The three founders of an application aiming to interject social media into TV watching got an education in Philadelphia but their addresses — and the buzz surrounding their startup — are in the familiar bi-coastal entertainment hubs.
As the web has buzzed for some time now, PHILO is a web and iPhone application that has its users ‘tune in’ to the TV programs they are watching in the same way Foursquare users ‘check in’ to physical locations, then pushing a conversation discussing shows in a “newsfeed-like conversation” as Mashable put it.
Like others before them, the three founders put time in at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in the 1990s but don’t call the region home. CEO David Levy, who also heads the Wharton Angel Network, and CTO Carter Page are in New York City, and Greg Goldman calls Los Angeles home.
For the next few months, artists will have a chance to display their digital work on the iconic PECO Building’s crown lights.
The opportunity comes from Art in the Air, a joint project between University City Science Center‘s Breadboard technology arts program and PECO. Each month through December, three selected digital art pieces will be displayed on First Friday atop the building, which is situated on Market Street along the Schuylkill River and which is a striking part of the city’s skyline.
PECO installed its iconic LED signage to replace an older technology in late 2008 and officially lit the billboard on the Fourth of July, last year. The board is made up of 118 40-foot long LED columns, according to Eastern Sign Tech, LLC, the Atlantic City-based company that installed the setup.
“When they changed it, I missed the old PECO building. The ads all looked the same, like a PC presentation from 1991,” Klip Principal and Creative Director Ricardo Rivera says. “So I’m stoked that they’re putting some actual art up there, because it’s a great iconic canvas for digital media.” Read more
Except, when the social network launched in 2003, Gibbard wasn’t thinking about how valuable it could be to a business trying to reach customers.
He just knew it was going to be big. That thought never left his mind as he jumped to MySpace and later Facebook — which just last week passed an epic 500 million user milestone — always head of the curve.
“I saw the power that the Web has at connecting people, reconnecting with someone or connecting with someone you met recently,” he says. “Prior to these technologies, we didn’t have that.” Read more
Online dating sites ought to have nearer the success rate as a search engine, says John Myles White.
“When you compare the people that big dating sites suggest to you with the pages that Google gives you in response to a search, the difference is staggering,” says Myles White, a Ph.D candidate in Princeton’s psychology department.
John Myles White
Last week, Myles, 28, and partner Jim Keller, 29, the founder and CEO of Willow Grove-based web development and strategy company Context, announced the launch of Junebug, what they call their answer to “the lack of innovation in online dating.”
The duo is entering the crowded online dating scene because they say their competition isn’t leveraging contemporary statistical techniques to their fullest extent. Now all they need are the users and data to prove it.
If Bart Mroz was pushed to give you a piece of advice, it just might be to limit yourself.
The founder of the recently re-branded SUMO Heavy Industries says a lot of firms doing web work get caught up in trying to do too many things and come up short doing them well.
“We started as a web development company that did all kinds of things like brochure sites and app development for different clients,” Mroz tells Technically Philly. “Then we decided to only do e-commerce work — the best decision that we made.”
In March 2008, Mroz co-founded round3media and by last November, Mroz had learned his greatest skills were focusing strictly on e-commerce site development. After his two partners in round3 wanted to work on different projects, Mroz started anew, launching e-commerce heavy SUMO with new partner Robert Brodie and creative director John Suder.
With a new name and a freshly announced, local client, Mroz is — and forgive us for this — entering the dohyō and fighting to build his company’s name as the top e-commerce development company in the region.
It was only a matter of time until Philadelphia’s graffiti scene was given a digital upgrade.
At least, that was the thinking behind Drexel University’s Social Graffiti project, which projected digital animations and interactive messages on the side of the university’s Nesbitt Hall early this month.
Team leader Matthew Morton, who just graduated last week with a bachelor’s in digital media from Drexel, worked with five other members of the media school to develop the project. Inspired by Comcast Center’s video wall, the team used 3D animation and videography techniques to creatively—and temporarily—alter the building’s facade.
Optical illusions, like one scene where it appears as if the walls of the building are being pulled back, revealing its inside, were used throughout the projections.
Most notably, folks could “paint” the building with custom messages, the heart of the graffiti project. Anyone could tweet text to the project’s twitter account, which would be displayed on the side of the building at 33rd and Market.
“The Twitter messages were the next step in finding out how the piece could be interactive,” Morton says. In order to display the tweets, the production team used Twitter’s API to automatically broadcast 140-character messages directed at the Social Graffiti account.
Launched on first of June, the team was only able to run the event for a week. After all, the projector, a Christie Roadster HD 18,000 lumen monstrosity, cost about $11,000 per week to rent.
The project needed an extremely capable rig, since the projector shot from across the street in the Pearlstein building, 180 feet away. In order to fit the tall, thin facade of Nesbitt, the team turned the projector on its side to cover a greater portion of the wall.
Funding for the project was raised within the university and the team also tapped local tech companies to fill gaps. On three displays installed for the occasion above the entrance of the building, sponsors were given credit for their donations, Morton says.
It wasn’t a hard sell to university administrators. The team has even been trying to find funding to permanently install a similar projection system on campus.
It could be a valuable addition, Morton says. The project is a unique way of combining digital arts with the natural urban environment. “You engage an unsuspecting audience that way. No one coming down Market Street would have heard about it unless they came across it,” Morton says.
Winning is not entirely free, as WHYY reported in a follow up on our interview with Pahlka. The city would put out $225,000 for expenses, though CFA organizers say the talent they receive will exceed $1 million.
The other winning cities are Boston, Washington D.C., Seattle and Boulder, Colo.
According to a report from business organization platform Basecamp and economic development group Select Greater Philadelphia, business networking events held in the region are going strong.
Five-hundred organizations held 3,504 events last year, with nearly 300 held per month. The kicker—nearly half of the events hosted were put together by 25 organizations, with the top ten groups having hosted 31 percent of all events in the region. We see that trend often in our own events coverage. Read more
From Left: Jacob Gray, Len Lodish, Gil Beyda, Nate Lentz, Tom Balderson, Josh Kopelman
After stopping in Austin, Texas and the 67th Ward, GoodCompany Ventures has finally come home.
Last week, like they did in New York City, the socially-minded incubator gathered some of the sharpest local minds in venture capital to discuss the future of “social entrepreneurship” and to drum up attention for the incubator’s 2010 class, now accepting members until April 28.
Packed into the Blank Rome Conference Center, just off of Logan Square, journalists, students, investors, CEOs and entrepreneurs listened closely as the whirlwind presentations culminated into panel debate.
The result was an analysis of the local venture capital community and a spirited discussion about the merits of “social” investing. Read more
A few weeks after a disastrous 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 150,000 people, Peter Groverman was organizing.
By the end of his planning, Groverman—a Villanova law student and CEO of local advertising startup Tapinko—had brought together 126 people from around the world and 40,000 pounds of cargo, including $1 million in medical supplies, which all travelled on an airplane chartered to fly to Haiti last month.
It was another drill for Groverman, who first began organizing relief efforts when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and he gathered 40 students to head to New Orleans. But Groverman says another Philadelphia entity was helping drive his recent mission: Rittenhouse-based mobile payment startup Venmo.
Using the text message-based payment system, Groverman was able to raise $50,000 immediately—when that immediacy was vital. “Venmo [was] the whole backbone of our fundraising effort,” he says. “I cant imagine any nonprofit not using text message-based donation systems. There’s no need for a check, no need to go to a bank to deposit. I didn’t have time for checks to come.” Read more
It seems as though the City of Philadelphia will get a helping hand in its quest to move forward with 
