NextDocs: “We want to establish how a larger company can thrive in the Philadelphia area”

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in with NextDocs, the growing King of Prussia-based company that provides compliance solutions to life science companies.

In the past few months the company has ballooned to 126 current employees and is moving to a new office in Conshohoken that may or may not have a slide.

“We intend to make it the best place to work in software in Philadelphia,” says Satwik Seshasai VP of Product development. Seshasai recently joined the company after spending nine years in Boston working for IBM.

We ask Seshasai how Philly compares to Boston, NextDoc’s ambitions to double in size and how Philly uniquely allows engineers like him to have a greater impact.

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Monetate CEO David Brussin on giving away $2000, Philly’s growing e-commerce community and more

In 2010, Monetate CEO and co-founder David Brussin was offering an iPad to anyone who referred an eventual engineering hire. In 2012, he’s upped the ante to $2,000.

“We have as many open positions now as we’ve ever had,” he says. “It’s really across all areas not just engineering.”

With 90 employees and a new office in downtown Conshohocken the e-commerce optimization company has been rapidly expanding, claiming nearly 300 percent revenue growth in 2011 with large clients like Best Buy and Brooks Brothers. Monetate also upped its products offerings from one to the five-product “agility suite” in January.

The company is also emblematic of a growth Philadelphia e-commerce ecosystem with retailers like QVC and Urban Outfitters and service providers like SEER Interactive, Sidecar and GSI Commerce.

We spoke to Brussin about Monetate’s growth and Philadelphia’s suddenly robust e-commerce ecosystem.

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Adam Butler: college dropout, Fahreinheit 450 co-founder who designed 3D graphics for Apple, Warner Bros., others in 1990s now at Bracket [Q&A]

Adam Butler, a vice president at Bracket Global, co-founded cutting edge Fahrenheit 450 in 1996.

Adam Butler has a fine corporate resume.

He has a vice president title with Wayne-based Bracket, the global strategy and technology firm that supports pharmaceutical clinical trials. Before that role with the company, which was formed just last year, Butler spent nearly a decade with one of the companies that merged to form Bracket.

Butler, who lives near Malcolm X Park in West Philly, had many roles there, climbed the corporate ladder and seems a good company spokesman. That’s what helps make his story so interesting.

In 1996, the Pittsburgh native dropped out of Temple University to form a web development company and ran away to San Francisco.

At a time when the industry was dominated by big business, he and his partner, who, together, formed Fahrenheit 450 (named, similarly to the novel, after the purported temperature that paper burns), did cutting edge web work for companies like Apple, Warner Brothers and a half dozen others that you know but he can’t technically take credit for, due to 15-year-old contractual obligations.

Still, it’s clear to say that Butler, 38, isn’t your average corporate vice president.

Below, we hear more about his path and how he may have helped make the Temple student newspaper one of the first publications in the world to go from print-only to online-only, if briefly.

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Games for healthcare: Professor Nancy Hanrahan on Penn’s “Game Solutions for Healthcare initiative”

For the University of Pennsylvania, the 2011-2012 academic year has been dubbed “The Year of the Game.” The University’s various departments are all encouraged to weave games into curricula. The folks at Penn Nursing School, however, are taking it to a whole other level.

The school’s “Game Solutions for Healthcare initiative” put out an open call to all Penn students to help create games that would improve the healthcare industry, specifically the nurse-patient relationship. While the school only expected five entries into the contest, they’ve received 10.

And, according to Professor Nancy Hanrahan, the contest has not only reshaped the way the school thinks about solving healthcare problems, but is also challenging the way its students have learned for decades.

“My hope for the future is that we don’t have these silos of separate schools at a university,” says Hanrahan.

All of the games will be on display for the award ceremony on April 19th that is open to the public.

After the jump we ask Hanrahan about her favorite games, how this hopes to change the nursing field and why she loves engineers.

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Councilman David Oh: “We have to talk about growing the pie more than regulating it”

Photo courtesy of Oh's Facebook page

Since January, David Oh has been a hard man to get in touch with.

That’s when he was sworn in as a new Councilman-At-Large along with 5 other new members of Philadelphia City Council, an elected rookie class that meant the departure of six veteran members of the Council’s seventeen seats.

Oh says that life as an attorney at Zarwin Baum DeVito Kaplan Schaer Toddy, P.C. — where he has worked since 2008 when he merged his private practice with the firm — has changed. Though he says he’s been waking at 4:30 in the morning and working as late as 11:00 p.m., he hasn’t been able to practice much law in the courtroom since the election.

Instead, he’s been focused on transitioning to his new role as Councilman.

Oh grew up in Southwest Philadelphia, where he still lives today with his wife and three young children. He says his political aspirations were driven in part from watching his father Reverend Ki Hang Oh found the city’s first Korean-American church in 1953.

“Growing up and living in a poor section of Philadelphia, I was exposed to the problems and issues that people face and ultimately saw many occasions where people who didn’t have much opportunity became successful,” he says. “There was always the question: ‘couldn’t we do something a little better’?

Shortly after starting his new post, Oh helped found and now chairs the new Committee on Global Opportunities and the Creative/Innovative Economy, dedicated to exploring ways to improve Philadelphia’s economy through the those sectors. He also sits on the Committee of Technology and Information Services.

After the jump, Oh talks business taxes, global economy and growth and honest government.

Oh announces his Philadelphia City Council campaign in January 2011.


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Farmville for do-gooders: The Wayne-based video game studio that’s making the world a better place

A screenshot from "A Better World"

The staff at ToonUps is obsessed with positive thinking.

Nearly 15 years after Ray and MarySue Hansell founded and sold RMH Teleservices on the Main Line, the duo is back with “A Better World.” A new Facebook game that encourages users to do good deeds in the digital world which can then translate to real life.

In-game tasks like “Water a friend’s garden” or “Find a missing item” help the game’s 50,000 active monthly users build up credit to then purchase in-game goods. When all the game’s users collectively reach a certain good deed milestone, ToonUps donates part of the game’s proceeds to causes around the world.

“Those type of actions, studies show, actually improve your health and well-being,” says MarySue Hansell. “We’re challenging people to do that so when they complete these goals we’ll actually do a real-world donation too.”

This December the company, which now has 15 full-time employees, wrote a $10,000 check to Cure International to fund medical operations for 10 children around the world including a procedure for a three-year-old girl that helped return her ability to walk after a bone infection compromised one of her legs.

We chatted with Greg, Ray and MarySue Hansell about their quietly growing video games studio in Wayne and why Philly is the country’s center of positivity. No, really.

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Friday Q&A: Brendan McCorkle of CloudMine on growing fast and setting up shop at a newspaper company

Philadelphia Media Network has had a bad week.

The company that owns the Philadelphia Inquirer, Philadelphia Daily News and Philly.com is wrapped in a controversy stemming from its possible sale to a buying group that includes former Philadelphia mayor and Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell.

However, among the all-to-familiar “newspaper for sale” news, nestled several floors up at PMN Headquarters are the three Project Liberty companies that are a major part of PMN CEO Greg Osberg’s marquee initiative to help modernize his media company. The plan: incubate technology startups and incorporate them into his company. And at least one of them, Cloudmine, is on an opposite trajectory of its landlord.

The mobile development framework and recent DreamIt grad has been steadily growing since its inception. The company has seen rapid growth in its platform, bringing total traffic to just under a million monthly API calls, up from tens of thousands in December. Additionally it has just hired two new employees and is weeks away from closing a round of funding.

We chatted with Brendan McCorkle this morning about his company’s future and what it’s like to be housed at a newspaper company.

Saskia Thompson: “I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek” says City of Philadelphia property data chief [Q&A]

It’s not about the data. It’s about the city.

Saskia Thompson

So says Saskia Thompson, who later this month will celebrate one year in her role as the executive director of the newly created City of Philadelphia Office of Property Data.

Her job is to square a dozen or more efforts and uses and agencies that track and rely on city address details — think permits from L&I and billing from utilities. The problem is that through the years, different city departments created their own processes and technologies, so whenever the U.S. Census comes around or the city wants to update its property tax assessments, there is a giant headache.

Oh, and then there is the ongoing issue of how many vacant properties are in the City of Philadelphia.

That will be in the hands of Thompson, a Detroit native (where she started her city government career) and University of Michigan graduate, who is serious and measured in conversations with Technically Philly, contrasting with her relative youth, punctuated by bright blonde hair.

Thompson, 42, who spent the better part of a decade working for Charlotte, N.C.’s city manager, is the steward of a project that she says began in earnest in 2009.

“There was an ad hoc group around the city that got together to say that the flow and the accuracy of property data is not what we’d like it to be,” Thompson said during a December interview in her small office in the Municipal Services Building across the street from City Hall. In 2010, six months after the ad hoc group led some departmental interviews and best practices research, the group gave recommendations to the mayor and managing director.

“The bottom line was that there was no real ownership of property data,” said Thompson, who lives in University City. “A number of agencies create it or use it or both, but we don’t have named data stewards for each property attribute that everyone in the city relies on.”

Thompson sought out a gig with the City of Philadelphia for as much as a year before the right gig opened up, she said, adding that after Detroit and her time in Charlotte, she wanted to work on the bigger stage of a large Northeast corridor metropolis.

She’s gotten her wish.

Housed in the Finance Department, which is also charged with the boondoggle of property tax assessment, Thompson first brought on a small additional staff last October and may do more. To do this right, she says, it will be another year before implementation of a solution begins.

Below, Thompson talks to Technically Philly more about her goals and why she’s not a data geek.

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Al Schmidt: new reform GOP city commissioner talks about changing Board of Elections [Q&A]

New City Commissioner Al Schmidt ran on a campaign of reform for the beleagured Board of Elections.

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”

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Stephen Tang, Science Center CEO, puts down the politics that slow innovation [Friday Q&A]

Steve Tang discusses his participation with the Innovation Advisory Board.

The University City Science Center will celebrate its 50th anniversary next year, but this month, Stephen Tang [Coverage] is marking his own anniversary: four years since being appointed President and CEO.

“I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is,” Tang said, followed by laughter, in a telephone interview last week.

It’s hard to imagine that his staff wouldn’t: the Science Center has an increasing connection to regional and national innovation under Tang’s leadership, and if its programming is as successful as it appears, a closer connection to the regional community that is impacted.

The Science Center has stepped up its game in helping to define University City as a vital technology corridor in Philadelphia. Tang is actively seeking $20 million to fund in perpetuity its QED proof-of-concept incubation model. The rebranded Breadboard program has become a celebrated and energetic arts and sciences intersection that grew out of a once stodgy art gallery space. NextFab Studio, a high-tech prototyping workshop created in partnership with the Center, is now expanding to South Philadelphia. And though it just launched in 2011 and the Center’s Quorum entrepreneur clubhouse has yet to be measured completely, the resources of support are there.

Earlier this month, Tang joined the Innovation Advisory Board — a national advisory committee to the United States Department of Commerce — in releasing a report [PDF] about the economic competitiveness of American innovation.

The board, comprised of 15 well-known innovators like Arthur Levinson, Apple’s new Chairman, and Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, had a notable local presence. Tang joined Natalia Olsen-Ortecho of Center City-based EG.

For those with an understanding of the issues confronting American innovation competitiveness, the report was certainly not groundbreaking in its overarching research:

• Federal investments in research, education and infrastructure were critical building blocks for American economic competitiveness, business expansion and job creation in the last century;
• Failures to properly invest in, and have comprehensive strategies for, those areas have eroded America’s competitive position; and,
• In a constrained budgetary environment, prioritizing support for these pillars are imperative for America’s economic future and provide a strong return on investment for the U.S. taxpayer.

The outcome of the report now rests in the hands of the Secretary of Commerce, who will put together a plan to confront these challenges. But in an election year, as Tang puts it, that process “is likely to be highly politicized.”

After the jump, we caught up with Tang to hear his thoughts on the report and on the fourth anniversary of his joining the Science Center as President and CEO.

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