Pricing on Benjamin's Desk coworking options.

A Juicy Couture and an upscale nail salon wouldn’t seem to be likely building mates for a soon-to-be coworking space, but a trio in Rittenhouse say they are in the process of building Benjamin’s Desk into just that sort of space.

Michael and Jennifer Maher and their co-founder Mike Goldstein have plans to offer 32 open desks, three private offices and six permanent desks to both short-term and longer-term members across a variety of industries looking for office space in Center City starting this April.

Unlike other Philly-based coworking spaces — like, most prominently, Indy Hall — the Mahers and Goldstein hope Benjamin’s Desk will differentiate itself by offering a more corporate environment that includes a range of business services, including tactical business consulting, mail services and private phone lines.

“We look at ourselves as a hybrid,” said Michael, an active duty Naval Officer, adding that he expects to house a mix of tech startups and independent service providers who want the flexibility and collaboration of coworking but a more traditional workplace setting.

Naval Officer Lt. Michael Maher overlooking his plans for renovating the 7th floor of 1701 Walnut Street.

Cape May natives both, Michael, 29, and his wife Jennifer, an attorney at Pepper Hamilton in Center City, came here looking to be entrepreneurs. Among a host of other ventures he boasts, Michael says the two own a screen printing business called Express Custom Apparel, as well as another company that plans to produce corn-hole tournaments down the shore and equity in an Atlantic City web design firm.

The idea for Benjamin’s Desk came about in January 2010 when Michael was combing through an article on coworking. Also a business school student at Villanova’s Center City campus, Michael began researching the market for a professional, multi-industry coworking space in Center City. As he tells it, when his projections seemed to check out, he and his wife, who live in Rittenhouse, started looking for real estate and settled on 1701 Walnut Street about a year ago. Negotiations and plans have been on the go since.

Right now, however, the space on the 7th floor of the Allman Building at 17th and Walnut streets is empty and dated, facing a $150,000 remodeling, Maher said. Below, watch a short walk through of the space that is scheduled for a large-scale renovation.

“Center City is growing, from a resident’s standpoint and a jobs standpoint,” Michael said. “More people are living here. More people are working here.”

Benjamin’s Desk seeks to be “Philadelphia’s premier shared office and coworking space for professionals,” Michael is quick to say, but with so many projects in the works it will be interesting to see whether the Mahers and Goldstein can foster a professional community that offers value in a market with a growing array of colocation options.

Evan Kalish

For much of its 220 year history, the U.S. Postal Service was something of a technology company: speeding communication and commerce through innovation, says postal geek Evan Kalish.

Today, in batch machines that can process 40,000 pieces of mail per hour, some 95 percent of handwritten addresses are properly dispatched by OCR technology, the 25 year old student in Penn’s master of urban spatial analytics program.

“[The machines work] from the ZIP code first, then to the address and select the proper street from the limited number of options available, tagging them with the bar codes that you can see on the bottom of first-class letters you receive. Human operators resolve the rest of the addresses remotely,” said Kalish, who lives in University City. “With Delivery Point Sequencing, another machine properly sort the mail for dozens of carriers in proper delivery order, based on their routes, with just two passes of the mail through the system.”

From today to the first ‘fully automated post office‘ back to the pneumatic mail tubes of the past, Kalish, a native of Queens, N.Y., has discovered new corners of the world’s original modern national postal system while writing his popular Going Postal blog, which has been profiled by Time magazine, the Washington Post, BBC and NPR.

All the stories use young Kalish as something of a juxtaposition for growing news of inevitable cutbacks at the U.S. Postal Service. While no doubt an important issue to Kalish, he says the best he can do is grow interest in what remains an impressive organization.

The blog kicked off in September 2010 as a way to share photos and stories about the postal service with other devotees of the historic agency, says Kalish, who did his undergrad work at Brown University.

The first effort followed a cross-country road trip but has grown from there.

“My newer entries have also been more in-depth, and shares the broader experience and anecdotes of rolling into any given town, as opposed to just showing a photograph of its post office.  I think it’s more relatable and I’ve gotten positive feedback with respect to my unique telling of my postal visits,” he said.

While his post office trekking has taken him across the country, it has also helped him get to know Philadelphia better, by visiting 45 21 offices in the city’s neighborhoods.

“There were three post offices that I had to visit because I knew they were likely to close: the Adams Avenue, Girard Avenue, and Wissonoming stations.  Those were all discontinued April this year,” he said. “Two offices I’ve enjoyed a lot in Philadelphia are Spring Garden on North 7th Street and Southwark at 925 Dickinson. Both are historic buildings constructed during the 1930s as part of Roosevelt’s WPA program, and each features a great interior mural. This is how the government kept artists working during the Depression.”

Kalish lobbied the Postal Service to donate a unique sign from the Wissinoming office to the Post Mark Collectors Club museum in Bellevue Museum and adds that Manayunk’s is unique for featuring a street level parking garage beneath the post office.

I have never seen that before or since,” he said, but, of course, being in Philadelphia, it’s hard to top the B. Free Franklin Post Office in Old City that was the nation’s first.

“Overall, my favorite post office, at least in terms of architecture, is that of Greenville, PA.  Its sheer grandeur, combined with unique materials and fantastic architectural details, make it a true standout,” Kalish says. “It’s tough to pick a general favorite since I’m fortunate to have had great postal experiences all across the country.”

As you might guess, most teenagers in Philadelphia are, quite simply, not violent, flash mobbing ne’er-do-wells.

Like their counterparts elsewhere, they’re students, who like clothes and sports and friends. And they care a lot about how others see them.

So it might make sense that when organizers of the University Community Collaborative of Philadelphia, a youth leadership nonprofit housed at Temple University, were looking for a new outlet for the nearly 15-year-old group that its students wanted to create a news program to fight negative perceptions of themselves.

Not enough positive youth voices are being heard above the din of violent exceptions, the group argues.

Meet What’s POPPYN, a quarterly, half-hour online news show about teenage issues in Philadelphia: produced, starring and featuring the group’s participants. This month, the show’s sixth episode launched, focusing on global issues and how local kids are getting involved, and shorter segments are being produced every couple weeks.

“We highlight how young people are positively contributing to their schools, communities and organizations and their voices on local and national issues,” said Natalia Smirnov, the initiative’s media productions and communications manager. “Ultimately, we hope that POPPYN helps to change the perception of young people in the city as criminals, drop-outs, violent flash mobbers, poorly educated.”

Founded in 1997 by Temple political science professor Barbara Ferman, UCCP began as a community-based research project, adding youth programming in 2001 and beginning to focus on leadership development in 2006 and has done a lot of work to connect young leaders.

This year, with a small grant from the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development, Poppyn started with four college-aged young people who had been involved in past UCCP programming, said Smirnov.

“The original team had been frustrated with representations of youth in the media and wanted to create their own positive alternative,” Smirnov said. Each episode is created, produced and starring six to 10 young people, including students from public and charter schools and a smattering of college volunteers, many of whom have been involved with UCCP programming for years. The group, which finds its members through its own programming, is often seeking other interested young people.

No one involved in the project had TV production experience, but rather took an interested group of young people and found partnerships, including strong support from PhillyCAM, said Smirnov.

Smirnov offered a few ideas to help support their cause:

• Submit comments on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter: “It means a lot to our youth producers to to know that the show is being watched and liked and would be great to get some more public feedback.”
• Pitch ideas: Organizations that are supporting youth-led projects and activities can pitch their stories to us on whatspoppyn AT gmail.com.
• Host a screening: “We’re looking for teachers to host screenings in their classrooms,” said Smirnov. “We’ll come and do a workshop for free with them. We also had a lot of fun covering a Philly public school graduation last year — we did South Philly High School — and are looking for schools that want to have their school’s graduation featured on POPPYN.”
• Offer expertise: If you have background in video production or in dissemination, get involved by emailing whatspoppyn AT gmail.com.

Simon Hauger, one of the lead organizers of the Workshop School, an alternative high school experience launched this academic year at the Navy Yard.

Four years ago, Stefon Gonzalez was a freshman at West Philly High School.

Like others interested in working with his hands at the school since the late 1990s, Gonzalez joined the Hybrid X Team, an after school program that grew national fame for building electric and bio-diesel cars that outperformed college-level teams. Now Gonzalez is finishing his high school career at an experimental, project-based program at the Navy Yard.

This fall, the Hybrid X group, started by West Philly High teacher Simon Hauger, has launched the Workshop School, which embodies the science-driven, hands-on learning of the after school program but expands it to a full school day. Featuring 29 seniors from three different public high schools, Hauger’s effort is housed in a Victorian building overlooking hulking ships at the Navy Yard.

When Technically Philly visited on a cool, bright November morning, the students were in a half dozen groups, working through different assignments as part of a project to build a solar-powered workshop on the building’s front lawn. One team was charged with financing its construction, another with design and building materials, another with site planning, another with permitting. The school, which was also developed by Hauger’s former West Philly High colleagues Michael Clapper, C. Aiden Downey and Matthew Riggan, and has been a concept in their minds for more than a decade.

Discussions and projects drive the curriculum, and hands-on action trumps much else.

The school is funded in part by a grant from the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster and endorsed by the School District, which is administering the school’s lunch program, said board member Ann Cohen.

Below, watch a short video documentary.

What does it take to receive more than 50,000 downloads in Apple’s App Store with an education app dedicated to ornithology?

Sometimes, that kind of success is about a firm’s ability to be flexibile when projects don’t go exactly as planned.

Though an original pitch to an educational institution for a bird-watching app didn’t pan out, it gave Old City-based interactive firm I-SITE a chance to show off its iOS and Android development chops and to approach a new partner.

So it is that this summer, I-SITE and Iridescent Learning, a science education nonprofit, launched Build A Bird for iOS and Android, a free game that teaches children about bird science and ecology.

The app — which lets kids “build” flying creatures with a touch of physics for good measure — was even featured in Apple’s App Store, owing to the bump in downloads. The bird angle — considering the success of Angry Birds — surely didn’t hurt traffic.

Producer Jon Gross, who also contributed user interface and user experience expertise to the project, says that the concept was molded in Flash and then ported to iOS and Android devices using Adobe Flash Builder and Adobe AIR.

After that, success was all about good marketing.

The I-SITE team, made up of seven full-time employees and which fluxuates to a dozen or more when bigger projects come along, works with clients like The Downtown Lower Manhattan Alliance and Deloitte. These consulting projects have helped the organization learn about how to market their products, partnerships and client work, especially having developed a following of its own. It’s also given the company a clearer vision for how to delegate and decide on new projects.

The company splits its work among client, educational and nonprofit projects, like Build A Bird and iGorrilla, an app dedicated to informing people about Africa’s endangered mountain gorilla.

Gross says that I-SITE has four or five regular, major pharmaceutical clients that enable it work on the more altruistic projects on the side.

“We like to focus on anything that can help communities, whether local or in Africa. That’s our passion,” he says.

More about Iridescent, below.

This weekend, Trophy Bikes owner Mike McGettigan’s nostalgic technology showcase will be back on display.

As part of DesignPhiladelphia this Saturday afternoon, owners of old equipment, like typewriters, cassette tape records, boom boxes and hi-fi cabinets will gather at Fergie’s Pub to show off their dated gear at Tape ‘N Type.

The event will feature a speed typing competition, and the chance to swap mixtapes, with a slew of prizes. RSVP here.

Last December, McGettigan launched his Type-in event at 30th St. Station, similar in scope. The new event calls back to the charm of audio equipment before compact discs and digital downloads.

Below, NewsWorks covers the Type-in.

SpotCrime.com screenshot showing its database goes back several years, older than many other services online.

On May 7, 1998, 23-year-old Wharton Ph.D student Shannon Schieber was strangled to death on her second-floor apartment by Troy Graves, who would later be characterized as a serial Center City rapist.

That’s about the time when Colin Drane first moved near 22nd and Chestnut streets in Center City.

“I believe this was part of my inspiration to inform the public and help catch bad guys,” Drane, 41, said. It felt like a Penn student was assaulted every day that September, he added.

His form of detective work? Data. In 2007, Drane launched SpotCrime.com, one of a handful of national city crime data aggregation tools. Drane has been collecting crime reports in Philadelphia for more than four years, first by scraping news reports, then through a daily data dump from the police department.

Colin Drane

Last year, SpotCrime.com, published by Drane’s parent company ReportSee, was sued, in a landmark case, by PublicEngines, the company behind SpotCrime.com and last month’s partnership announcement with the Philadelphia Police. The case, settled out of court, was watched closely and, in the end, resulted in a decision that SpotCrime, which scrapes free resources, couldn’t use information from CrimeReports, which partners, like it did here in Philadelphia, with crime safety organizations.

SpotCrime was using a public feed from Irving, TX “for free for three years,” when it was recently turned off by the police department in exchange for the CrimeReports proprietary system, Drane said.

“That’s an important story,” Drane said, but he can’t legally talk about it, as part of the settlement.

Currently, SpotCrime tracks some 500 feeds, but, as Drane says, “it fluctuates because [while] many cities are becoming open with their data… some are moving their data behind [other] proprietary systems.”

Drane pointed to Omega, one of the industry’s big players, which just added terms of use that cut off SpotCrime from using data from Omega’s partners, which number in the hundreds of U.S. cities, Drane said, and restrict even manually recording and distributing the information.

“The data is much more valuable if you have monopoly control. It is bad for the public because access is limited,” Drane said. “The optimal value to the public is to make it free to everyone and increase the probability that the public is going to be more informed and ultimately safer. But, if you are going to allow a monopoly of the data, then the entity receiving the monopoly control should probably pay for that control.”

SpotCrime was launched to remain open, he said.

The site launched in 2007 in Baltimore, where Drane moved around 2000 to open up an office for a shipping company he was launching. After selling it and launching SpotCrime in Baltimore, he then followed up with Dallas and Washington D.C., where there were existing open police data feeds — and then launched in his old home, Philadelphia that year.

Now still living in Baltimore, Drane says Philadelphia remains one of his bigger markets, sending out 30,000 daily emails here out of 3.5 million sent every month nationally.

ReportSee has two employees and, though he’s involved in other projects (like recently publishing a true crime book), he spends “90 percent” of his time on SpotCrime and its related cirime data sites.

“We consider ourselves a news organization,” Drane said, “and so we take the sharing of information that important.”

Spotcrime.com, which is funded by advertising, “isn’t the prettiest site,” Drane said. “We’re like craligslist, no frills, just what you need. We’re more about the distribution because we just want the information available.”

For anyone that’s tried to hire a job candidate, using a traditional jobs board can be a challenge.

In many cases, after a job has been posted, applications, resumes and material have to be collected manually through email responses from candidates.

To solve this problem, Cherry Hill’s John de la Rosa and Philadelphia co-founder Kotaro Fujita recently launched JobMuncher, a SaaS product that aims to centralize the hiring experience for employers and potential employees.

Using the site’s online dashboard, employers can communicate with applicants and offer jobs to them directly on the site. Candidates then have the opportunity to accept or decline an offer in the dashboard.

JobMuncher utilizes a fremium model. The first job post is free for businesses, and monthly pay plans are available after that, from a standard offering of 10 jobs per month for $19.95/mo to a premium offering that includes 100 jobs, and additional tools, like notetaking and a calendar for interviewing, for $199.99 per month.

In the backend, the user interface is clean and easy to understand. Color-coded buttons give overseers the ability to quickly see which applications have been rejected, interviews, or offered. And a document viewer makes it easy to see posted resumes without having to download the files separately. Management can add notes applicants’ files and rate them, as well.

Though de la Rosa says he is considering a white label model, for now, companies can create their own vanity URL on the site and upload branding and customization for each job listing repository.

For the past year, de la Rosa and his partner have been bootstrapping the startup, covering costs including operation, marketing, development and hosting. He says that since launching earlier this year, a half-dozen companies are using and evaluating the software, including a local restaurant owner who will be filling staff at two new locations for management, cooks and waiters, and a Groupon competitor looking to expand its national team.

Through September, JobMuncher is offering its Premium package free of cost for three months, valued at $399.90. To enroll, sign-up for the Premium offering and use the code “summerheat”.

Ben Ashpole has a technology company, and its first product is the infomercial-ready Pocket Grill, boasted to be “the first full-sized grill that fits in your pocket.”

And with a Kickstarter campaign, he’s aiming to push the first round of the grills into the market.

After leaving a job working on software for “a certain large defense contractor with offices in the region” in 2006 and earning a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania, Ashpole starting growing a list of software clients for what would become Bashpole Inc. in 2008. But all along, he had hobby projects, tinkering and tweaking existing products and dreaming up new ones.

By spring 2009, Ashpole’s hobbyist tinkering had grown enough that he thought there might be another business there. He posted an ad on Penn’s student job listings and on craigslist: “something like ‘entrepreneur has backlog of projects, seeks assistance,” he said. One of those projects on his mind was a pocket-sized grill that could actually withhold a hearty slew of meat and vegetables.

Ashpole, 30, took on three engineer masters students, one of whom helped develop the application that led to the company’s first patent, which covers the grill’s particular flexible folding joint, something that could be used in other products, Ashpole said. By the end of 2009, he found Jay Olman, his first full-time employee who helped push forward the design, manufacturing and implementation of the product and that new company, the Bashpole Group.

Not, of course, to be confused with Bashpole Inc., the software company that now has four programmers in a narrow Center City office — “the two companies are named so similar because I’m that creative,” Ashpole said with a laugh.

Ben Ashpole, at right, the founder of invention-house Bashpole Group and software company Bashpole Inc., joined by Pocket Grill co-developer and Group employee Jay Olman

“The idea first came while hiking on the Appalachian Trail a couple years ago… I really did go camping and just had food falling everywhere,” Ashpole said. “There’s a lot of effort put on new technology, and I’ve done a lot of that for a long time and still do. The Bashpole Group is a technology company in that we’re interested in patents and doing something new, but, then, we’re anti-technology because we want to do it as simple as possible, often with what already exists in the real world. There are no space age polymers in the Pocket Grill. It’s steel and a new way to fold it all together.”

Sitting in his offices on 23rd Street below Sansom early this month, Ashpole sounds like a reluctant salesman — more builder than boaster — but he says he and his team of Olman and two paid Penn interns with mechanical engineering backgrounds are excited about being involved in every stage of the process: from design to prototyping to manufacturing to marketing to selling. But there’s no secret what interests this pack, sitting around a table just off a creaky elevator and a few steps away from the hum of the Bashpole Inc. software team and two one-man startups sharing work stations.

“I always liked building things. When I was 10, I started programming and got pretty good at it. But there’s something particularly special about building something you can touch and interact with,” said Ashpole, who has been active with Philly Startup Leaders. “And I think that goes for most of the people who have been involved here.”

Taking on the entire product lifetime challenged Ashpole, he said. “We had to prototype how to prototype.”

They sought advice from professors, mentors, small business advice centers and “anyone who would listen,” but he found a real disconnect between those who know inventions and those who knew how to market inventions.

Ashpole, an Indiana University graduate, makes a clear distinction between consulting and building products outright.

“There are consulting groups like the Bresslergroup and Ideo, but I’m not as interested in solving problems for other companies,” “I’m interested in the full spectrum here with my team.”

The Versatile Pocket Grill™ from Bashpole Group on Vimeo.

So the Pocket Grill is serving as their big test. Ashpole said he used to wonder what people were doing when they worked on the same project for years, “and here I am working for years on this project.”

“The manufacturing decisions were challenging, we tried domestically and overseas. Some U.S. manufacturers were competitive, but they needed huge quantities, like 25,000 on first shipment,” Olman said. The company tried laser cutting, casting, welding, forging, bending and other processes across some 40 manufacturing companies, Olman added.

But as the Pocket Grill nears a chance to ship, Ashpole said he is excited about a handful of other projects and patent applications in the works.

Said Olman, with a smirk: “There are a lot of annoying things in the world that need fixing and until that’s no more, inventions will be important.”

The Sturdy Pocket Grill™ from Bashpole Group on Vimeo.

Ashpole and Olman are a pair of Midwest boys, and they still have the reserved expressions and quiet laughs of their perceived roots, though both now live in Center City and ‘happily walk to work,’ Ashpole said. Ashpole, from Indiana, found Philly after taking that software job with that certain defense contractor before Penn. Olman, 25, from Cincinnati, took a job with an engineering firm in Iowa after graduating Penn but when he got laid off he came back: “I liked it here and thought this is where I wanted to find work.”

Ashpole too seems firmly rooted here.

“Philly has talent. What I’ve been able to find here is people with the interest and the knowledge to work on a single idea and bring that to market. Contrary to what you might think, I don’t believe that’s something that exists everywhere,” he said. “In five years, the Bashpole Group will still be here with a handful of people — a small and creative team — getting products and patents out. The dream is to build.”

Pocket Grill in Rittenhouse Square from Bashpole Group on Vimeo.

[Pocket Grill facts]

Beyond the bubble, a technology company of stability and promise is probably solving an old problem with new solutions.

Zikria Syed

And that’s how Zikria Syed describes his King of Prussia-based company NextDocs, a Microsoft SharePoint-based company specializing in the life sciences that was called last month Microsoft’s best partner in that industry.

Think of the company like this: a smattering of info products that walk pharmaceutical and biotech companies through their varied, highly-technical compliance processes, often involving the Food and Drug Administration or its equivalent abroad.

CEO and co-founder Syed says, with operations in six countries and projected $15 million in revenue for 2011, NextDocs is seeing all the growth he could have imagined and more.

“We have big ambitions. Our growth is only picking up,” Syed said, noting the coming opening of a new office in Japan, to join their existing sales offices in Germany, Switzerland, France, the United Kingdom and Canada. In recent years, NextDocs has often been cited as among, if not the first, fastest growing private company in the region.

Founded in 2006, the company doubled in size in 18 months, he said, now with 86 employees, 50 of whom are in King of Prussia.

The company has close to 100 customers, including five of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies in the country, Syed said, in addition to many smaller, boutique biotech firms and laboratories.

“Any business that is bringing new drugs or medical devices to market through regulation are our customers,” he said.

The flexibility of distance is important, Syed added. Among the company’s early 10 largest clients, few were headquartered within 300 miles. He was able to later approach and attract the established, regional companies.

Syed also notes his pride in bootstrapping the company with his team, raising no outside capital.

“Entrepreneurs forced to raise capital aren’t building the best capital,” he said. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t or can’t raise capital, but the technology world has to remember that the ability to raise capital isn’t the success, it’s to get the product to market.”

To do that, Syed is in a unique, niche market himself, focusing on narrow tools, for a specific industry using particular technology.

“Microsoft is the strong and critical partner, providing all the technology infrastructure, and we provide business solutions to an important, valuable industry,” he said.

Syed is a self-described technologist, with a masters in computer science from Drexel University, but he also has the kind of business resume that investors might like to see (not that he’s always answering their calls). As CEO of Broadpeak, a related clinical trial management software company, he pushed forward its place in the industry and found an exit with DataLabs two years after founding it in 2004. Before then, he was an executive with Siemans Medical Systems and spent 10 years with Microsoft.

Syed founded NextDocs in 2006 with Matt Walz, now CTO of the company.

Raised in Panjab, Pakistan, Syed came to the United States at 18 for an undergraduate degree from Lock Haven University — “looking at a guide of colleges, it seemed affordable and nice, just 200 miles from any city, and, I learned, also that far from any city,” he said with a laugh.

“I’m happy to be here now, growing in just the way we’ve always wanted,”he added.