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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Under Mauro, Langhorne’s Entertainment Games looks to social and mobile and away from retail channel

This summer, Langhorne’s Entertainment Games, Inc., a publicly traded company, announced that it had acquired Heyday Games, a social networking-focused gaming company.

Since June, we’ve watched as Entertainment Games has managed to quickly change its focus from the retail sales channel — essentially, getting gaming titles in the big box chains — to social networking focuses made famous by companies like Zynga, known for its FarmVille Facebook title.

This fall, the company launched Retro World, a series of Facebook games that hopes to tap into the increasing demographic of baby boomers landing on the social network. By acquiring rights to media that feature famous stars of the past, like Marilyn Monroe and Dick Clark, the company is hoping to create through Retro World a gaming experience that is a trip of nostalgia for the demographic.

So far, it seems to have been a success. In media alone, the company enjoyed a round of coverage from publications like VentureBeat, Inquirer, NBC10, CBS3, Games.com, Reuters, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others.

In the acquisition, Entertainment Games brought on much of Heyday’s management team, including Gene Mauro, who joined on as the company’s new President and Chief Operating Officer.

Mauro, who works from Connecticut, but bounces between that location and Entertainment Games’ locations in Los Angeles and its headquarters in Philadelphia, has been in the game business for close to two decades.

He says he had history with Entertainment Games as an outside director, a friend of the board since 2005. But because the retail sales channel has been in decline, he says, his task coming onboard to the company was to think about strategy and growth and how Entertainment Games could make an aggressive play in the emerging channels of social gaming and mobile.

Mauro says that adoption of Retro World has been strong, with over 30,000 active monthly users.

After the jump, we caught up with Mauro to hear about the acquisition, its new Facebook title Retro World, and the company’s new direction.

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Jim Querry: City of Philadelphia GIS is among country’s best, part of open gov future [Q&A]

Jim Querry at center, with the City of Philadelphia Office of Innovation and Technology GIS services group that he leads, including, starting at his right, GIS specialist Sarah Cordivano, GIS manager Brian Ivey, GIS application developer Adam Conner and system and database manager Julia Jia

In 1996, when Jim Querry started at the then called and still evolving Mayor’s Office of Information Services, there was a single Internet connection, an Apple dial-up tool at 1234 Market Street.

“That’s where you met to get on the web,” he said.

Fifteen years ago, Querry, who now leads the city’s geo-spatial information systems group that is responsible for mapping, tracking and evaluating city services, was joining an effort by some in the city to get ahead of what was already being billed as the digital revolution, a chance to bolster transparency and efficiency of government systems.

The Planning Commission, Querry said, led the charge to put the City of Philadelphia in a position to be setting the standard for what municipal use of GIS could yield.

To create the foundation on which the city’s crime analysis evaluations, trash collection routes and 311 complaint locations are determined, early city leaders chose platform tools from Calfornia-based Esri, now the global gold standard for GIS products. After early hesitance, Philadelphia became a leader in publishing its longitude and latitude-based map layers to state clearinghouse PASDA. By 2000, the city had won the prestigious Esri President’s Award, an honor again earned in 2008 — a two-time win that no other organization or level of government has yet duplicated.

Though other big cities have caught up in the GIS space in the last 10 years and the surging open data movement has captured public attention in other ways, Querry says the City of Philadelphia maintains some of the most dependable map layers around.

If accuracy is at the heart of making impact with data, then, Querry might argue, Philadelphia has a lot of reason to be a leader again.

Below, Querry speaks to Technically Philly, flanked by his young, four-person team, about the past, present and future of city GIS.

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A.J. Russo on winning at Photo Hunt, proposing through Megatouch [Friday Q&A]

The new ML-1 MegaTouch machines

AMI Entertainment Creative Director A.J. Russo

AMI Entertainment creative director A.J. Russo says he knows the secret to always winning at Photo Hunt.

“The best people cross their eyes and the two photos come together and it makes the differences pop,” he says. “I can’t do it, but I’ve seen people do it at our trade shows and they just go round after round.”

Perched on bars everywhere, the ubiquitous Megatouch touch screen game system has been entertaining pub-goers for over a decade, yet few know of the company’s Philadelphia origins. Best known for the aforementioned Photo Hunt game that has players scrambling to find all of the differences in two photos before the time expires, AMI Entertainment is based in Bristol and often uses Philadelphia as a guenea pig for its latest games and market research.

The company is working on its latest product line: a brand new machine that is best described as a combination of Megatouch and Xbox Live-like features, adding scoreboards, an in-game currency and social features. And with the company’s latest push on iOS, players are now able to practice at home with its free Photo Hunt iPad game.

“Before you go to the bar you can have a drink at home and play a little Megatouch and then go show off in front of your date,” says Russo.

We chatted with Russo, an AMI employee since 1999, about the next generation of touch screen games, how Philadelphia impacts its newest games and the time he helped a customer propose using one of his company’s games.

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Friday Q&A: Louis Toth of Comcast Ventures

Comcast Ventures was thinking about content long before its parent company acquired NBC Universal. The venture capital arm of the cable giant counts Flipboard, About.com, SB Nation (now Vox Media) and BlogHer among its dozen of investments. Now with NBC in tow, Comcast Ventures has a powerful channel for helping its portfolio companies.

“We have access with all of these resources to help entrepreneurs and tell them how the market is going to evolve and give them heads up on what’s next for Comcast,” says Toth.

Like its parent company, Comcast Ventures has offices in The 67th Ward, Silicon Valley and San Francisco along with its presence on the 55th floor of the Comcast Center in Center City.

After being locally active during the first tech bubble over ten years ago, the firm (which is, as Business Insider pointed out, run by a woman) is dipping into Philadelphia once again funding five DreamIt Ventures companies through the Minority Entrepreneur Accelerator Program and was one of the investors in Invite Media, the ad platform that exited to Google in June 2010.

We spoke to Managing Partner Louis Toth shortly after the firm closed a $6.1 million investment in Catalog Spree in November. After the jump, read why Comcast bothers investing when it could acquire, how his firm views Philadelphia and why it invests in the turbulent media industry.

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Dr. Chad Womack: A vision for tech-based local development and the STEM education needed to get there

Womack in 2007.

Updated, Dec. 13, 2011, 12:41: Changed company named from NanoTec to NanoVec; corrected Dr. Nunery’s name.

When Dr. Chad Womack moved his nanobiomolecular startup company NanoVec to Philadelphia in 2006, he was working from an office located in front of University City High School.

Though he was born and raised in Philadelphia, he didn’t know the history of the school. Long drawn to education, he began wondering how the school was impacted by science, technology, education and mathematics (STEM) initiatives.

That was how he came to chair a School District of Philadelphia task force run by then Superintendent Thomas Brady to help shape a vision for boosting STEM opportunities.

“The school district was not prepared to address STEM as an initiative that would provide an opportunity for students to have a pathway into college, majoring in STEM, and then into careers,” Womack says.

It wasn’t the first time that he has been involved in the issue.

In 1999, Womack followed a health fellowship at Harvard researching HIV/AIDs to a research position at the National Institutes of Health in Washington D.C. His interest in STEM led him to D.C. Public Schools, where a year later, Arlene Ackerman would resign as Superintendent.

So it was that Ackerman’s departure from the School District of Philadelphia this summer was familiar to him. He was actively working to encourage STEM initiatives in the District, when he wasn’t working with The America21 project.

“Ackerman didn’t want to be bothered with it, but this is very typical of leadership in public education. To them, STEM is this special thing for whiz kids,” he says.

Womack’s The America21 Project is focused on empowering urban centers and communities through STEM education and workforce development, high-growth entrepreneurship and access to capital. With his new venture, he’s still actively engaging the District around STEM priorities.

After the jump, we caught up with Womack about the state of STEM education in Philadelphia.

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Technology often a vehicle for fraud, waste, mismanagement: City Controller Alan Butkovitz [Q&A]

City Controller Alan Butkovitz and his office are good at finding the lede.

The elected official charged with auditing city government and council spending continues to make news by highlighting the most egregious examples of waste, fraud and mismanagement.

Like yesterday’s announcement that half a billion dollars of taxpayer money is being managed by outdated, unsupported technology from 1996 in the city’s procurement department. Or an October audit that showed, among  other shortcomings in the city’s often criticized Sheriff’s office, that its less-than-stellar website had apparently cost $2.9 million over five years. (Yesterday, a sheriff’s employee was charged with a scam that bilked the city out of $400,000, ahead of state Rep. Jewell Williams taking office in January.)

In his second term since first being elected to the position in 2005 following a 15 year tenure in the state House of Representatives, Butkovitz, 59, seems to enjoy the gig. He is serious and detailed, eager to discuss the 400-page audit report on the Sheriff’s office one recent November afternoon, with a tuft of his gray hair falling toward his cheek in a sunny corner office of the Municipal Services Building in Center City.

Butkovitz, a resident of Castor Gardens in the Northeast,, has not been without his critics. In his 2009 Controller campaign against a younger, more progressive tax advocate, Brett Mandel portrayed Butkovitz as a machine politician who focused less on auditing each city agency as the City Home Rule Charter [PDF] requires and more on bigger, headline-grabbing and politically-strategic investigations.

Still, with increasing frequency, Butkovitz’s claims of waste, fraud and mismanagement at the city level involve technology: IT infrastructure, agency software and the shortcomings of it all.

Below, Technically Philly talks tech, taxes and hackathons with the West Philly native and graduate of Overbrook High School and Temple University.

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Brigitte Daniel, Wilco Electronic Systems: executive vice president of black-owned cable operator talks about digital divide, Comcast [Q&A]

Will Daniel had two babies in 1977.

One was launching Wilco Electronic Systems, the now Fort Washington-based, black-owned cable operator that focuses on serving low income Philadelphians. The other, of course, was his daughter Brigitte Daniel.

Though Will remains president and chairman of the company, it’s been Brigitte, 34, officially the company’s executive vice president, who has taken up much of the company’s vision and regulatory affairs — heavy lifting in the regulation-crazed cable industry. Recently named to an FCC committee on digital diversity, Daniel is hungrily taking on the digital divide and couching that as a fundamental of the company’s future.

Since 2001, Wilco, which employs about 45 people, has been the primary cable and internet provider for Philadelphia Housing Authority projects, while it continues to offer mainstream offerings at more affordable costs for low income Philadelphians in other ways. Brigitte was one of the driving forces in bringing together the Freedom Rings partnership that won federal broadband stimulus funding to trial ways at increasing broadband access and awareness in poorer communities.

“Wilco helped frame the conversation,” Brigitte said. “The city put together the [new computer] centers, we did the infrastructure. It was important to have the partnership. It isn’t easy to get everyone to play together in the sandbox.”

Brigitte seems the perfect heir for her father’s business, perhaps even more so when she mentions she hadn’t planned on ever joining the company while growing up in Abington. An alumnus of Spellman College and Georgetown’s law school, she found herself gravitating to the impact telecom has on communities while in school. After graduating from Georgetown in 2002, she did policy work for USAID in Ghana, West Africa, where mobile technology conversations were already stirring. She was hooked.

Now living in Fairmount, Brigitte is currently on leave from her role in the day-to-day management of Wilco, as she serves in the prestigious Eisenhower Fellowship program. Traveling to learn about how the digital divide is being handled in south Asia, Daniel landed in New Delhi in late October, traveled elsewhere in India, including Hyderabad, then Sri Lanka, Singapore and will move on to Malaysia before returning in mid December. (See her blog on her travels here.)

In a phone call from Mumbai earlier this month, Daniel talked to Technically Philly about Wilco’s relationship with Comcast, what’s the future of Freedom Rings and more.

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