worth making.

Drexel, Penn and Temple have all proven invaluable resources for the company in its early stages, he said, adding that the University City Science Center could be a sensible next step for the company, which is currently being incubated on Temple’s Main Campus.

“On the investment side, both Ben Franklin Technology Partners’ Nanotechnology Institute and the state’s PA Nano Center demonstrate regional long-term commitment to investing in and supporting nano-based business,” he said. “Additionally, there are several local angel and VC groups interested in socially-focused ventures — cleantech in particular — from which nano-based startups can absolutely benefit.”

That’s good for the region and for pureNANO, Davidson said.

“Nanotech is the next great wave of technological innovation, and what is so exciting is that it can happen right here in Philadelphia, not California or New York. And it’s already happening here,” he said. “We have the technical, business and investment resources right here in our backyard to develop an entrepreneurial ecosystem that catalyzes a nanotech revolution.”

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney commercial litigation attorney Frank Taney hosts open office hours for young tech businesses in the region.

Since starting to host free, monthly open office hours in June, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney attorney Francis X. Taney has met with nearly two dozen entrepreneurs he never knew before.

“Some become paying clients, some I never see again, but almost everyone walks away with some knowledge they needed, which is really the point,” said the Center City commercial litigation lawyer better known on Twitter as @ScaryLawyer. “The bigger, the stronger the pie in Philadelphia, the better it is for all of us.”

(Which is a good perspective, as Technically Philly is hosting another startup advice open hours on Jan. 19, albeit more focused on investment than potential litigation.)

Taney’s effort started at the Corzo Center at the University of the Arts by answering questions from students who were mostly starting industrial crafts and other creative arts businesses. Now it’s grown into part lead generation and part giving back, he says, helping startups the fourth Wednesday of each month. The next opportunity will be Jan. 25 from 6-8pm.

“I’m typically very useful to people who are trying to figure out the legal bases they have to cover in launching a business, whether that relates to entity selection and formation, contractual and IP issues or other related issues,” said Taney, noting he has walked through actual disputes with young businesses.

One advantage of sitting with so many startups, says the South Jersey native and Cherry Hill resident, is that he’s been able to get a good sense of where the broad entrepreneurial community is headed in Philadelphia.

“You’ve always tended to see less of a bubble here, and that’s still the case” he said. “Nobody’s chasing the sizzle. They’re building businesses.”

Working on a decade with Buchanan Ingersoll and 17 years in and around Center City, Taney, who earned a Penn law degree after doing his undergrad at Drew University, says he sees a lot of incremental ideas –”not a lot of projects that are trying to cure cancer.”

Still, two decades of technology business growth — with a bubble burst in the middle — has created a community that Taney says most entrepreneurs he talks to have some interest in helping to build.

For entrepreneurial-minded Twitter users in Philadelphia, he is a familiar sight as @ScaryLawyer. How’d he choose that name when he joined in 2008 on the recommendation of fellow PANMA board members?

“I chose the name because I’ve often felt that some people are uneasy around me because I’m a lawyer; so it was an ironic response to that,” he said. “Little did I know at the time the various interesting people I’d connect with through that platform.”

Considering Taney has clients like Passyunk Square web design firm P’unk Ave and Headhouse Square e-commerce development shop Sumo Heavy Industries, while working around big corporate clients of the medium sized Pittsburgh-based law firm, his perspective has some value.

If Taney was in charge, he says that to continue to grow the perception and impact of the Philadelphia tech scene, he would focus on ‘the multiplier effect’ — the power of proximity to attract and retain talent.

“Startups in New York are taxed like crazy but they’re growing that community in a big way,” he said, noting that national press attention there can help. “The Nutter administration is a big improvement, I think, but we need to keep focusing on how density and perception of success brings more of it.”

It’s not that Philadelphia is without strong ideas that could fuel big business growth, he says.

“The ideas behind [startup accelerator] DreamIt NYC companies are no different or better than those at DreamIt Philly. There is just the feeling of more money there,” Taney said. “Or more specifically, the investment community here has different interests on the whole.”

Is it an education problem?

“No one is entitled to tell investors that they should be investing in a different area, but it can help to continue to introduce people with money in the western suburbs to the real businesses being built in Philadelphia today,” he said.

“With a train ride, you have access to the federal government in D.C. and the consumer-focused money in New York, but I see people building something different here,” he said. “Can they keep it special as it grows?”