What is a startup?: a Technically Philly definition

Turns out, despite the focus on them in technology news, there are lots of questions about what exactly a ‘startup‘ is.

Any new business might use the word as an adjective, but we at Technically Philly think we need a philosophy for what exactly constitutes a technology startup when we categorize and cover their work in the Philadelphia region.

Here’s our definition. Tell us what we’re missing.

• Broadly, a startup is a new business that is testing plans for scalable revenue.

Though not always, a technology startup typically has these common traits:

• Fewer than 20 employees
• Younger than three years
• Seeking or have secured early-stage investment, especially angel and Series A.
• Looking at scale of a product, rather than growth of a service
• Led by initial founders who describe themselves as entrepreneurs
• Focusing on disrupting existing processes through greater efficiencies
• Often involves technology solutions to create efficiencies through product over service

Take the Technically Philly membership survey; 10 questions, 5 minutes to make us serve you better

We want to hear from you, the reader, in our first ever readership survey, here. It’s just 10 questions and should take just five minutes of your time.

Almost three years ago, Technically Philly launched.

We wanted to cover technology how we thought it should be covered: locally, with an eye to urban renewal by creating jobs, making government more transparent and combating the digital divide. While we played newsman, we also focused on making the product sustainable through sales.

We launched a consulting practice, threw events, helped create Philly Tech Week and have gone about being a part of connecting a community. From our very original business plan, we wanted to grow to a membership, where we would be offering clear value for a community that would, in turn, help support us.

Our content will always be free and available, but we think there are other services we can offer and some we already do that are worth paying for. We want to hear from you to get a better sense of what you think we should focus on.

So, please, take our 10-question, five-minute membership survey here.

What will be the impact of Philly Tech Week 2012?

“To make a better Philadelphia through technology.” That’s our call to action and the motto of Philly Tech Week 2012, now only six months away.

Today, we’ve launched the Philly Tech Week media kit, which you can flip through by clicking the embed above to active full-screen mode, or by clicking this link.

Using data and information we collected from attendees, this publication will help you understand the value of the inaugural Philly Tech Week, held in April, which brought together 4,000 people at 65 events and had city-wide impact.

The big takeaways are in the 2011 numbers:

• 65 events across broad range of technology industries
• More than 4,000 people attended events throughout the region
• Featured in more than 50 stories in newspapers, radio, television and blogs
• 35 participating sponsors signed on for inaugural year
• 30,000 unique visits to PhillyTechWeek.com and TechnicallyPhilly.com during month of event as well as 1,000 social media mentions

We hope this media kit shows why we need your help to make a success out of Philly Tech Week 2012, to be held April 22 through April 28, 2012. Check out the media kit here. Sign-up for email updates and look for a Fall launch of the 2012 website here.

If you’re already interested in getting involved, learn how to organize an event or how to sponsor Philly Tech Week.

City Paper, PlanPhilly, Technically Philly launch interactive RDA vacant property explorer

Today, City Paper has an issue full stories about Philadelphia’s vacant land, which the publication calls, arguably the city’s “biggest problem, and also our biggest opportunity,” News Editor Isaiah Thompson writes.

The series was completed in partnership with PlanPhilly and well, Technically Philly, which we’re proud to report this afternoon. Our part? Helping the paper convene data and create an interactive property explorer that, interestingly enough, shows properties sold by the city’s Redevelopment Authority that remain vacant today. The raw data used to create the map are also available there.

The full series completed by City Paper is available here.

Hats off to Tim Wisniewski, who created the application (and put up with our meddling). Wisniewski has been tied closely to Philly’s hacker scene of late, after coordinating on several Open Data Philly hackathons that we’ve hosted. Be sure to check out his other big property data project, the OPA Data Liberator, recently rebranded as phillyaddress.com.

Help inform the city’s comprehensive plan with our Broadband2035 project

It was in the first days of publishing Technically Philly two years ago that we came to understand that the city’s broadband infrastructure played a crucial role in our technology community.

Wireless Philadelphia, an effort to provide free, wireless access to city dwellers, had ended a failure. Verizon had only recently been allowed to expand its internet connectivity services to residents here, and Comcast had staked a much bigger claim over the city by altering its skyline with its tallest building.

So it was with much bewilderment that when we browsed through the Planning Commission’s comprehensive Philadelphia2035 plan, the first undertaken in more than 60 years, there was little mention of the copper, cable and fiber-optic lines that run deep beneath the city, helping connect it with a global economy. Though the plan is incomplete, summaries of the plan have under-represented what we believe is vital to the city’s economic growth: broadband connectivity. Without more detailed plans to implement next-generation connectivity, the city risks missing an important opportunity.

A few weeks ago, the Commission released the first draft of the plan [PDF], seeking comments from city residents.

That’s where you come in.

Today, we’re asking for some input that we can provide immediately to the Planning Commission on your vision of this city’s needs to support and expand broadband access. What needs are unmet for your individual or business purposes? What problems have you witnessed regarding broadband infrastructure that you’d like to see changed? What are other cities doing that are a benchmark for success? Respond in the comments below, or send an email directly to info@technicallyphilly.com before Monday, March 28, and we’ll make sure your comments are heard. Now’s your chance to help shape the future of Philadelphia’s broadband access.

And after the jump, more details on the Broadband2035 project, the editorial series that we’re officially announcing today, which will take a deep look at this city’s broadband infrastructure.

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Philly Tech Week update: WHYY headquarters, civic hackathon and more

Philly Tech Week is starting to focus in on impact. Today we have four big announcements for the April 25-30 week of events.

HEADQUARTERS: WHYY, the region’s public media organization based in Old City, will be the official headquarters for Philly Tech Week, offering up its beautiful, modern Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons.

Working with TEDx, Barcamp Philly and Refresh Philly event planner and community builder Roz Duffy, WHYY will play host to a brown bag lunchtime speaker series that week, in addition to our Friday night signature event, which will serve as the week’s highlight. More details to come there.

CIVIC HACKING: In other exciting news, as part of the third annual national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday, April 30 at Temple University, we’ll also be hosting the Open Gov Hackathon organized by Tropo. Coders, designers and developers will be creating civic-minded tools, largely using newly shared government data. We want the hacker crew and journalists to work together to create projects that will be utilized and have the best chance to make impact. It’s a good fit with our Transparencity coverage. Find out more on the BCNI blog here, and expect more to be finalized soon.

GETTING THE WORD OUT: We’re also proud to announce that we’re working with Grid magazine publisher Red Flag Media to land the first Philly Tech Week print supplement on the streets that week, which will feature the week’s calendar, but also fresh content on our community and sponsor shout outs. That’s in addition to that hot Philly Tech Week website from the Jarv.us development team in Northern Liberties and the forthcoming Philly Tech Week app from Alkali Media.

NEW PARTNERS: New sponsors include the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department, Chariot Solutions, Reed Technology, the University City Science Center and Tropo, and new event organizers include Wharton, First Round Capital, the Philadelphia Science Festival from the Franklin Institute, Indy Hall, the African American Chamber of Commerce and more. Many, many more conversations are still alive.

Check out our Sponsorship one pager and Event organizer guide to become a part.

Expect lots more events, partners and details soon. Clear your calendar for April 25-30 and get involved!

Thank you for supporting us: today is Technically Philly’s second anniversary

As we tweeted this morning, today marks two years since we first launched Technically Philly with this post.

It was followed the next day by our first piece of news, an item on free cell service for low income Pennsylvanians and since then every weekday since, we’ve offered a little bit of coverage and clarity on a still growing technology community of creatives, entrepreneurs, technologists and geek heads. This is our 1,232nd post here.

Last year for our birthday, we celebrated with a Philly Startup Leaders Fishbowl to move on our building a business.  Plenty has happened internally since, and we’re tried to keep you apprised so our community of readers was part of our growth as a startup vying for sustainability like many of you.

Of our three founders, two of us are now full-time, and last month featured about 17,000 unique visitors to the site, clicking through to nearly three pages per visit, despite our 1,800 RSS and 500 email subscribers receiving a full feed. We have also long curated a conversation with our more than 3,000 Twitter followers.

In addition to covering this community and its trends, with your support we are proud to say we’ve done the following in the past two years:

• We launched Technically Media, a parent publishing consultancy company.
• We’ve started a grant-funded research project on the open data movement in Philadelphia.
• We have started organizing the first ever Philly Tech Week, to be held April 25-30.
• We kicked off a tech startup demo event called Switch Philly to help show off our scene.
• We’ve grown a national journalism conference called BarCamp NewsInnovation.
• We pitched a News Inkubator concept that is informing major investment in Philadelphia journalism.

Now we hope to move from startup toward established business and bring all of these concepts together. Thank you for supporting us. We look forward to many more years growing together.

Introducing Technically Philly office space

As part of Transparencity, the grant-funded reporting project we’re leading, we’re proud to announce that Technically Philly now has Center City office space.

Based in Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street, we’re still figuring out some logistical hurdles — like security, schedules and actually having functioning internet that visitors can use — but we have notions of using this great space as another way to get to know our community better.

Give us a heads up if you want to visit and co-work for a day. We accept one form of currency: you have you to teach us something interesting. …You know, or beer.

Sean Blanda gives you the quick tour below.

Transparencity: introducing Technically Philly coverage on open data in Philadelphia

Even you binary code aficionados out there might miss that in the image above, a message is spelled out: Data Sets You Free.

It’s supposed to be clever, but whether or not it is, we hope our insistence is clear. The next great wave in government and journalism and citizen action, of course, will be data driven. The power of numbers — and the transparency, accuracy, efficiency and accountability that can come with them — has not even begun to be realized.

Since Technically Philly’s inception, we’ve held a strong editorial stance that Philadelphia should be again seen as a leader — not a follower — in the areas of sharing and using smart, usable data to better the lives of all of us who live here.

So, it’s with great excitement that we say Technically Philly will be leading, in conjunction with the Institute for Public Affairs at Temple University, a six-month William Penn Foundation-funded project “toward collaborative projects using technology and journalism to increase the availability and use of actionable government data.”

The coverage series is called Transparencity and will feature reporting from all three Technically Philly founders. This funding will allow for deeper coverage in areas already of interest in our editorial mission: city technology policy, the Division of Technology and pursuits of government and other institutions releasing relevant data sets and related APIs and other actionable formats.

It should also be noted that this is grant funding for a specific reporting project for Technically Philly with a limited scope and does not come in conflict with our continued mission of growing our business.

Find details of the grant below.

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Technically Media Inc.: We build Audiences (and publish Technically Philly)

Just a quick update for those of you who have long requested we keep you apprised on the startup business side of things.

Earlier this month, we more formally introduced Technically Media Inc., the media services company that publishes this rag you’re reading right now. Just so we’re clear, don’t be impressed. That isn’t some multinational corporation. It’s still a startup from three schlubs in Philly, but now we just are a little more legally sound.

In addition to squandering late night hours tracking venture deals, startups and the technology community in Philadelphia, we like building audiences online.

So, in the catering business to this retail shop, we will be helping nonprofits, businesses and other media organizations grow an audience online through meaningful content, in addition to keeping TP alive.

Any potential conflicts of interest, as always, will be disclosed, as noted in our ethics policy.

If you want more, founders Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and Christopher Wink have all written about the move.