University City Science Center: half-century-old institution evolves as innovation pipeline

When you think about incubators, accelerators and coworking, you’re probably thinking about something new.

But the University City Science Center, which calls itself the largest urban research park in the country, is old and it’s been a part of pushing innovation forward for nearly 50 years.

“We’ve been incubating companies since we opened in 1963,” said spokeswoman Jeanne Mell. “The term ‘incubator’ didn’t really exist then.”

Mell says the Science Center is certainly not taking credit for the concept, but in many ways the Science Center has served as both an example and as a foundation to a regional technology community by providing physical and educational support to new and established tech companies across their lifespan.

“We have sought to create an environment, from the get go, where people could collaborate and make connections,” Mell said.

But just because the Science Center, as well as its 31 regional shareholders, has had nearly half a century of success promoting technology and entrepreneurship in the region doesn’t mean they’re stuck in their ways. The powerful hub, led by CEO Stephen Tang, has been a major part of real estate development in University City, particularly along the Market Street corridor, and that growth is driven by new interests.

In fact, in the last few years the Science Center has done a lot that’s new — this institution whose reputation was built on life sciences and still hosts its fair share of staid, biomedical operations, is increasingly bringing its power to bear onto the consumer spectrum of technology.

Indeed, if we’re drawing distinctions in the new infrastructure to house innovation here, this strip of shiny buildings on Market Street in University City may have versions of them all, which might help tell the story of the development of the latest layer of the Philadelphia entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Read more

PhillyPolice Mobile: police department launches mobile web site

It used to be that you had to dial 9-1-1 if you wanted to talk with the Philadelphia Police Department from your mobile phone (or any phone, for that matter).

Now, as long as it’s not an actual emergency, you can use your phone to get in touch with the PDD using PhillyPolice Mobile, the new mobile web site the department launched last week.

“The overall goal is trying to make our services easy to use and bringing us closer to the people we serve,” PPD Director of Communications Karima Zedan said.

Read more

E-commerce companies staffing up across Philadelphia

Monetate's office is pictured in September 2011 before the company launched into a recent employee expansion

While the national job market is showing tentative signs of recovery, Philadelphia’s e-commerce sector is growing so fast, many local employers can’t hire talent quickly enough.

According to Forrester research, e-commerce is expected to see double-digit growth through 2013 to a total of $240 billion in transactions, making online retail a wonderful option for a city looking to continue its reputation as a place with a growing technology job market (third in the nation according to a January CyberCoders study). After surveying some of the region’s entrepreneurs we’ve found that a steady stream of Philadelphia e-commerce shops are busy building out their own strong ecosystem.

Read more

Sports Business Intelligence: Center City sports analytics dashboard signs three new pro teams, looks to grow

A demo of the main Sports Business Intelligence dashboard.

Imagine you own the Philadelphia Phillies.

Philly has just played their 2012 home opener and while you care about attendance, you also want to know about food and merchandise sales, walkup ticket sales, total revenue and you want to know how all of that compares to home openers for the last ten years.

You could hound an entry-level staffer to crunch the numbers, but Sports Business Intelligence founder David Adams would prefer you give his sports analytics dashboard a try.

“What this does now is takes the data they get in Excel and brings it to life,” said Adams, who is a Wharton alumnus and a Brewerytown resident.

Read more

SEER Interactive’s Wil Reynolds on 40 employees, lessons on growth: scaling just takes a little faith

SEER Interactive founder Wil Reynolds in his Northern Liberties HQ, dubbed the 'Search Chuch.'

Any successful small business eventually reaches a point where the workload overwhelms its resources. When this happens, a company has two choices; cut back on clients or expand.

As most ventures find out, staffing up can be hazardous. In the effort to grow quickly to meet demand, many companies lose sight of their goals, hire the wrong people and fail to develop a consistent, welcoming culture, says Wil Reynolds.

Reynolds, the founder of SEER Interactive, a Northern Liberties-based SEO firm, is trying to do something else.

Reynolds started SEER in his apartment in 2002. Three years later, he hired his first employee. In the past year, Reynolds’ employee count doubled to 41. There are some lessons to learn from a company that can withstand that sort of rapid scaling.

Read more

Dean Harris: award winning local technologist teaching computer science to Philly high schoolers

Dean Harris

Every Saturday morning since January, a group of about 17 Philadelphia teenagers have been trooping over to a Temple University computer lab to learn about computer science.

The students, mostly from area charter and magnet schools, are largely college-bound and predictably excited to learn, say those involved. So it’s surprising that their teacher, Dean Harris, sees himself as unlikely role model, he told Technically Philly, but his track record as an innovative digital electronics technologist suggests otherwise.

So does the apparent respect of the teens, who are giving up sleep and Saturday morning cartoons to be in class with him and his co-teachers, leading Java Presenter and DRUPAL expert Tariq Hook, mechanical engineer L Dollio Durant and Harris’s son, Askia Harris.

To explain why Harris still sounds a little surprised when he says that he teaches Computer Science 101, despite the fact that he’s taught eight classes so far, begins when Harris was a teenager in Philadelphia in the 1970s, about the same age as some of his students.

His path — from lost kid to student to heavy technologist to teacher — is instructive in the city’s battle for digital access illustrated by STEM education.

Read more

New Paradise Laboratories: Kensington theater company produces two-part productions, onstage and online

New Paradise Laboratories has a Philadelphia address (North Randolph Street in Kensington), but the unconventional theater company also has an equally important presence online. –Check out their, well, unorthodox website here.

New Paradise Laboratories creates productions with a two-part interaction — the one that occurs onstage and the one that occurs virtually — allowing viewers to engage with characters through its image-intensive website as well as through social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, Mashable reports.

“The 1996-founded theater company worked to bring Broadway home to the Internet, where interactive performances may thrive. Fatebook was one of the first plays of its kind,” Mashable reported. “In addition to molding the two characters’ lives online, the play also incorporated geo-location technology where a character guides you through a park. Audience members could download a sound file for a 45-minute guided tour in a Philadelphia park. Online audiences can take a virtual walk online via YouTube. The third act completed the play with a real-time performance in Philadelphia where the theater is based.”

Desks for Startups: Infrastructure for entrepreneurs or budding startup bubble?

Novotorium's main office space in Langhorne. Novotorium is one of many local startup incubators attempting to differentiate itself.

If you have a startup in Philadelphia that has outgrown your local coffee shop, but doesn’t want an office or a storefront, well, you’re in luck.

In the last six months, the number of low-cost desks for technology startups, often coupled with mentorship and business services, has exploded — more than doubling by some counts. And, as you might expect, that growth has also sparked a debate: is the development of an infrastructure necessary in a maturing entrepreneurial market or is there a budding bubble of startups servicing other startups?

Let’s put them in three categories: (1) coworking, which puts community above all else and often creates a more diverse network of residents beyond traditional startups; (2) acceleration, which offers set, short-term housing and heavy mentorship, often in exchange for equity, before kicking their tenants out, and (3) incubation, which offers longer-term, if still temporary, housing, more passive support and voluntary education programming.

“In Philadelphia, we’re still establishing the process to create and scale business,” said Garret Melby, an old hand in the region’s investment and startup communities, one sunny afternoon in Love Park. “We have to see it shake out.”

The city already had examples in the past. The old-time crew includes Old City coworking powerhouse Independents Hall, which launched in 2007 and announced last week plans to expand again, Devnuts which opened in Northern Liberties two years later, the noted University City accelerator DreamIt Ventures and the newly morphed Good Company Group, led by Melby, as well as institutional incubators like the storied University City Science Center, the Drexel University-based Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship and others.

But the last six months has changed a lot, most notably in that third category of incubation, which can be seen as more passive and more competitive. Is this a sign of strength or of an impending collapse?

Read more

ATR Systems: nearly 40 years later, a workforce management tech company evolves in Warminster

To show off its workforce management tools, last fall, ATR Systems installed 60 silent, synchronized clocks at the Curtis Institute near Rittenhouse.

It was a long shot, starting a clock-in system company in the basement of his Doylestown home with the pitter-patter of two kids echoing on the floorboards above. Mike Hoover’s father, Tom, had some experience in the field, but he was sinking most of what he had into this company in 1973.

After time served in the U.S. Army and another small venture, Tom Hoover started Accurate Time Recorders, or ATR Systems. Today, the company, headed by his son Michael Hoover and located in Warminster, Bucks County, fulfills the needs of more than 2,000 businesses.

Read more

Media Bureau Network: founder Ben Barnett sells Northern Liberties HQ, plans for future

Ben Barnett reminisced on the scenery at the Media Bureau Network.

For some, it’s hard to say goodbye to the 12,000 square feet of memories on 3rd and Brown Street in Northern Liberties. After 13 years in its brick layered and artistically decorated home, digital media agency Media Bureau Network is moving.

MBN, the digital media strategy and content production house that was once a self-styled scrappy, webcasting pioneer, provides a large-scale environment for back-end productions, says founder Ben Barnett.

After launching in 1997, MBN became among the state’s first online networks, its small group of contributors wrote, produced and directed original content with the intent to distribute through internet channels. All with a goal of informing communities, something like the high-tech answer to pirate radio.

“We’re a for-profit that acts like a non-profit,” Barnett, 44, the MBN founder told Technically Philly. Curbed Philly first reported on the sale last month.

Read more