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.

Satwik

As always, edited for length and clarity.

What’s the coolest thing you guys are working on since we last spoke?

The most exciting thing were seeing is the trend of “consumer-ation of the enterprise.” Were starting to build in the ability to get more social, use cloud deployments and see more mobile use cases. We’re taking the most exciting things happening in the consumer technology world and applying them to the enterprise with NextDocs and life sciences.

Being in Philly we hear all of the things happening in the Bay Area and in New York City, and if you read Technically Philly, the things happening in Philly. A lot of that is happening in the consumer space, but it’s just as exciting in the enterprise.

You spent a lot of time in Boston working for IBM but you recently moved to Philly. How do they compare other than their struggling baseball teams?

The baseball teams track pretty well together in the past 10 years. Philadelphia is a really close-knit community that believes that a rising tide floats all boats. I’ve reached out to local engineering VP’s and every one has been willing to talk to me about recruiting, tech, events … and there’s no competition. In fact, I got this job [at NextDocs] due to a referral from someone at another company.

The juxtaposition with the growing tech community and the local established life sciences community allows engineers to have unique impact on the world, which is really about getting medicine and medical devices to patients. I agree with Phil Moyer’s blog post about commercialization. Philadelphia is the place to come to if you’d like to make an impact on the world.

Whats next for the company?

We’re moving to Conshohoken from King of Prussia and we intend to make it the best place to work in software in Philadelphia. We’re looking to double the size of the company [from 126 employees].

We’re building a space that will use the latest technology to allow engineers to be productive and fun. It’s got floor to ceiling windows looking over the river.

In Philadelphia, we have a lot of one-, two-, 10-person companies but we want to establish how a larger company can thrive in the Philadelphia area. People will be attracted to move to Philadelphia because of this. We’ve already recruited from Texas, New York, Connecticut, St. Louis and North Carolina.

Will you have anything quirky at the office like a slide?

Yeah, but you’ll have to apply to work here to see what we have in store.

If you’re going to go through the trouble of moving, why not move to the city?

The big reason we moved to Conshohocken is because people can take the train from the parking lot of our office. We wanted it to be accessable to people who are in the suburbs and in the city. I’m a believer in that you want to hire people for their entire career, we wanted to pick a location that people could evolve with [if they start a family and eventually move to the suburbs]. It’s the perfect location. It gives you the best of both words.

That’s not to say we won’t consider doing things in the city. We’ve had discussions on co-ops or hackathons inside the city. We’re open to talking about that.

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.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

We get the feeling that Philadelphia has a growing e-commerce community. Are we crazy?

Your perception is dead on. Luckily, a lot of what’s going on I get to be involved in because a lot of the growth is with our customers, many of whom who are in Philadelphia like Urban Outfitters, QVC, Pet Food Direct, GSI commerce, Rue La La and Kynetic. I can’t think of a place with more e-commerce other than San Fransisco.

The other thing we noticed is the high number of companies in Philadelphia supporting e-commerce.

I think so, what’s nice here is that there’s a nice mix of e-commerce companies and service providers. We work with brands like Revzilla and get such great feedback on our product. That feedback is much easier to get when you can get together in a room.

How often do you guys get together?

Pretty often, actually. I see them on a regular basis. This week though, is a bit of an outlier, I will be face-to-face with Urban Outfitters, GSI Commerce and QVC.

So we’re not crazy to think Philly is growing?

Not only are you not crazy, I think there’s a specialty that’s emerged among Philadelphia startups. While it’s not the only thing they are doing, there’s a lot of online marketing and e-commerce Philly startups.

Maybe that’s because Philadelphia seems to be much more conducive to B2B companies than B2c.

You see specialties in lots of markets. New York is ad tech, for example. It’s a little early to say, but I think its fair to say we have the early signs of an e-commerce specialty. An advantage we have here in Philly is that we have a lot of amazing retailers here with decades long history and experience and that gives us an opportunity to create way better products because we can sit with people who live those problems every day.

Lets talk Monetate. Last time we visited there was a lot of empty desks. What’s the office look these days?

Well, there’s a lot less empty desks. We’re about 90 people. We almost tripled revenue last year, and we actually handled more pageviews than Twitter or ESPN last holiday season. We’ve really gotten to an amazing scale, we have a lot data to play with. On Black Friday last year, 20 percent of all e-commerce data went throughout the Monetate platform.

What’s your biggest challenge?

Definitely finding the right people. Recruiting is never done.

Do you have the ambition of selling Monetate?

You have to position yourself to make the right decisions for your business. If you’re focused on trying to flip a company, you’re going to make the wrong choices. We are building this to be a big company, as if we are going to become a public company. We’re optimized for building a large successful company that doesn’t distract ourselves with another kind of a target.

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.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

What do you do for Bracket?

I have been there nine years and there have had a lot of roles in that time. There are now 500 employees at Bracket. There were only 10 employees nine years ago. The work I do now is focused on scientific tools that support R&D, doing sales and marketing and product development.

What I do now is nothing like what I started.

What were you doing nine years ago?

I came to start in e-learning, creating electronic and multimedia tools to help people learn. We wanted to find ways to train clinicians and nurses to make sure they were evaluating patients appropriately, and to know they were doing R&D actively and effectively.

But before that you developed a reputation for launching development firm Fahrenheit 450. Tell us about that.

It was a milestone. I was still an undergrad, the genesis came in 1995 while at Temple [University]. I launched Fahreinheit 450 with another partner [named Michael Martin].

We had just finished a year internship with the Chronicle of Higher Education, and we were hired as interns to formally create a web presence for the Chronicle. They were selling data and IT services almost 10 years earlier, almost like Bloomberg. It was crude but wildly popular, and they wanted to convert that to the web. That was what everyone was talking about then, transitioning models online.

We built a tool for higher ed to access that data, and we built something modest, though ahead of its time, and I learned a whole lot about programming, and I started doing a lot of automation. I learned PERL on that project. [laughs].

And that was the start?

A friend of mine, who became my partner with Fahrenheit 450, and I got a few projects to transfer work onto the web, and we recognized this could be a paying gig. So we turned this into a lot of multimedia and interactive things.

For example [in 1995], we built a virtual reality tour of a publishing plant for a yearbook publisher — the tours were the most popular ask, but they couldn’t accommodate everyone. It was miserable to make but it was really cool, using Qucktime 3D and other tools, and once we were able to get through the raw materials, you could walk through the plant and see 3D objects and models and that led to one project to another and to another.

Really new ideas then.

How did the company develop its reputation?

We were forced to adapt. HTML as a commodity rapidly lost its value.

When we started, I was getting paid thousands of dollars to make HTML. By the time I relocated to San Francisco in 1997, that was a $20 an hour job. The other things that we had done — the automating, the authoring, PERL, we started creating databases to manage it all — was the stuff that was our niche, this database publishing.

…That was our reputation and that was our business.

We hear there are some very high profile projects you worked on.

The high profile stuff, well, most of it we were never supposed to market it, so I can’t say too many names, but I can describe the projects broadly.

OK, what are some of the biggest projects Fahrenheit 450 took on?

We did a really huge project for a [very well known] large, international Church network. They create an enormous amount of literature, and we built something that allowed them to suck up content they created in other programs and create a pamphlet or newspaper or magazine or brochure from it. In 1997, the only other systems that allowed that were things like mainframes that ran on archaic hardware that was impossible to get in and out of.

We also did work for a well known West Coast university… to do something similar, that had an interface to add content or could take stuff  from Microsoft Word, which was still a pretty novel thing then, and have that parsed and placed automatically.

Perhaps most prominently, you did some early web work for Apple, correct?

We had a connection at Apple, and Apple at the time was evangelizing their technologies, trying to recoup some market share.

They had an agreement with a few companies that was tied to a big promotion where when James Bond started driving a BMW, and Apple would hire us to go do 3D models of these cars that would be available on the web. And 3D tours of cars were just not available anywhere else online then.

There were a couple other situations like that, where Apple knew we could do these things and use their tools, and they would find a third-party, a really big company, that they wanted to use their tools, and say we used Quicktime 3D to do this cool project. We had some really amazing experiences that way.

…We also did large projects for folks like Warner Brothers, who were evangelists about this innovation and so you can mention their name, but there are others, like a well-known European car maker that did cool work too but wanted it private [who did the work].

And this was all new even in the late 1990s?

These systems did exist already. Most newspapers used these big systems for millions and millions of dollars, but it required a whole army of staff. It was all very rigid and no customization. Anyone who used them despised them, particularity writers, and we were able to come in there to find easier, cheaper, more flexible options at a time when a lot of people just didn’t know that was possible.

For our second and third and fourth paying gigs, I was still an undergrad, and I ended up leaving Temple because I had so much paying work. … I never went back [to Temple]. My mother still hasn’t forgiven me I was 9 credits short.

But you felt you had to leave Philadelphia for San Francisco. Why?

At the end of 1996, that was where all the customers were, so we had to go to San Francisco if we wanted to do this seriously.

There were some cool things happening in New York and anything cool happening in Philly was going to New York. But the big interest was happening in San Francisco.

So why come back to Philly? You were from Pittsburgh.

We did it for a few years, and it was a lot of fun, but it was tiring and really hard and my coming back coincided with the end of a relationship.

In roughly 2000, I came back to Philly and started a record label and other projects, took a job with Bluestone for e-learning and multimedia learning.

Bluestone was an excellent company that got bought by HP [in October 2000] before disappearing. It was one of the really high-profile internet successes of Philadelphia, started in Mount Laurel by a few guys, including Mel Baiada, who came from places like RCA and defense contractors in South Jersey. They went public on their own in 1999 or so before I was there and it was a real high-profile company.

So there were some things starting to happen in Philly, and this was were my friends and my network really was from college. There was a feeling that it was a bubble by then, particularly in the minds of the smarter ones and particularly in San Francisco, and then by 2001 it was bursting, so I made out alright.

Before we let you go, we hear you have a great story about pushing your college newspaper to go online-only in the mid-1990s.

I did a lot of internships and learning out of the classroom and took time off, so I had a lot of perspective.

I started in 1991 and was studying film, but was always around newspapers. My mother ran a little tiny newspaper in Pittsburgh, where I grew up, that eventually got bought by Gannett, and so I loved visiting the work she did.

I did 50/50 film and journalism. That led me to the internship with the Chronicle, and that internship had me learn a lot, and when I came back I was managing editor of The Temple News in fall 1995. We were expected to pay for the printing entirely from ad revenue, and printing costs were skyrocketing, and it was the height of the mid-1990s print scare, and the student-run paper people and the ad sales people were undergrads and couldn’t do it.

The [now defunct] Northeast News Gleaner published the paper then and, for a while, were doing it for free because we couldn’t pay our bill, but it had to stop. We were trying to make print work — we were daily at that point — and we went to our faculty adviser to ask for more money, and they said you’ll have to close down the paper.

Instead, we decided to go on the web, and we launched in spring 1996 as online-only, no print at all. The Inquirer and Editor & Publisher and Wired and the New York Times were all running stories about our transition, being this trend piece of the future.

In the beginning of spring 1996, we just couldn’t afford to print, it was that simple. By the end of that semester of 1996, we launched as a weekly print product, but, yes, the Temple college newspaper was probably one of the earliest online-only publications.

We used to run this ridiculous house ad, where on the front page of the paper we’d push to the website, and on the back of the paper, we would would literally run a screen capture of the home page, showing what content people were missing.

…I guess things have changed.

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.

Nancy Hanrahan

As someone who has pretty much no experience in healthcare, nursing and the world of academia, can you explain this to me like I’m five?

This event grew out of the university’s decision to make this “The Year of the Game.”  Nurses are at the bedside 24/7, they’re listening and knowing what makes people better more than anyone. I proposed doing something like Health 2.0 (ed note: sort of like a health X-prize). We don’t have that kind of scale but we do have some pretty incredible resources.

Here, everyone kind of lives in their own school so we’ve been working with the engineering school to bring together very creative smart nurses with these very creative and smart engineers to come up with some projects.

What are the incentives for the students to participate?

These students were just waiting for something like this.

Can you give us an example of the games people are making?

When you hear in the news about soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan, there’s a lot of distressing information about how they are integrating into society. One of our games is “Mission Reintegration” that uses dice and cards that helps educate the solider on the ramifications of reintroducing themselves to their old lives.

The idea is that while they re deployed they’d use this as a tool to begin to look at the issues they are going to face, but also keep stay connected to their community and friend by playing the game with their fellow soldiers.

This other game was designed by nursing students only, in this one they are testing the game out in juvenile dentition centers and they made a game called “Body Wars.” The hope is that the adolescent makes the connection between drugs, food and sex and the effects on their body. It’s kind of like “Operation.” They tried the game with the group, and the adolescents got very competitive. They loved it.

Whats the hope for an events like this? What do you hope to accomplish?

You don’t hear much about what nurses do. The idea that these nurses are bonding with other students with different skills has a created a phenomena here. We hope to build on it.

Below, a TED talk about how gaming can make a better world.

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.


How has your transition to Council been?

From the start it’s been very demanding. I’m a Councilperson-at-Large, so I cover the whole city. The transition took a little longer this year because we had six new councilpeople coming in, as opposed to the usual two or three. We come in at a difficult time: With Catholic schools in the region looking at being closed, the announcement of closings of other public schools, and much more, it’s pretty challenging.

You were a member of Rendell’s mayoral transition team in 1991. What was that Philadelphia like compared to today? What stands out to you as changed?

The thing that stands out to me that’s positive is that there has been a homegrown change. In some cases, it is brought by people who are very interested in innovation, creativity, technology, who are very interested in transforming Philadelphia into a better city. On the negative side, the job situation is worse for many of the average people living in neighborhoods. The educational system is very strained. While there’s an ongoing effort to make corrections, it has been very challenging. There is a greater divide between those who have opportunities and those who don’t.

How did you become interested in politics?

My father was a pastor who came from a very difficult place: occupied Korea. He came to Philadelphia in 1952 and started his church in 1953. He ended up in Southwest Philadelphia when there was a lot of issues, including racial strife. He dealt with immigrants and all the problems of people who don’t speak the language or understand the culture in a time when society was more discriminatory.

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. Eventually as I was able to get an education and become a professional and serve on different boards, there was always the question: ‘couldn’t we do something a little better’?

You helped create and now chair the Council’s Committee on Global Opportunities and the Creative/Innovative Economy. What are the priorities?

We have to of course be aware of the fact that the city needs revenues. In our current situation, we have to talk about growing the pie more than regulating or doing other things with it. Looking at Philadelphia’s history and where we’ve ended up, we have to look at where our growth is in our region and the world to find out what we could do. What is unique about Philadelphia, and to whom is Philadelphia attractive?

I’m very much focused on making Philadelphia a more global city with a section of the city physically that is accommodating for the type of people that we want: a 24-hour section of our city. We can look at other cities that have turned the entire city into a 24-hour ecosystem and why that was successful. Creative is a wonderful thing: it has self-esteem and self-worth attached to it, which are extremely important especially in declining neighborhoods where people have lost a sense of self-worth. In the case of innovation, the city’s challenge is to really attract and retain all of these innovative people.

We have to translate that vision not so much to your readers but to people who don’t have access to it in neighborhoods. We need these people, and this is an energy that will benefit these people and ultimately the jobs.

We’ve seen a noticeable increase in and action around Open Data in Philadelphia. What is your commitment to open government? What needs to get done?

Greater participation means greater opportunity for success. If we have a more accessible government, you can do all the things you need to do, at any time. It makes government more convenient. But beyond that, if it’s more transparent, then people are more aware and are able to add their opinions, experience and other things.

What will you do tomorrow to improve Open Data initiatives?

There was a bill introduced yesterday [Ed. note: by Councilman Bill Green] that ultimately will have to do with time table and processes of the city’s IT, so that it can make the information within City Hall available for scrutiny.

In addition to that, we can also legislate that data that is user friendly in the sense that people don’t necessarily want to look at a one-inch thick report from a certain department of government. They still want to know how many kids are in school, what’s the budget, how much money goes to classroom education. We need to allow people to participate and understand what government is or is not doing.

Part of your Honest Government platform is to modernize the tools used by civil servants. What are you hoping to achieve there?

I think we have to improve the quality of human interaction in the city, and that’s something that people want to see done. When we talk about honest and transparent government, that means someone who opens a drawer, pulls out a manilla file folder, and says ‘I’m happy to provide that for you’. Access to information and opportunities comes not on the computer right now. We’re dealing with the bureaucratic issues of internal policies, how things are recorded, what’s available.

How do you hope to make Philadelphia more business-friendly?

We probably need to at least take a look at our overall tax strategy. Some taxes are too low, others are too high, some are counter-productive. In this shrinking world, we need to hear form people who we want to be here. We want to make the city business-friendly. If you are a business person, in terms of your desire to take a risk in the city, employ people in the city, pay rent, expand, increase holdings, we want to make sure that this is a city you want to be in.

How would you like to see Philadelphia’s technology get involved with politics and policy?

Communicate. I will say that you’re doing exactly what is the answer to this question. Someone has to communicate that government is important. Part of that depends on people involved in this sector. Understanding what we’re trying to do and finding ways to add opinion or be helpful or critical. I am trying to get a sense of what’s going on, meet with lots of entrepreneurial groups, businesses, developers and investors. We need to have the input and buy-in of the people.

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.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

(L to R) – Greg Hansell (VP of Product Development), MarySue Hansell (President/COO), and Ray Hansell (CEO) of ToonUps provides a check to Joel Worrall (Vice President) and Matt Shandera (Director of Marketing) at CURE

How’d this come about?

Ray: We funded and founded it mostly using money we received from the public offering of [RMH Teleservices] a company we built in the 1990s. It was wireless services and it was a big home run. All local, too. We used the proceeds to do digital content in the beginning of the decade. Over the last 10 years we were really curious about Facebook, especially social games like “A Better World.”

Greg: We wanted to take those mechanics that people love from games like Farmville and instead of encouraging time-wasting have them to do good.

Is the company sustainable? Is the 15 person staff all fueled through the revenue from the game?

Ray: That’s the anticipation. It’s all basically funded out-of-pocket by MarySue and I. We are seeking capital to help.

How has Wayne been as a place to develop games?

Ray: In terms of getting animation talent, its pretty prevalent in the area. Some of the technical resources we had to bring in some people from outside of town.

Greg: Philly is good with systems and back-end stuff but not as many Flash and ActionScript developers with game experience.

Ray: We built a successful company before on the Main Line, there were other one’s like us then in the area but most were in the Midwest. With Facebook games, most are in Silicon Valley. But the do-good and “cause gaming” aspect? You could plop that anywhere.

A lot of people have told us that Philly has a lot of social entrepreneurship or “triple bottom line” resources. Do you agree?

Ray: I think that’s true. The roots of the “City of Brotherly Love” and the Quaker movement provide that backdrop. This city takes care of its own really well. We’ve found that local individual investors resonate with the mission.

Greg: The Positivity Center is actually run out of Penn so Philly is really the center of positivity in the world.

The cynic in me thinks “What does me giving someone a heart in a video game have to do with an actual good deed?”

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

Greg: There are other area of the game where players report good deeds that they’ve done in the real world to earn digital rewards as well.

What’s the next step for ToonUps?

Ray: We have a lot of flushing out to do, we need to propel this thing toward higher activity to make it self-sufficient. We’ll also be working on the mobile app. Sort of like a Foursquare app for do-gooders.

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.

Cloudmine Co-Founder Brendan McCorkle

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Last time we chatted, you were about to enter DreamIt Ventures. What has changed since graduating? 

We got the Darwinian kick out into the wild, but we didn’t stay out for long. After DreamIt we were back to our nomadic coffee shop ways for the holidays. It’s surreal being here [at Project Liberty], the footprint of the space is identical to DreamIt but there’s three companies here instead of 15. A lot of us are fundraising so were not even all here all the time. DreamIt will probably kill me for saying this, but DreamIt feels a little more like camp and this feels a little more real.

What has the interaction been like with PMN?

It’s been interesting working with PMN on their backend needs. We’re guinea pigs, so the Project Liberty thing is just starting out and the Inquirer is trying to reinvent themselves. I really respect when big companies do that.

We’ve been interacting with their developers to get them to use our libraries. They are a big organization so it’s moving at a different speed than we’re used to, but that’s good practice. Not everyone can go a million miles an hour for 14 hours a day like a startup.

According to your about page, you’ve hired two people.

We have hired two people: Derek Mansen and Steve Berlan. They started in the past two weeks, so that’s pretty exciting. We are considering hiring a third.

So what’s growth look like for you guys?

It’s been good, we’re still getting of couple users a day, so that’s what’s nice about a Web 2.0 business. We have some sort of mindshare and people are mentioning us, so there’s a trickle of people coming to check us out. On the slower side, the larger customers have a sales cycle that is a glacial pace.

And you’re raising money? Last time we chatted you talked about how that was an all-consuming process.

It’s still all-consuming, I don’t think it ever ends. We do have a term sheet and we are soft-circled above the match for Ben Franklin Technology Partners (ed. note: BFTP requires companies to match its funding before investing). We’re trying to close by the end of the month. It’s tough finding a lead investor, but once you have a lead the dynamics change. You meet them at a networking event and you get an intro, then you see them again, then you come back and then we talk.

Usually 49 out of 50 say no, but once you get one yes to lead you can go back to those other 49. It isn’t just “I like you and your market, here you go.”

Whats next for Cloudmine? I know you guys have to leave the Project Liberty space when the company moves to its new offices on June 1st.

Well, there are provisions to extend our time here but we’ll look into that next month. We have guys who are we obligated to pay now. The bottom line is that we want a little more bandwidth so the three co-founders (McCorkle, Ilya Braude and Marc Weil) can with now turn our attention to sales growth while still working on the platform.

We’re also doing global sponsorship of Startup Weekend and other hackathons. Our customers are developers so we have to go everywhere where they are. We’re about to celebrate 1,000 users. We’ve done a good job at being aggressive but we want to be more aggressive and go to hackathons not just in New York, Baltimore and Philly but also in places like in Florida, London and Detroit. It’s a full court press on engineers.

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.

Edited, as always, for length and clarity.

Let’s start by defining what success is for this project.

Success is a couple of things.

It will have named data stewards for each piece of data and a clear process for tracking and maintaining changes. We don’t have that now. We have people working very hard every day to get this right, but it’s pretty much on an ad hoc basis. We need a much more formalized process.

[Secondly,] the ultimate success is that we know our data is trustworthy, transparent, easily accessible and it’s very customer friendly. I am a huge fan that government should be transparent and our data should be public, but we need to be on the forefront of doing that. The reason we’re not is not because we don’t want to share, it’s because we want to make sure what we share is accurate and want to do so in a responsible way.

What is the strategy for bringing together a mess of different processes around city property data?

There are a couple of theories of how you do this, one is the scorched earth theory, where you just take everyone that touches  the data and consolidate that into one department in one and place and we just start over. I’m not saying we wouldn’t do that at some point, but I felt like it wasn’t the place to start.

We don’t have the luxury of starting from zero. Work has to be done every single day. People are using this information. The data, while we know it isn’t perfect, isn’t so bad that services aren’t being delivered.

So I was interested in finding a way to do this while we do our other functions. And I knew we couldn’t get it done to make the property assessment deadline of 2012, so I proposed that we need a very small team to start with to to a deep dive of business process mapping in every department that touches every attribute across the city because we can’t fix this with technology alone.

There will be a technology component but that is going to come later.

This is essentially about how we do the work, who is responsible for which component. Who owns addresses? Who maintains the streets center line? How are changes to all of those data tables transferred and where is the chain of command to make a change and implement a change? All of those things to me may seem like technology is really about how we get the work done.

A year later, where is this effort?

I proposed a really deep dive effort — we’re still a few positions short — and [in December] we started the site visits to those that touch data.

What is the timeline and the ultimate goals we can look for?

The only timeline I’m willing to talk about now is the research and design phase. I’m not sure what implementation is going to look like. People want quick wins for obvious reasons, but we need to see… for example, it is possible we may need legislative changes in order to do this in a different way. We certainly know there are policy changes. And, of course, everything I’m talking about here involves a people component and to do that, it takes time.

So I expect to spend about six months doing the research phase and then a three to six months phase to design our solution.

Now, if we find some low hanging fruit that is more easily fixable, we aren’t going to wait to do that, but I’m not going to set a timeline for implementation until we’ve really done our homework.

And the other thing is I have no idea how much it is going to cost. There will be a technology component, there will be changes to our software, so we need to see the costs. Some of this might get done as we make other upgrades.

For example, we know we have an old mainframe at property assessment that needs a real robust CAMA system. Changes that we’re talking about, we may decide it doesn’t make sense to change other systems as part of another implementation, and that’s just an example.

Just to clarify, you’re saying that a year from now, we’re going to have the research on what is involved and a rough concept of what the solution is going to be.

Yes. And we would have a timeline for implementation.

Does this include the ever-present vacant property conversation?

Definitely related, now there are multiple efforts on vacant property because people are trying to tackle different things. But, yes, this is definitely a part of that.

The real hurdle remains the definition of a vacant property — is it Water Department turn offs or something else.

Yes, and so there is a committee, more than one, and the city is trying to determine its role. The city has a role in managing vacant property, but we’re also not the only player when it’s a property we don’t own. There are multiple efforts that are probably related, but we are not leading them, though we will be part of them.

Then talk a little bit about what data are we specifically talking about.

Think of all the attributes that touch a piece of property.

There’s the address, some cases there are multiple addresses. Our addresses don’t necessarily match Postal Service addresses, and they don’t necessarily need to. We use addresses for different reasons. We need to know where services are delivered, we need to know where it’s located, like street information and block ranges.

Think of all the things that touch property history, ownership, zoning and things like we want to be able to have a history of an address and have all outstanding permits that have been assigned to that address.

Our permit database — and we have one, we know what permits are assigned to an address – - but there’s no way to easily coordinate that, like how 911 routes police and fire or medic to an address. They are coming from completely different data tables.

Consolidation is a touchy subject at the City of Philadelphia, do you see your office owning this data?

I’m not saying that OPD is going to own it. That’s probably not the best way because we’re not the closest to this, what I am saying is that we will be in the centralized coordinating role and setting some standards for how these things are done and making the transition across the board.

Property data is an important type of city information, but certainly not the only one. Do you expect to take over other roles with city data?

I don’t know what this is going to look like in the end state. This is no different than a whole host of efforts in the city that involve business processes so we can optimize our data to have an integrity and translate that across units and the public.

Our focus is on property data. I hope that our process is repeatable for anything else we work on.

Do you at least picture coming out of this finding other dependable data sources that can be shared, outside of property or other ancillary benefits?

One of the things that we don’t have is a consistent process for releasing any kind of data. I’d love to see that done. There’s a more seamless way to get information from the city.

When I say there are other efforts going on, [the city is] trying to completely revamp our web process behind the scenes and our presence to the public, so how data becomes public is a part of many goals that are important.

Do you have a personal interest in data?

I’m not involved in this because of the data. I’m involved in this because I believe in making government as efficient as we can and moving it into at least the 20th century.

This is the third city I’ve worked for, and I like how cities work, I like the operations. There ‘s no other corporation that has as many core services as the city does.

Most corporations have three or four things they are responsible for and that’s it. The city is responsible for hundreds of core functions that if we quit doing, you would hear about it.

And so I come at it from that perspective. I want the city to be more responsive because I think they’re great places to live. Every city has its own culture and its own unique vibe and that’s how I got involved in it.

I’m not a data geek, I’m a city geek. I want to make the city work better.

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.”

Not only is the culture of the office one in need of updating, so too is the physical City Hall office space, Schmidt said, noting that it looked “like nothing had changed in decades.”

To be fair, when he first walked into the office on Jan. 3, there were four or five computers there.

“But they never had an internet connection or even word processing software,” said Schmidt, laughing with a degree of incredulity. “They might as well have been poorly performing lamps.”

It shows how much Schmidt and Singer have to do to meet many of their promises.

Another story line exists with Schmidt, who lost a spirited 2009 campaign against City Controller Alan Butkovitz. With a few of the Republican City Council candidates, he represents a divide in the local GOP between an old guard that has focused on a small, if stable, slice of the pie for patronage jobs, and a newer reform movement that hopes to run competitively in citywide elections.

An educated former performance auditor from the federal Government Accountability Office, Schmidt 40, who is married and has two daughters in East Falls, is bright, cheery and prepared. Earlier this month, Pittsburgh-bred Schmidt sat down with Technically Philly to discuss his campaigns and plans for his new office.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

Give us the quick pitch on what your new job is.

The three city commissioners sit on the Board of Elections to decide matters before the election board, from polling place changes to much bigger things. They run the election machinery in the city.

The Board of Elections has roughly 100 full-time civil servant employees and an approximately $10 million budget, with offices in City Hall, at Delaware and Spring Garden and a warehouse in North Philadelphia. So it is an organization and operation that you’re running, and much like agriculture or farming, there is a time when you’re sowing and a time when you’re reaping.

You have two elections every year, a general and primary, whether it is federal or municipal only, so there’s always activity that takes place every year, but sometimes there are different things that occur. There is a voter ID bill being discussed in Harrisburg, that’s something new this year. There is another bill that would change how names appear on the ballot, having them rotate rather than some candidates just getting stuck with a low position. Special elections, we’ll have some of those this year. Those are examples of things that come up that we decide.

There’s no redoing elections. There’s zero room for error. That’s what makes this so critical.

Remind us of what you campaigned on and why you think it worked.

There were a couple of core principles that we ran on that we thought the office could benefit from.

One was greater transparency in terms of voters and people interested in getting involved in civic life in the city and having access to the information to make the most of it, including people who want to run for office, because it shouldn’t just be someone who is connected to some ward office.

Another element was accountability. There were previous Controller audits and other reports, including from Inquirer and the Daily News, that consistently pointed out its lack of accountability for how it spends its money and its responsiveness.

And to improve efficiency. Elections in Philadelphia cost more than any other county in the state, and it’s more than twice the average of any other county. It costs $10 per voter to run an election in Philadelphia and that’s more like $4 or $5 in the rest of the state.

Sure, but large cities present problems in terms of population and access that can drive up cost.

Well,yes, but it’s high in terms of the amount spent per voter when compared to other big cities too, so something is wrong there. But because [previous commissioners] weren’t transparent about how they spent their money, we don’t know what’s wrong until we’ve come into office. So we have a lot of work to do.

We’ve seen the reform movement in citywide offices happen before, perhaps most famously in the 1950s, so why do you think this resonated now?

My background is in political history — I have a Phd in political history — so you have different types of moments and sometimes they catch fire and sometimes they don’t. For example, there are plenty of things in city government to be outraged about every day and every year, like DROP which really captured people’s attentions and has had a significant impact on the results of elections, and other things are at least as abusive in terms of use of taxpayer dollars, but they never catch people’s interest. So you try to raise awareness of what you can, and see what interests.

I’m obsessed with Richardson Dilworth, Clark and that whole phase: they had been losing for 12 years before they were successful in the face of a Republican Party in this city that had once outnumbered Democrats 12 to one. Now, Democrats outnumber Republicans six or seven to one. I’m not suggesting that any change in the city either with our party or in city government will be easy but you’re certainly not going to succeed if you don’t try.

With a reform Republican breaking into a Democrat/Republican machine commission, the Clark-Dilworth comparisons are inevitable, but the difference, of course, is that whenever we have a seen a big watershed change in registration locally, it has at least nearly mirrored something happening nationally.

The Democrats had the wind at their back and the New Deal was going on, so the migration of African-Americans not only to Philadelphia from the South but also from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party…

So that changes a lot, but there are some notable people trying to reshape the GOP locally. Can a change really happen locally without a national trend to push it along?

Well, you just don’t know. I don’t want to overdo the Dilworth thing, but it’s not like when Dilworth is starting out that Dilworth knew there would be a New Deal or that African Americans would defect en masse from the Republican Party.

You just don’t know what’s around the corner. Now, there’s no sense whatsoever that there is going to be a change to the city that would be parallel to the Dilworth-Clark era. This is not going to be a Republican city in the foreseeable future. The Republican Party registrations have been declining for years and plummeting years ago. That has caused strife within the local Republican community.

One last politics question, in terms of being a different breed of local GOP candidate in a heavily Democratic city, do you see your role to make your party affiliation more palatable to more progressive voters in Philadelphia or to make party affiliation less important overall by suggesting it’s an outlier?

At least the way I’ve conceptualized it, we want a Republican reform taking place and Democratic reform taking place in the city. The objective is to improve and reform city government. The objective isn’t partisan. If we do the best job we can do, there will be a partisan benefit to it. But if you look at it through a strictly partisan effort, it won’t work.

Singer is in a different party, and I’m sure there are many things we disagree on, but in terms of city government, there are very few things we disagree on it.

There’s the old saying that there’s no Republican or Democrat way to fix a pothole, well, similarly, elections in Philadelphia are either going to be fair or not be fair, it’s not a Republican thing or a Democratic thing or a Green Party thing. Taxpayer dollars are either spent well or they’re not.

What are you excited about that would interest a technology community?

A lot of the changes are really primitive that still move the agency forward a light year.

Right now, there’s hardly any information available online. Only recently did they put information up on how to register for absentee ballots. Putting up past election results and things like that is primitive stuff but important.

We do look forward to some small innovations like being able to text your address and we can text back the location of a poling place.

When you look at the great work done by the Committee of Seventy, you realize they’ve done it to fill a vacuum left by the city’s commissioners not keeping up with this. Go to Seventy’s website, put in your address and find out where you can vote. It’s not like you have to go to City Hall and look through a big binder to find out where you vote.

They have information on how to run for office, and I think it’s all things the city commissioners should be doing.

What is priority one for you?

There’s one that is immediate and one long term.

The most immediate thing is that we have to propose a budget for our office for city council. There’s very little time. In past, the budget hasn’t been very transparent. We want to do more.

How?

Not just how much you have to spend, but on what.

A budget can be five line items, with $1 million for this and $3 million for that, or you can break that down more. I think City Council deserves that and we should do that.

And what’s the longer term goal?

My background is as a performance auditor. We can find ways to find efficiencies to save money and improve services. I’d like to lead a way to evaluate the entire office. There are many civil servants there who work very hard and know what they’re doing, but I suspect there are ways to further improve services and save money.

I think it’s foolish to just rush in and make changes.

Just because you win an election, doesn’t mean you’re right and know everything about how to improve performance.

So taking a little more deliberate approach to do the changes right is what that performance evaluation will be intended to assist with.

How would you judge success at the end of your term?

One thing we did from the start after election was form a a transition committee and one of their responsibilities was to assemble our commitments during our campaign, so now it’s important to look to those as a touchstone for as much as warranted for delivering on what we promised. Some may be impractical, but I doubt it and believe we’ll be able to follow through.

Two new faces on a three person panel, and Commissioner Clark wasn’t exactly out campaigning, so I doubt you know each other well. Will the three of you go out and get beers?

[laughs] Well, the Sunshine laws prohibit us from discussing business privately, but we can get together to discuss the Eagles but nothing before the commission.

What was the relationship between the commissioners in the past?

Marge Tartaglione made decisions and two other commissioners placed temporary employees, since the board hires a significant number of temporary employees before and during elections.

Is there water cooler talk in your offices?

It’s not like the City Council can go around and talk about issues, it’d be in violation of Sunshine Laws. though that seems difficult, it is in place for a good reason, to ensure transparency. Small matters like internal office needs can happen in executive session, but otherwise, we don’t talk about high-level matters.

….We’re going to do good work, and the voters will be able to know about it.

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.

Tell us about the Innovation Advisory Board and the process of putting together the report—

First of all, it’s an honor. If you look at the 14 people other than me, I felt like Vance Worley in a pitching rotation of Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay and Cole Hamels. Arthur Levinson is the Chairman of Apple. I mean c’mon! Irwin Jacobs is a founder of Qualcomm. These are impressive folks to be around. My first inclination was to listen to them. I love the saying: “You’re given one mouth and two ears, use them proportionally.”

Well, you made the starting lineup. Why do you think that was? How did you use it to your advantage?

I was able to fit in that discussion by providing practical views of how innovation is done at the grassroots. I was also able to put a spotlight on the Greater Philadelphia region. I’m in a very fortunate role that I see the world through the eyes of all [of the Science Center's] stakeholders. Certainly entrepreneurs and innovators. Academics and people involved with R&D. People in industry and venture capital. I think that my participation gave a view of how those things fit together and how regional innovation strength plays into the overall map.

Having now seen the full report, what would you have added or changed?

The report is broken into sections: research, education, infrastructure, manufacturing. What was not called out was how those things come together to build strength in innovation and then convert that innovation to companies and jobs. If you think about how to make America more competitive in the global market for innovation then you have to think, ‘why does it matter that the U.S. is strong?’ The next level is what parts of the U.S. matter because they have uncommon strengths in research or education or infrastructure. You get into discussion of regional innovation clusters and strengths. We could have focused on that aspect.

Second, the U.S. is unique in that we’re a melting pot. We share a future and not a past. How do we encourage a constant flow and replenishment of people and thinking? That’s where immigration comes in. It’s a topic that’s very polarized and it’s confused with illegal immigration in the border states. In Philadelphia, there are a tremendous amount of students that come from abroad, many of whom who come to study in STEM fields. If we don’t create an environment where they can stay, they go back and build companies that compete us against. There’s a defensive and offensive reason that policy should be much more accepting of people who are going to create innovation through our education fields.

What are the outcomes of the report? What surprised you?

I want to elaborate what I told the Inquirer: that “the line between policy and politics is very fine.” As part of the advisory board of 15 people, I think the report would have been different if it had been written by those 15 people. There would have been a greater sense of alarm about how far we’ve fallen behind. There would have been much more pointed and detailed discussion about what to do in terms of policy. The reality is that the report is a result of legislation. It was written by the Administration and we accept that. Those of us that live and breathe this understand that there’s got to be more structural changes to make us more competitive with innovation in this world.

Is this report actionable? What are the next steps?

The next step from this report is literally that Secretary of Commerce is charged to create a strategy based on this document on how to address these issues. It’s finding common ground with the issues in order to develop those priorities. The challenge is, we can acknowledge as obvious that this is an election year, so that strategy is likely to be highly politicized. We don’t know who will be President or how much ownership that president will have in this strategy. Unfortunately because of politics, we’re building strategy in innovation in fits and starts.

How does the report impact us on a local level?

I think we are as a region under-appreciated in terms of our innovation capacity. There’s still a view that we’re a blue collar, bare knuckles town. The reality is that our strongest industries are education, health care and life sciences. Yet other regions like San Francisco, San Diego, the Research Triangle, Boston, get more airtime than we do. [Having two representatives from Philadelphia] really created an awareness that Philadelphia wants to be known as an innovation center and deserves to be. It allows us to have other conversations with government, other industry partners and foundation sponsors, to enhance our overall approach to innovation.

You’re celebrating this month your fourth year at the Science Center. How are things different now compared to then?

I’m celebrating, but I don’t know if anyone else is [Laughs].

People tell me this is a tough job because you’re dealing with a lot of folks with different agendas. I knew that coming in to the job. What I’m most satisfied about is that Science Center is viewed as something that attracts people toward our mission of innovation entrepreneurship. That’s largely because we started out wanting to listen to needs. What I’ve tried to do, hopefully for many more years, is first fit in and then stand out. You can’t declare yourself anything in Philadelphia. You can’t impose yourself on the community. 

My most recent experience before the Science Center was a multinational company located in Japan [Olympus]. When you’re part of a subsidiary to foreign-based company, you learn as an executive that you have more influence than control over what’s going on. In Philadelphia, you’re better off trying to persuade people than to force people to do things. At all times, I want to be known that we’re under-promising and over-delivering. At end of the day, if people like us, they’ll gravitate toward us. If not, they’ll go some place else. 

What has changed across the city and region in the last four years?

We’ve survived some tough economic circumstances. I think that as a community you grow stronger through that because you’re forced to do more with less. Great working relationships are forged in those times. Sometimes when you’re in boom times, where there’s no need to work with other folks, you don’t develop that level of cooperation. I hope that we’ll come out of that downturn not just with stronger economic resources, but better relationships and better activity.

What do you hope to do in 2012? Any big changes on the horizon?

We’re beginning the process of raising $20 million to endow QED [proof-of-concept entrepreneur funding program] to make that sustainable in perpetuity. With Quorum, you have more great incubator companies that come through our facilities. We’re also planning our 50th Anniversary for 2013. We’re the third oldest research park in the country.

What’s your background? What got you to the Center?

Because I grew up in the area, and because I knew about the Science Center and knew its mission, I thought it was an intriguing blend of stakeholders that would be great to work with. My entire career has been in for-profit sector with exceptions of early stints in academia. I was leery of the nonprofit community but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the talent and commitment of people at the Science Center. And I’m able to sit at both sides of the table with investors and entrepreneurs. I’m able to bring all of this to the job every day.

Plus, I have a great passion and love for Philadelphia. I want us to do better than we’ve done before. It’s a matter of getting the word out there locally, nationally and internationally that we’re the place to be for innovation.

How’d you end up in Philadelphia?

I was the son of Chinese immigrants who both came to the county for education. I grew up in Wilmington and my first baseball team was the ’64 Phillies. Of course you know what happened to the Phillies that season— they were viewed as the greatest September collapse of all time. I grew to love baseball. I became a good baseball player in high school and college, and my parents encouraged me. You go to places that your parents didn’t go, just as they went to places that their parents didn’t go.