Google's regional Zeitgeist for Philadelphia.

Each year, Google tries to capture what’s on people’s mind internationally with its Zeitgest report, an insightful look at culture and mood based on a measure of the company’s gigantic search history.

But Google also completes regional evaluations, which shed light on local zeitgeist. You can see the interactive regional report here.

Google’s annual evaluation of search data shows a common thread in Philadelphia: queries on Google by locals appear to be driven by informational resources, not the news cycle or by memes, like is common nationally (Rebecca Black was the fastest rising search).

And in comparison with 2009, Google’s Philadelphia audience is changing, or its wants are. Dominated that year by requests for information related to the city’s universities, 2011 data shows an audience hungry for information about major public institutions, hospitals, retail outlets and landmarks.

Dwarfing other search queries, SEPTA claimed the highest searched term during the year. It stands alone at the top, owning what appears to be at least three times the next most-searched phrase, Philadelphia School District, as pictured above.

Third on the list, perhaps not unsurprisingly, was PA unemployment.

Following those top searches were, in order, Penn In Touch, Jefferson Hospital, Penn Blackboard, Franklin Mills Mall, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sesame Place and Reading Terminal Market.

For more detail, view the Philadelphia zeitgeist report at Google.

In-Q-Tel’s press release made clear that the investment was to improve the security and connection aggregation capability of Connectify, a consumer software solution that can turn any Windows 7 computer into a wireless hotspot.

What wasn’t reported is the reach of that product.

Connectify co-founder Alex Gizis told Technically Philly in September that the software has over 3 million downloads, including more than a million in China, where Internet censorship is a storied issue.

And though the company has turned its attention to commercial technology, and changed its name to reflect that shift, the investment isn’t the team’s first venture into state-backed tech development.

For nearly 10 years, the company has been known as Nomadio, Inc., based at the Marketplace Design Center, not far from 30th Street Station, where it has had transit access to U.S. military organizations outside of Philadelphia. Much of its work over the last decade was in creating technology to solve “super hard” networking problems in the defense field, Gizis says.

In 2005, Nomadio developed the technology used to control the EOD Bombot, a small, remote-controlled, unmanned vehicle used in the Middle East to disable improvised explosive devices, or IEDs. The company created software for reliably driving robots for miles even in the face of terrible radio interference.

The vehicles, which can travel as fast as 35 miles per hour and which are equipped with video surveillance technology, can approach an IED, dispatch a small amount of explosives, move away from its target and detonate the IED without causing damage to itself. By 2006, some 3,000 Bombots were sent to Iraq and Afganistan.

Gizis, who is 38, has been working in technology since the 90s, when he was CEO of Group Cortex, an early website development consulting firm that was sold to AnswerThink in 1999. He left the company in 2002 to start Nomadio with co-founder and CEO Bhana Grover. They created an early consumer vision of augmented reality, which got the attention of the Air Force, though the work was ahead of its time, Gizis says. That was the just the beginning of the company’s work with defense and intelligence projects.

“I believe we saved some lives. Now we want to do commercial software,” Gizis says.

A video of the Bombot technology can be seen below.

Connectify, the company’s first commercial success, is able to turn any Windows 7 PC into wireless hotspots to be shared across devices. A user can easily allow other laptops, phones and portable devices—any device with WiFi connectivity—to share a single connection without a wireless router.

Gizis told Technically Philly earlier this month that with the investment from In-Q-Tel, technology will be developed to reinvent the Virtual Private Network.

In-Q-Tel declined to participate in an interview for this story, but an announcement statement came from William Strecker, Executive Vice President of Architecture & Engineering and CTO of IQT, in a press release. “Our strategic partnership with Connectify will provide our U.S. Intelligence Community customers with access to the most advanced wireless networking software available.”

Alex Gizis, Co-founder, Nomadio/Connectify

The software will enable users to create spontaneous private networks that work in tandem to strengthen the throughput and reliability of those connections.

“Today, you dial-in to a VPN and wait until it connects. We think we can fix that by making it work magically, similar to how the iPad works now” Gizis says. “They’re looking to have the software enhanced with security features that [U.S. intelligence agencies] need.”

The idea for Connectify came from an experiment. Demoing one its military technologies that allowed for the remote control of a Humvee vehicle miles away across a wireless network, the team was baffled by their own inability to share Internet files as widely. After a late night hacking session, “we started off with a very basic feature set and suddenly we were on the front page of Slashdot,” Gizis says.

Since releasing version 3.0 of the software, Connectify became the company’s “real driver of revenue.” Today, the software has over 3 million downloads and a half-million active users. Utilizing a freemium model, users can trial a limited version for free, or they can pay $29 per year for full access to a premium version.

But in China, which claims a third of the software’s 3 million downloads, users are not paying. “We’re fulfilling some use-case there. But we’ve only sold four [premium versions] there,” Gizis says.

When asked if he thought that use-case might have been to avoid authoritarian control of the Internet, Gizis had his doubts. “If they’re watching your traffic, they’ll see this one computer going to all of these websites.”

To his point, the country’s government can simply block access to VPN and proxy servers.

A report from The Atlantic‘s James Fallows this September pointed to the popularity of and recent obstacles to Virtual Private Networks in China.

He noted China’s indifference to encrypted VPN technology in a 2008 piece, and how that’s changed in 2011. In February, “serious disruption of VPN activity began … officials from VPN companies said they were being targeted, in a way they’d never experienced before,” he wrote.

Before the announcement of investment from In-Q-Tel, Gizis told us that a Mac OS X version could be coming. After the investment, we can imagine a lot more features on the way.

Snipi, the Evernote-like application that allowed users to collect and organize web content, had pivoted to become Sidecar, an automated marketing tool for e-commerce companies.

“We’re building a system that helps e-commerce companies leverage a lot more information than what the average worker can handle on a day-to-day basis,” says Founder Andre Golsorkhi.

Andre Golsorkhi

Basically, he says, e-commerce sites often have to manage search engine marketing, on-site personalization, email personalization and other aspects of their business by constantly monitoring metrics and adjusting the campaigns accordingly. Sidecar automates the process so the site can worry about the big picture stuff.

“Many retailers can’t afford to operate all of the different systems at once. Rather than having teams of people or multiple agencies use all of these tools, we made a platform that can manage these aspects for the retailers,” he says.

The result is a dashboard where companies can monitor campaigns and tweak as needed and the product is just preparing for primetime after nearly a year of development. The first commercial beta of Sidecar launched in September 2010 with its full public launch in April 2011.

So far, the pivot is working. The company has raised $2.5 million dollars in venture capital money in August to help expand its current 12-employee workforce and Snipi has been rolled into Sidecar. Sidecar’s business model relies on taking performance-based percentages from sales resulting in marketing conducted by Sidecar.

“Our core principle is automation. We want to remove the necessity for people to do the knuckle-bleeding work. With this funding we hope to add additional components like social media or affiliate marketing,” says Golsorkhi who added that the company will hire three more employees to be based out of its Gayborhood offices at 13th and Sansom.

“There’s minutia that has to be done every day that bogs down the team, in some shops even the owner is actively involved. We want them to get to the more creative and strategic work.”

Philadelphia and e-commerce

Philadelphia is evolving into a small but thriving home for e-commerce companies and vendors. A look at a few that we’ve covered recently:

• Lamps.com, the Old City lighting provider.
• Monetate, a tool to help e-commerce companies with testing.
• QVC, the now-ubiquitous shopping network is one of Monetate’s bigger customers and was originally funded by Safeguard Scientifics and Internet Capital Group.
• Revzilla, the South Philly-based motocross online retailer.
• And the big fish, GSI Commerce which sold to eBay for $2.4 billion.
• WebLinc, the web development firm that focuses on e-commerce.

Store manager Lynh Pham holds up one of the coffee shop's tethered iPads.

In Rittenhouse, a young, corporate world expat is hoping that his experience with technology will help boost sales at his new franchise coffee shop.

Andrew Kupiec, who opened a Saxbys located at 20th and Walnut with several business partners in April, says it was the real estate potential of the location that really caught his eye when he first noticed the vacant property while he was the regional General Manager of wireless Internet provider Clearwire. In November 2009, we interviewed Kupiec in his role at Clearwire.

“I thought it could be a Clearwire retail store,” he told Technically Philly on an early morning last week, as customers filled the spacious shop.

But new leadership at the investment-backed WiMAX Internet provider brought with it a new vision which changed things for Kupiec. He left the company, and using his contacts in the real estate and investment worlds, he pitched the idea that the block could use a high-end coffeeshop. They looked to Saxbys as a Philly-known brand, and have added a custom food menu and catering opportunities to set it apart.

But the shop isn’t just high-end, it’s also high-tech. The model that Kupiec is most excited about is that the coffee shop’s tech amenities come at no cost.

In the center of the store, seven tables feature tethered iPads that customers can use for free. Employees, trained on the devices, help patrons that need assistance logging in, or signing up for their first email address.

A free computer center near the entrance of the shop features four computers. There’s no cost to use the printer connected to those computers, either. “It’s great for someone who’s late to class that needs to print a paper, or someone that needs to print airline tickets before heading to the airport,” Kupiec says.

Just inside the door, there’s a charging station for customers that need a quick-charge for their mobile devices. WiFi comes at not cost and with no time limits for customers.

All of it makes for a smart strategy that could attract discerning customers that are turned-off by shops that charge more for the tech amenities they’ve come to expect.

Kupiec says that he and his partners are now looking to possibly open three more locations, which will utilize the same technology advantages.

What he and co-founder Marc Levy have to show for it is more than 7,200 photographs of Philadelphia businesses and institutions, a number which is growing fast, and which serve as the foundation for The Jawn’s 11,000 business listings.

“I’d start with Walnut Street, for example, and it would take me about 2 hours to walk, stop, shoot, walk, stop, shoot,” Sanchez says. He’d gather 300 to 400 business locations on a street through this method.

The service, which launched two years ago and has made some more notable headway in 2011 (the company has been able to produce about 2,000 user reviews from more than 400 users) — is similar to Yelp and other mapped listing services, which they hope will be made more powerful by local perspective.

“A lot of these websites that give this information are really crap. I thought we should create something that people can use and benefit the city,” he says.

“We wanted to create something that wasn’t the Silicon Valley one-size-fits-all model.”

Co-founder Marc Levy pictured left. Co-founder Jeremy Sanchez, right.

Sanchez, who was born and raised in Brooklyn, moved to Philadelphia to attend Temple University says he doesn’t “plan on leaving for a very long time.”

It’s with this local focus in mind that The Jawn is also utilizing an increasingly common startup hook: giving back. The Jawn promises to provide a five percent donation to charitable organizations through the revenue it will generate. EatShopGive, a local daily deals site launched last month, follows a similar charitable model.

Though the partners are not yet full-time with the endeavor — Sanchez makes a living designing websites for consulting clients — they are actively seeking investment with the hopes of being profitable by next summer and eventually expanding to additional cities with the same homegrown data emphasis.

Using a freemium model that targets businesses that want control over their listing, the company has signed up 40 businesses to free accounts, a handful of which have upgraded to its nine dollar per month premium service. The paid offering allows a business to control its listing information, images and post upcoming events. Customers also get a vanity URL, and the ability to reply to and if necessary, can request to remove reviews.

With plans to redesign this fall, the company is heads-down trying to grow its modest traffic (less than 1,000 users per day) before it focuses on growing its revenue.

“I’m still a broke college student,” Sanchez says.

“In the United States, if you want to reach a million users in a consumer play, you need to convince one in 260 people to use your product,” McQueen wrote.

It’s something that is easy to miss between the headlines of TechCruch, that same publication that makes the startup environment seem so exciting.

The enterprise — the business-to-business marketplace for software — is gaining more and more attention. TechCrunch has devoted a section to enterprise news, and Technically Philly has done its fair share, like coverage of Emerging Technology for the Enterprise, an international conference dedicated to the space, which takes place right in our Old City backyard.

It’s a growing market. In June, Gartner reported that the industry is on pace to surpass $267 billion in international revenue in 2011.

And though Wayne’s HardMetrics isn’t rewriting the rules of enterprise software deployment, it’s a great example of the prowess of enterprise business and its Philadelphia impact.

The company helps call centers measure performance with sophisticated software.

For example, companies like Motorola and its consumer handheld division, one of HardMetric’s “cornerstone” clients outsource global help desk operations to third-party operators. Each day, as HardMetrics Chief Executive Officer Rob Winner tells it, “there’s an extremely huge mountain of data coming in.”

What HardMetrics customers want is real-time context for decision makers to analyze those third-party operators to see where performance is and isn’t, Winner says. With that kind of information, decision makers can move business away from inefficient partners.

And like many other enterprise providers, which were once typically housed behind internal company firewalls, more and more companies are moving to SaaS solutions, and offering attractive packaging, like HardMetrics’ recent web optimization for tablet computers like the iPad and Android devices.

“Maybe you have 1,000 people sitting in a call center making and taking calls. It enables somebody to get out on the floor with a tablet and make decisions immediately,” Winner says.

The company began as a startup in 2003. It took 18 months to build the technology and the product was first launched in 2005, Winner says. In 2006, the company raised $4 million from two early-stage venture capital firms, NextStage Capital and Osage Ventures.

Today, the company has about 20 staffers and is expected to grow this year. And Winner says the private company was driving profit in its first 12 months and is still turning quarter-on-quarter growth.

Winner, who was born and raised in South Jersey and lives in Doylestown, noted some of the company’s neighbors in Wayne.

Just down Swedesford Road, where HardMetrics is located, is Evolve IP, another successful business-results based enterprise service. As we wrote in a 2009 piece on that company, in 2007, Evolve received a $15.4 million investment from private entities that, then, was said to one of the largest information technology investments in Philadelphia in the last decade.

It’s a good block on which to be located. After all, let McQueen, the enterprise entrepreneur above, remind us: “Businesses Spend Money.”

Don’t call it the Farmer’s Almanac 2.0.

That historic publication, founded in 1818 in New Jersey, seems to have met its match. Bethlehem-based WeatherTrends360, a service provider and, now, consumer product offering, is doing something similar: trying to predict the next year’s weather.

Unlike the Almanac, which relies on predictions around the solar cycle, WeatherTrends360 is using complex algorithms based on historical weather data. And the company is helping large companies plan business strategies by understanding what they weather will be like during important sales cycles.

The company claims that it can predict weather with 80 percent accuracy.

“[Companies] need to know how much to buy, where to put it, when to promote it, how to advertise it,” says Co-Founder Bill Kirk [No relation to the author].

Companies like Wal-Mart, one of its first customers, Coca Cola and 150 other major customers are using the service to understand just how cold the winter might be, or when the first summer heat wave will hit. That information can help sell jackets or air conditioners.

And now, with the introduction of an iPhone app, the company is hoping to tune consumers into predictive weather patterns to help plan vacations, weddings and more.

“Who hasn’t planned a vacation, a wedding and not checked the weather,” Kirk asks. “We can almost guarantee 8 out of 10 times that we can nail that week for you,” he says.

What else does the data tell us?

“Right now, we’re seeing [weather patterns] similar to the 70s. The sun and oceans are in a similar phase,” Kirk says. That kind of data is matched with statistics around climate cycles and historic meteorology data collected from 66 governments, universities and other institutions from around the globe.

The technology started 22 years ago, says Kirk, when he was enlisted in the Air Force and helping it make flying operations safer by understanding the weather.

And after founding the company in 2002, signing Wal-Mart up for the service opened the flood gates, Kirk says, to other companies. Now, with its iPhone offering, the company is excited to connect with consumers who may have never heard of long-range weather forecasting.

Previously located in Plymouth Meeting through 2006, the company is made up of meteorologists, climatologists and statisticians. It’s a small staff, the number of which it wouldn’t disclose, but one that is reliant on computer technology rather than workforce.

It’s a venture capital-backed private company, having raised $6.5 million in a Series A round of fundraising — from investors like Philadelphia’s Trestle Ventures and Kodiak Venture Partneres and others — to expand globally through 2009 that it has since bought back. The company reached profitability in 2008, Kirk says.

“Every phase of our lives is impacted by weather,” Kirk says. “It’s all about putting the power of future weather in the palm of your hands.”

If you’re wondering how to scale a company fast, take a look at the trajectory of Skillshare, a New York-based startup intent on creating a market for educational classes in major cities across the country and globe.

The company, which began gaining public attention in April, is opening its service to Philadelphia as soon as August 16, organizers say.

Skillshare allows anyone to create a class or enroll in someone else’s, essentially creating a DIY education marketplace on a local level. The company suggests that its classes could be a potential business channel for companies or freelancers, and could be a revenue stream in and of itself. In New York, where the site has already launched, the site recommends that teachers set an average admission price of $25.

The classes could be a boon for local tech education, but it’s perhaps the company’s nimble scaling with seemingly modest publicly-known investment which make it more interesting to entrepreneurs.

One of Skillshare’s local coordinators, Brendan Lowry — who’s been working with the project since June and has been helping to fiercely run the company’s Philly Twitter campaign— says the company is currently relying on word of mouth and grassroots marketing. It’s clear from the chatter that it’s staying heavy on the social media and good ‘ole fashioned in-person meetings.

Skillshare’s is a labor intensive marketing push that clearly is backed by operational interest in Philly (as well as 50 other U.S. and international cities) and, of course, financial investment. The company raised a round of angel funding in May to the tune of $550,000, according to TechCrunch. But that figure seems low considering the company’s aggressive, simultaneous push to additional markets, like San Francisco.

It’s moving fast. And it’s clever: though Philly is not yet “unlocked,” like 50 other cities that are listed as possible locations for the Skillshare service, you are encouraged by the site to get involved: “Unlock Philadelphia & Become a City Founder,” a page encourages the reader. Trust us: it’s already here.

The concept of Catball Eats It All, a developing new mobile game with ties to Philly, is simple.

Your goal is to eat everything in sight. The more you eat, the bigger you get. And the bigger you are, the more you’re able to eat.

There’s not a lot innovative about that.

The members of the development team Broken Compass Studios, coordinated by Project Manager Jeff Hsu, were inspired by games like Katamari Damacy, where players collect objects on a sticky ball that gets bigger and bigger, and Super Mario Galaxy, where the player inhabits small orbiting worlds instead of recognizable two-dimensional Mario levels.

But where Catball is unique is in its art direction.

The concept art and mockups created for this in-progress development are all hand-painted, which gives the game a feeling of unpolished yet sophisticated perfectionism.

Yisrawayl Goodwin, aka NoseGo, painted the exterior of the new defunct Tyson Bees food truck

The art is produced by the increasingly recognizable Philly native street artist Yisrawayl Goodwin — who friends call Yis for short, but is known as NoseGo in the art world. You may have seen his work covering the side of the under-new-ownership Tyson Bees food truck, or his mural on the side of a building at 4th and Porter streets in South Philadelphia, commissioned by the Mural Arts Program.

Composer Ben Thornewill, a member of local band Jukebox the Ghost, which is making strides itself, has committed to making the game’s soundtrack.

The game’s art production process is delicate.

A designer comes up with a concept and creates a basic blueprint for a level in Adobe Illustrator. The blueprint is imported in the the iOS software developers kit and physics are added, and the edges and shapes of the blueprint are refined. The designer then sends the Illustrator file to Goodwin, who prints it out and crafts it by hand.

“The image is tabloid size sheet of paper, larger than legal or letter size,” Goodwin says. “We have to make sure it’s larger then what we are reducing it to so the quality isn’t lost. I keep it pretty traditional to what I normally do, using mixed media with an aerosol base, acrylic on top of that, then for fine detail, use a fine paintbrush or marker.”

Then the print is scanned back into digital form and edited in Photoshop. If the painting doesn’t match up perfectly, the team adds a few other software manipulations to make it work.

Left: Original Illustrator level concept; Right: Painted final product

The visuals are a striking difference when compared to popular vector-based games like Angry Birds, which is currently a leading mobile game.

With its unique approach, the team is in the final days of an attempt to raise money to support the project — specifically, the team says it’s raising money for licensing fees and to support art and music production costs — on Kickstarter.

With only six days left in the campaign, and not yet half way to it’s goal, the team has raised $1,860 of its $4,000, with 56 supporters behind the project.

Hsu, who coordinates the team from New York, says that even if the fundraising campaign isn’t fully committed, the team will press on. It wouldn’t be the first time the team had to make an unexpected change.

Originally, plans were to create a children’s e-book based around the Catball character. But the medium shifted as the production team came together. Hsu was in touch with a pair of game developers based in Salt Lake City, Utah, who liked the idea, and since then, the group has taken the book idea and turned it into a game built for mobile devices. The team hopes to launch the game this fall, with a port to Android to follow.

“When we first got to talking, we all shared a love of games. We were looking at Yis’s art, the really cute, fuzzy characters,” Hsu says. They agreed that making a game was the best way to realize the concept.

To date, nearly everyone on the team is working other full-time jobs and working on Catball in their spare time. Goodwin is a full-time artist, doing commissioned work, murals and working on retail designs for t-shirts and toys. The team’s two developers are students that are working on the application before fall semester begins.

To keep things in order, the team meets nightly by conference call. “What makes it work is that everyone is really motivated and really excited for the project,” Hsu says.

“Hopefully when it’s finished, it would be like a playable painting,” Goodwin says.

In the sixth inning of a Phillies game earlier this month, this author sat in the 416 section of Citizens Bank Park and snapped a photo of the packed stadium as Cliff Lee led the Dodgers 2-0.

It was perhaps an unremarkable moment, simply another photo from another corner of the park, one of many taken personally in the past, but a marker of an experience worth saving, perhaps. After all, for this author, it’s not every day that one gets to attend a Major League game.

But it’s maybe more indicative of an increasing tendency — compulsion, maybe — to want to share these markers online.

For Frank Panko, a South Philly art director with an interest in sports and some extra time on his hands, these photographs are a business opportunity.

“Whenever I’m at a game, there’s a ton of people taking photos constantly, sharing on Facebook and Twitter,” says Panko, co-founder and developer of A View from My Seat, a product which collects photos submitted by users, of, quite literally, the view of the field from seats at sports venues.

Though it’s a Philly-born idea — the 36-year-old lives with his wife about two blocks from Pat’s and Geno’s cheesesteak restaurants — Panko says he’s looking beyond Citizens Bank Park.

He thinks that sharing photos at venues could be turned into a much more lucrative idea. A View from My Seat could be great for ticket sales, he says. As it exists now, purchasing tickets online leads users to plain seating charts, or for the more technologically advanced venues, photographs of empty fields, or virtual representations of those fields.

In a phone interview last week, shortly after this author unknowingly snapped a potential View from My Seat photo submission — Panko posited a question: What if, when purchasing tickets from sports teams, you could see real photos of games in progress, like the ones taken by his users?

“With the Phillies online ticket sales, you can click [to see what the view is like], but you don’t get a good idea of what it’s like during the game,” he says.


But that path, which could be the service’s primary revenue model, has resulted because the product itself is already building a strong user base.

Panko says that the service has collected photos from every Major League Baseball team, and nearly 90 percent of professional basketball and football teams. Logistically, Panko and his wife together oversee a database which stores more than a thousand venues across professional and collegiate teams.

Six thousand photos live in A View from My Seat, submitted by 25,000 registered users that have downloaded the Android app or logged on to the website. Panko, who is an art director for a local web development and design firm that he chose not to disclose, developed by himself the mobile application and the web site.

That’s after more than a year of availability. Beta versions of software were launched last July to a bumpy, buggy start, he says. But early this month, View from My Seat was officially pulled from beta status, now that those bugs have been fixed.

Still, in this local universe of startups, that kind of traction — which was achieved with little advertising and marketing — caught our eye. Panko says that a promotion in partnership with T-Mobile, which highlighted sports Android apps drove downloads this fall. And during baseball spring training this year, interest in the new season brought a big gain in submissions.

The product isn’t generating profit. Panko says that he’s committed to gaining a following, first. But he’s not blind to building relationships with ball parks, starting first with minor league teams, who often have more limited seating resources on their ticket sales sites. And he’s interested in ticket resellers, like StubHub.

But if Panko’s mission is true, then for now, that outlet for sharing experiences at professional sports venues is available, growing and built locally.

And the season’s just started.