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.

Read more

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.

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Cadence Watch Company: The 4-bit binary watch by Cadence: “Simple, geeky, and clean, the Cadence 4-Bit watch is stylish without being gaudy,” says CrunchGear.  Technically Philly readers get 25% off to make holiday shopping easy.

Springboard Media – Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer based in Center City and now, in Exton. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500 when you’re ready to upgrade.

Volpe and Koenig, P.C. — Since 1987, intellectual property boutique law firm Volpe and Koenig has provided guidance on matters relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, e-commerce, technology joint ventures, non-disclosure agreements, technology acquisitions, licensing and litigation. Whatever your intellectual property law issue… Volpe and Koenig bring law to your ideas.

Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce – The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to promoting growth and economic development, advocating for sound public policy, and serving its members with outstanding programs and benefits. GPCC is the premier advocate of the region’s business community, representing members in 11 counties across three states with one voice.

Brolik Productions Customers visit your website and immediately judge your company. Will they stay or will they go? Brolik delivers innovative design, original content and a tasteful product that equals long-term loyalty for your brand and sour grapes for the competition.

Caffeine Fish – Caffeine Fish develops the Trainboard iPhone app and offers iPhone development consulting in the Philadelphia area.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Springboard Media – Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer based in Center City and now, in Exton. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500 when you’re ready to upgrade.

Volpe and Koenig, P.C. — Since 1987, intellectual property boutique law firm Volpe and Koenig has provided guidance on matters relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, e-commerce, technology joint ventures, non-disclosure agreements, technology acquisitions, licensing and litigation. Whatever your intellectual property law issue… Volpe and Koenig bring law to your ideas.

Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce – The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to promoting growth and economic development, advocating for sound public policy, and serving its members with outstanding programs and benefits. GPCC is the premier advocate of the region’s business community, representing members in 11 counties across three states with one voice.

Brolik Productions Customers visit your website and immediately judge your company. Will they stay or will they go? Brolik delivers innovative design, original content and a tasteful product that equals long-term loyalty for your brand and sour grapes for the competition.

Caffeine Fish – Caffeine Fish develops the Trainboard iPhone app and offers iPhone development consulting in the Philadelphia area.

NextFab Studio — NextFab is a membership-based, high-tech workshop and prototyping center. Our facility provides comfortable, clean, and safe workspaces with hand tools, 3D printers, computer controlled machine tools, software, and electronics workbenches. Expert instructors and a community of collaborators are on hand to help you problem-solve and achieve your vision. NextFab Studio has everything necessary for you to invent, repair, create, and innovate!

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

Introducing the TP Directory

Earlier this year 25 people gathered at UArts for Tecnically Philly’s very own Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl, a chance for those folks to help us think about new ways to make the business sustainable. We received lots of advice which we’ve made actionable, but chief among the recommendations was the desire for a directory, a place where readers can get additional information about the companies and people that we cover each day.

That said, after more than six months of architecting and developing the project, we’re proud to announce the first iteration of the Technically Philly Directory. This new tool has two purposes:

1. To help readers better understand the history and context about the companies, people and place that make up the Philadelphia tech community, similar to TechCrunch’s Crunchbase.
2. To offer an easy portal to find all the technology resources Philly has to offer. Want a list of local investors? You got it. Most popular companies? Sure. We plan on creating more of these lists, but our current directory page offers a sampling of where we are heading.

Most directory pages are simple: a photo, description and previous news content to help readers “catch up” on a person or company. However, we will be shortly announcing a new advertising model that will allow people and business to control the contents of their directory page for maximum visibility. For some examples of these detailed entries, see entries for Bill Green and Chariot Solutions (a thank you for being our first ever advertiser).

Also you’ll notice that each news post on Technically Philly now has small icons on the left sidebar. These are the people, companies and places tagged in each story. For example the “People” in this story include Bill Green. The “Companies” section includes Technically Philly and Chariot Solutions while the “Places” includes Fishtown. Click to browse the directory pages for each entry.

This is a small first step, an effort we hope to expand along with our coverage with features such as a search function. Go ahead and poke around! We’d love to hear your feedback.

Guest Contributor Week: An open call for op-ed pieces

We’ve long held the opinion that if we’re going to cover this community right, we’d need your support.

Now, we’re adding a second act to an actionable call for that very cause.

In August, we called for folks to submit coverage of events that we can’t make. As a staff of three, there’s just too much going on to do it all. And we hope that we begin to see more submissions on the city’s weekly technology happenings.

Today, we’re announcing that we’re accepting opinion pieces from our audience, with the hopes that issues that we’re unable to cover can be better brought to the forefront. We further believe that these submissions can inspire more in-depth coverage as we continue to expand our editorial perspective with the help of the community.

To kick it off, we’ve solicited a few folks in the community to write some initial contributions, which will be published throughout the week, hoping it will help provide a scope of what we would like to see and to encourage others to participate in the dialogue.

Our decision to accept these submissions is inspired by many of the off-the-record conversations we have with leaders in Philadelphia. We’ve spoken enthusiastically to the frustrated or inspired. But much of the time, because we’re a news organization founded in fact and not opinion, we’ve been unable to air important commentary.

Pieces should be from 150 to 500 words in length and should include a relevant photo and a headshot of the author if possible. We’re looking for distinct opinions or points of view that have relevance to our community and our coverage and we will be closely reviewing pieces that appear to be advertisements for companies and individuals.

Submissions will be vetted and edited by Technically Philly staff, but we’ll work closely with contributors to ensure the message is published as intended. To submit a piece, please email info@technicallyphilly.com, and we’ll be with you as soon as possible.

Thanks in advance for helping Philadelphia’s technology community shine.

Thanks to our weekly sponsors

Technically Philly is made possible by advertisers and sponsors that are important to Philadelphia’s technology community. This week we’d like to thank:

Caffeine Fish – Caffeine Fish develops the Trainboard iPhone app and offers iPhone development consulting in the Philadelphia area.

NextFab Studio — NextFab is a membership-based, high-tech workshop and prototyping center. Our facility provides comfortable, clean, and safe workspaces with hand tools, 3D printers, computer controlled machine tools, software, and electronics workbenches. Expert instructors and a community of collaborators are on hand to help you problem-solve and achieve your vision. NextFab Studio has everything necessary for you to invent, repair, create, and innovate!

Springboard Media – Springboard Media is a certified Apple Specialist and retailer based in Center City and now, in Exton. They’ve got a ton of accessories and a great trade-in program that can score you up to $1,500 when you’re ready to upgrade.

Volpe and Koenig, P.C. — Since 1987, intellectual property boutique law firm Volpe and Koenig has provided guidance on matters relating to patents, trademarks, copyrights, trade secrets, e-commerce, technology joint ventures, non-disclosure agreements, technology acquisitions, licensing and litigation. Whatever your intellectual property law issue… Volpe and Koenig bring law to your ideas.

Tek Lado Magazine: technology and pop culture magazine for the new bilingual generation, TekLado –  published in English and Spanish – caters to Hispanic and non-Hispanic geeks, gamers, techies, comix fans and more. The mag hits the streets of Philadelphia on Septempber 22, 2010.

Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce – The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to promoting growth and economic development, advocating for sound public policy, and serving its members with outstanding programs and benefits. GPCC is the premier advocate of the region’s business community, representing members in 11 counties across three states with one voice.

Brolik Productions Customers visit your website and immediately judge your company. Will they stay or will they go? Brolik delivers innovative design, original content and a tasteful product that equals long-term loyalty for your brand and sour grapes for the competition.

Interested in joining these organizations and individuals in supporting Technically Philly? Check out our ad packages and contact our Ad Sales Manager. Can’t find something that fits? We’ll customize a package for you.

And the final two Switch companies are…

Geographic software company Azavea and sustainability tracker Zecozi will round out the slate at Switch – our biggest event yet that will feature five demos from five local companies. The late additions will join last-minute travel site Packlate, music technology company Orpheus Media Research and web development shop P’unk Ave.

A regular here at Technically Philly, Azavea will be demoing CommonSpace its new application that allows Philadelphians to easily determine the walking distance to anywhere in the city. We’re also proud to showcase Zecozi, a Good Company Ventures company that will launch its first product shortly before the event.

We plan on previewing each company in the coming weeks, but the best way to be inspired is to purchase a ticket. Not only will you get to see five great local companies, but we’re happy to announce that you’ll also get half off of drinks at the Tavern on Broad after the event.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center, MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce and the Corzo Center.