Poptent’s user-generated commercials undercut expensive ad agencies

Poptent's assignment board shows a handful of the available commercial projects, most of which start at a $5,000 payout.

Wynewood-based Poptent, a social network that connects businesses with advertising and marketing creatives, might just turn the video advertising industry on its head.

Back in 2007, Chief Marketing Officer Neil Perry, who’s worked in marketing as a senior leader at McDonald’s and as Vice President of Marketing at Monster.com, realized that creating high-cost video advertising campaigns in a universe of user-generated content just didn’t make sense.

“[We] produced a bundle of commercials and I got famaliar with how expensive commercials could be. I knew there could be a better way,” he says.

Three years after launching, Poptent has built a community of 14,000 members—climbing at about 500 users per month—comprised of professional and semi-professional videographers and ad creators looking to break into the advertising industry and make some cash doing it. The company has produced 65 assignments for national advertisers like Nestle, Anheuser Busch, Ben & Jerry’s and TurboTax.

Part of that growth is for the company’s affordability. In the world of marketing, Perry says, a 30 second spot might cost on average about $350,000, not including talent. Poptent campaigns start at $32,500, the cost of one video ad and the technical backend to place a brand on the site. Each additional ad costs a business $7,500. A company could purchase more than 40 viral videos from Poptent for the cost a single traditional advertisement. “The next time you need video, you don’t have to pay a national agency an arm and a leg,” he says.

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Shop Talk: Monetate brings real-time marketing to e-commerce

Often, e-commerce marketers waiting on slow-moving IT departments are losing time that they could be spending marketing to customers, says serial entrepreneur David Brussin.

“Because they don’t have control of their sites, [marketers] can’t create the best experience for each customer on the site,” Brussin says. “That’s been the promise of e-commerce for 10 years.”

Brussin, who co-founded Conshohocken-based and First Round Capital-funded Monetate, thinks he and co-founder David Bookspan have solved that problem. The real-time marketing platform allows marketers to skip their IT groups and keep campaigns moving as quickly as they need to, he says.

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Shop Talk: West Philly’s OpenHatch is “a business card for geeks”

Update: corrected college names, edited Atlanta information.

OpenHatch, like many companies, was one born of frustration.

The company calls itself a “business card for geeks,” a service that allows open-source programmers to automatically import contributions from services like Google Code, Github and Sourceforge to create an automatic index of a programmer’s work.

Currently, programmers have to manually keep track of their open-source projects. Which can be frustrating when it comes time to apply for a job or show off a portfolio.

While OpenHatch has only been public for a just under two months, the company has rolled out several key features to help programmers keep tabs on all of their work without having to spend time digging through code repositories.

Members get a profile page with a link and description to their work that is automatically populated. The site also has a map that lets programmers know what other people in their area work on the same project.

Just eight months in, the company’s ambitions to become the best marketplace for open-source talent is easy to explain. However, to tell the story about how the OpenHatch guys came to Philadelphia, you’d need a world map, a handful of pushpins and lots of patience.

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Shop Talk: NPower PA ITWorks graduates first class

Last November, the trains that normally shot South in regular intervals on the Broad Street Line were at a standstill.

But as SEPTA’s transit workers—at strike over wage and pension issues—were busy on the picket lines, nothing was going to stop Eric Harper, bound to a wheelchair, from making it to class. Harper, living in North Philadelphia, trekked more than 40 blocks to Drexel University.

Harper is one of ten students that graced the stage at Drexel’s Mitchell Auditorium Tuesday morning to receive his diploma for ITWorks, an Information Technology job-training program for disadvantaged young adults. Harper is a member of the first graduating ITWorks class, a program put together by NPower PA, a nonprofit that does IT work for other local nonprofits.

Through a collaboration with the United Way of Southeastern Pennsylvania, NPower helped identify a need for a cost-free training program to help young high school or equivalency graduates that were neither employed or seeking post-secondary education, whom were getting by on part-time work. It was as much an opportunity to to support the community and it was to support NPower’s partner organizations, who were seeking more hands in their IT departments.

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Shop Talk: Proton Media thinks your workflow is better in 3D

A screengrab of Protosphere, the company's flagship product.

If you work at a large corporation and think your job sucks, Proton Media CEO Ron Burns sympathizes with you.

“Most people spend their lives in front of their inbox,” he says. “The lives of the workers of these large organization can be rather inhumane.”

Proton Media, based in Landsdale, has been fighting inbox-based workflows through its Second Life-style software that acts as a meeting room for large companies. The software helps companies facilitate collaboration and cut down on unnecessary travel expenses. Specifically, life sciences and gas companies.

“Their entire workflow has revolved around files and folders…. Not humans,” he says.

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Shop Talk: Bradley Ericson and 3SecondReceipts

Bradley Ericson

Like a lot of Drexel undergrads, Bradley Ericson likes to take trips for the South Street Special.

“You wrap a piece of Lorenzo’s pizza around a Jim’s steak and see which one of your friends can finish first,” the Drexel sophomore says. “It’s the simple things that keep you young.”

Of course, what has made Ericson one of the better known teenagers in University City was his being named College Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur’s magazine. So, though Ericson “never in a million years” imagined himself attending Drexel, you’d be right to guess he now approves of the path he’s taken.

Ericson is the CEO and co-founder of 3SecondReceipts, a startup incubated at Drexel, a startup that is testing a point-of-sale system for digital receipts to save vendors on paper and ink.

The company’s beginnings started October 2008 back at Drexel and, like the South Street Special, involves pizza. As a freshman, Ericson and his college buddies would head out to a university dining hall for pizza, using their student ID cards in the closed system.

Everyone waited for a receipt, and then everyone immediately threw them out.

“I just wanted my pizza faster, but I also realized all this paper was being thrown out for these small transactions that are pretty immaterial to us,” Ericson says now. “There had to be a better way.”

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Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. launches brand new VisitPhilly.com

Update here

The Philadelphia region’s most powerful cheerleader will unveil a sleek new Web presence and re-branding effort today.

At a Center City hotel this morning, the primary online home of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. will be recast as VisitPhilly.com, which is dominated by big photos and better integration of other content. This fifth redesign for GPTMC is also their first step away from their 13-year-old GoPhila.com. GoPhila.com now redirects to VisitPhilly.com.

The new design, led by Web design firm Happy Cog East with offices in Center City,  features a cleaner navigation with more interactive drop-down bars, a trend in development moving away from the more cluttered, screen-wide top navigation bar the last iteration GPTMC had.

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Shop Talk: XIPWIRE mobile payment platform lets you text cash

Sharif Alexandre wants you to text more.

The founder of Fitler Square-based mobile payment platform XIPWIRE lets consumers send and receive money by SMS message. After registering for the service and linking a bank account, users can send a simple message which automatically pulls money from a virtual wallet or bank account.

“Xip $10 to Bill.” Bill’s got your dills.

The service works, Alexandre says, for inconvient circumstances when someone’s forgotten a wallet or has to divvy up a tab. “If you go out to lunch and have to split the check, you go to ATM, you don’t know how much you owe,” Alexandre says. “If everyone has a XIPWIRE account, you can literally xip them money.”

Currently in soft-launch, plans are for XIPWIRE to be available to consumers next week.

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Shop Talk: Image Revolver uses crowdsourcing to curate art

For West Center City-based Image Revolver, an online art retail store that sells prints of international artists, the problem wasn’t getting content. It was making sure it was providing its customers with quality art.

“Getting a ton of content doesnt always serve the end user,” Image Revolver co-founder Yis Tigay says. “You have to figure out how to currate it, so users aren’t browsing through two million things.”

So, Tigay and business partner and Web developer Benjamin Greenberg–who met while working for local software developer Neat Company–decided to borrow an idea. From people-rating hotbed HotOrNot.com.

Though ImageRevolver accepts art from anyone, it is using a “community curation” system that let’s people vote on work. Once an image receives a vote of 80 percent or better on Image Revolver, it becomes available for sale. It’s a new feature, one that Tigay says works. “People have good taste,” he says.

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Shop Talk: Interphase Systems CEO John Biglin on Ready-IT BioPharma

A year ago, John Biglin, the CEO of Interphase Systems, was talking to the CFO of an emerging Center City pharmaceutical company.

The CFO, intent on keeping in order the financial house of his blue-chip invested life sciences startup, had a problem.

“Is it normal that sometimes you don’t get e-mails, or e-mails take a couple days to arrive or when you do get them, they come in triplicate?” Biglin remembers the CFO asking.

John Biglin

“Our IT has been cobbled together by an employee or by his nephew or uncle,” Biglin recalls the CFO and others in his position saying. “Someone just shows up in a truck and sets stuff up in our office. If the FDA came in here and we say we can’t produce this lab data or that, we are out of business.”

The CFO talked about multiple versions of contracts lost, emergency Best Buy trips for whatever hardware is on sale and documents that are never seen again.

That conversation last January set into motion the long-discussed plans for Interphase, which does 60 percent of its business in the life sciences, to develop a turn-key, managed IT platform targeted for small and medium-sized emerging pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that need top-level security, guaranteed disaster recovery, FDA compliance and flexibility. Biglin says that Ready-IT BioPharma, which launched late last month, just might be the only system of its kind.

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