Mason and Megan Wendell: from indie record execs to husband-wife branding and design Drupal team

Seems like ditching the record label for the branding and design firm was the right way to go.

Mason and Megan Wendell, the husband-wife team behind Mount Airy-based Canary Promotion + Design, met at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

“We started our own record label (Solarmanite Records) to release our own music and some other artists, and more and more bands started coming to us for advice on everything from how to publicize a release to how to get a barcode,” says Megan, 35, who handles the marketing side of the firm.

So they started a business doing just that outside of New York City, where she was working for a dotcom and Mason was handling Web work on Wall Street. By early 2002, the duo moved to Philadelphia and found a niche in the region’s arts and culture community.

Now they have a heavy hand in the look and feel of the Philly arts scene and open source content management system Drupal is their tool of choice.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Adam Dotson from SeventySix Capital

Adam Dotson

Technically Philly would like to begin with an apology.

In Tuesday’s VC Roundup, we speculated that ETF Ventures chose their new name based on their proximity. Turns out, the opposite was true.

“The reason we wrote it out (as SeventySix instead of 76), actually, was to not be associated with the highway,” says Associate Adam Dotson.

When the VC firm formally known as Eastern Technology Fund changed its name this week, it was mostly due to the rise in popularity of exchange traded funds, a sort of mutual fund for alternative investments. The resulting confusion between ETF the firm and ETF the investment vehicle prompted the group to rebrand themselves as SeventySix Capital: an homage to what Dotson calls the “entrepreneurial spirit of our founding fathers.”

The company also wanted to have a clearer connection to Philadelphia.

Below, we ask Doston for the rejected names as well as the difference between Philly startups and 67th Ward or D.C. startups.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Jason Tocci on his Geek Cultures dissertation

The typical breakdown of nerds and geeks runs on a taxonomy of their interests, says Dr. Jason Tocci, who received his Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication last year, studying the often stereotypical cultural identities.

There’s your manga-fanboys, comic book readers, computer geeks, video game nerds, and so forth.

“But the more I was researching, what I found interesting was how much these groups overlap. The more interesting distinction I was seeing was between stereotypes and how much people internalize them,” Tocci says.

So instead, when Tocci sat down to pen his 400-page dissertation on geek cultures, he decided on a different system of categorization, based on themes in geek culture: the geek as a social misfit; the geek as a genius; the geek as a fan; and the geek as chic.

Tocci, who’s now shopping his research to academic publishers—and who recently moved to Boston to teach at small women’s liberal arts school Pine Manor College—has become an expert studying the culture, which, as readers of this site likely have noticed, is changing rapidly from a once shunned subculture to one of increasing mainstream popularity.

We talked with Tocci earlier this week to get the low-down on the changing landscape and the state of geek cultures in 2010, after the jump.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Steve Barsh, CEO of Packlate.com

Update: Minor copy edits. Changed logo.

As reported in this week’s Venture Capital Roundup, Steve Barsh has had a busy week.

The DreamIt Ventures managing partner got his tons of national press for his latest startup, Packlate.com, from TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The company, based in University City (though with plans to move to West Conshohocken) aims to be a last-minute vacation booking service and has received funding from ETF Ventures and First Round Capital.

“It’s not a rocket ship yet, but it is kind of jiggling on the launchpad,” says Barsh.

Barsh says the idea has been brewing for years as he mentored young entrepreneurs at DreamIt while maintaining vacation properties in Utah.

“You know the saying ‘Those who do, do. And those who don’t, teach? I like to do both,” he says.

Currently he says he is still dedicating ten percent of his time to DreamIt but says he wants to focus most of his efforts on his new startup. We spoke with Barsh about Packlate’s future, how DreamIt can survive with preoccupied management and when we’ll be able to book a Jersey Shore vacation with Packlate.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Councilman Bill Green talks technology and Philly Charter

Early this week, Councilman Bill Green and five members of City Council introduced legislation that would change Philadelphia’s Charter to include a permanent Chief Information Officer.

As we reported, the bill would continue consolidation of the city’s Information Technology resources and it would require that the CIO develop annually a 5-year technology strategy, among other changes.

We spoke with Green on Monday to put into perspective the reason for the legislation—and whether or not the bill represents concern for current Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank’s leadership. Green’s answers, after the jump.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Keith McGinnis on Philadelphia Weekly’s free Happy Hour Guide app

No one is suggesting that iPhone applications are going to save legacy media. But the conversation so often turns to profitability on mobile platforms, that it may be a surprise there are so  few truly local products from Philadelphia media.

NBC10 and 6ABC have free apps developed with the help of their national parents. Shopiks offers Philly coupons, and there’s the popular Philadelphia Concert Hub.

A screenshot of the app's interface. Click to enlarge.

“The rest are tour guides, canned content, RSS readers of Philly feeds or some sort of national content that is supposed to relate to our area,” says Keith McGinnis, who recently left a role heading up IT for Review Publishing, whose flagship brand is Philadelphia Weekly.

In December, PW likely made the region’s strongest big media play into mobile by launching a McGinnis-led Philly Happy Hour Guide application for the iPhone and iPod touch. The application offers users the chance to search and find the best happy hour deals at specific locations, specific bars, specific neighborhoods or wherever is nearest. There are options for calling a cab, getting directions and tracking just what’s your favorite.

Last month, the app became free to use, after a paid trial version, and so now, McGinnis says, PW has an excellent opportunity to test the waters of localized mobile profitability, ahead of anyone else in Philadelphia (No particular provision is being made for the few hundred who paid $1 for the app, McGinnis says, “I figure you saved $1 on your first drink special.”)

McGinnis is now joining the staff of Northern Liberties Web development firm o3world, but the Happy Hour Guide is still close enough to his heart that he took the time to chat with Technically Philly about how the app plans on making money, how it got made and what it means for PW’s always active competition with crosstown rival CityPaper.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Justin Premick of AWeber can beat you in Call of Duty

Justin Premick of AWeber.

Technically Philly first met Justin Premick of AWeber in December at our first meetup at Nodding Head over a pint of Monkey Knife Fight.

Since then, we’ve had out eye on the growing email marketing company.

The privately held company was founded in August 1998 by Tom Kulzer. Kulzer, a salesman with a programming background, wanted to automate following up with clients by email and began coding software. After a few years, he left his job and bootstrapped AWeber.

The company has since been based at two other local locations before settling on its new digs in Huntington Valley with plans to continue growing.

AWeber’s new office is five times larger than their last (by the way, they’re hiring) and the company is looking to expand on its existing 75,000+ customer base

We talked with Premick about what exactly the company does, why they decided to lay down roots in Huntington Valley and AWeber’s sweet setup for pwning n00bz.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Ryan Davis, Philly.com President

Updated: colleague’s name @ 1:47 p.m. 1/8/10

He may not live in Philadelphia quite yet, but Philly.com President Ryan Davis says he’s “a southeast Pennsylvanian at heart.”

Ryan Davis

Of course, in the interest of disclosure, it should be made clear that Davis, who was put in charge of Philadelphia’s most visited Web site in October, lives in New York City, a rival if there ever was one.

The native of Allentown takes a daily train trip to Center City but says he, his wife and their new baby daughter — who he says has delayed the move — will be relocated to the region in the coming months.

If you’d think his location would keep Davis from the gig, the age of this 32-year-old might, too, seem like an obstacle. Yet there at the Market Street Philly.com headquarters he is, and, like every where else he’s gone professionally, he’s gotten there quickly.

Outside of college, Davis has never spent as much as three years with a single organization during his precipitous rise from aspiring journalist to newspaper dot com chief executive.

After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2000, Davis spent 29 months reporting with the St. Petersburg Times and then two years and nine months at the Baltimore Sun. He spent two years in Manhattan with executive management consulting firm McKinsey before taking the director of strategic operations position with Philly.com in February. Nine months later, he was named president of the 70-person staff.

That rise, he says, has put him where he wants to be when he wants to be there.

“It’s an exciting time when a lot of people are trying to figure out what local means on the Internet,” he says.

Below, Davis explains living in New York, lays out his priorities for improving on 72 million monthly page views and talks about the coming explosion of local on the Web.

Read more

Friday Q&A: catching up with Steve Welch, candidate for congress.

If you live in Pennsylvania’s sixth district, Steve Welch wants to have a word with you.

As reported by Technically Philly, The Mitos Group founder and managing partner of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures declared his candidacy as a Republican for Congress this summer and has since been in full-fledged campaign mode trying to build a network of volunteers in his gerrymandered district that stretches from the border of Philadelphia to Reading.

“We’re really focusing on meet and greets in diners and in people’s homes. Often it’s only five to ten people,” Welch says.

The campaign is Welch’s first and it has him relying on the entrepreneurial community of the region while simultaneously trying to build a network of supporters from scratch. So far, he has four full-time staffers (including current representative Jim Gerlach’s former chief of staff Guy Ciarrocchi) and a new Phoenixville office.

“When I set off on this course, I said to my wife: ‘This is me starting another business’,” he says.

Currently, there are four other candidates all ramping up for a May 18th Republican primary. We caught up with Welch to ask him how his life has changed since declaring his candidacy, his response to being snubbed by his competition and, if he won, would he follow in the footsteps of former Delaware Senator Joe Biden and take Amtrak down to the capital.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Pennsylvania Bio President Mickey Flynn

Mickey Flynn wants to talk about entrepreneurship.

In an industry and a region dominated by major players and corporate standbys, the president of Pennsylvania Bio, a statewide trade association for the biosciences with headquarters in Malvern, seems to brighten when startup talk comes to the fore.

He’s gone that route himself. Before taking the chief seat with PA Bio four years ago, Flynn, 68, grew tiny Puresyn, which develops purification services for gene-based drugs and vaccines, from three employees to 25.

But he’s no outsider to PA Bio, rather, he’s a steady hand in the region’s bioscience scene. He was a founding board chairman of the group 20 years ago and, all told, he has just shy of four decades in the industry.

Now, the resident of Downingtown is recovering from his group’s Biotech 2009 Symposium, which drew last month to the Convention Center more than 900 attendees, better than double what it did when he first became president and the largest in its nine years of existence.

Below, Flynn gives us a recap of the conference, handicaps the region’s bioscience-entrepreneurship ecosystem and explains why Mickey isn’t really his name but you ought not call him anything else.

Read more