NextDocs CEO Zikria Syed: ‘rapid growth’ in a niche life sciences market from King of Prussia

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.

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Vascular Magnetics, a startup, spawns out of Children’s Hospital

Vascular's treatment, displayed on the left, coats artery walls with iron-infused medicine nanoparticles (in red), compared to existing treatment on the right. By zooming, one can see only small red areas of medicine in existing treatment.

Updated Tue., July 19: Updated in response to comment from Woodward: “We don’t use a stent coated with medicine – we use a temporary, catheter-borne targeting device made of the superparamagnetic steel. In the magnetic field, this device develops gradients which force the drug-loaded nanoparticles into the arterial wall. The nanoparticles are delivered through the same catheter that carries the targeting device,” he wrote in an email.

Folks with Peripheral Artery Disease, a circulation disorder that affects more than 27 million older adults in North America and Europe, often have pain involved with simple tasks such as walking.

Stent-based solutions that treat the disease, which force open arteries and release medicines into the passageways to prevent reblockage, are only temporary. The treatments allow reblockage to occur in about 50 percent of cases after the first year.

But a startup company spun out of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia says it has created a new system of treatment that does a better job, and might have a future in stem cell research.

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Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings: update from U.S. Dept. of Energy project [VIDEO]

Original plans for the GPIC Navy Yard headquarters. Yes, there will be a roof.

Nearly a year since plans were first announced for a federally-funded, $129 million energy efficiency research initiative at the Navy Yard,  action is beginning to take root.

The Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster for Energy Efficient Buildings, a consortium of efficiency-minded institutions led by Penn State University, is charged with, through this initial five-year phase, developing strategies to better retrofit buildings toward energy efficiency.

That includes technology, methods and workforce, says Christine Knapp, who is handling public and client outreach for GPIC. It’s a national pilot project headquartered in what the City of Philadelphia hopes to make a hub of innovation.

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The summer of the scavenger hunt

It is not lost on us that Scavenger Hunt with Friends — a new mobile application developed by a group of Ocean City, New Jersey buddies — is the second app from the region that hopes to entertain users with the classic game.

Or is it the third?

SCVNGR, a DreamIt grad, has grown into Groupon-esque deals provider and opened an office here in Philly after raising $4 million in funding. Users can check-in to retail outlets and receive increasingly better deals each time that they do.

And only a few weeks after Scavenger Hunt with Friends issued a press release about its app, Stray Boots, a New York-based company recently launched its “Scavenger Hunt: A Tour,” app in Philadelphia.

Focus on Scavenger Hunt With Friends, made by a company that’s still headquartered locally, and as it turns out, has ties to a former Philadelphia mayor.

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High school students develop official app for Friends Select and get paid doing it

High school student Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi launches the Falco Initiative's official Friends Select event in front of the student body. Photo credit: Tina Dougherty

At Friends Select School, two ambitious high school computer science students have cut their teeth with a real-world application that has led to a fledgling business and a promising future in app development.

The two students, Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi and Haydn Dufrene, have created the second version of a useful, sharp-looking iPhone application for fellow students to track theirs’ and teacher’s schedules at the private Quaker school in Center City.

The school is based on a six-day schedule that rotates each day, so it’s an easy way for a student to find out where he or she is supposed to be. When a student is ready to add an assignment to their homework list, the app automatically detects which class they are in and categorizes it. Students can even tap into iSepta within the app to find out Regional Rail schedules.

The first iteration of the app, which the two students launched last year while taking Friends Select Director of Technology Jim Brubaker’s object-oriented programming class, had basic scheduling integration, and really started as a chance for the two students to get their feet wet with the iPhone’s native programming language.

“We had to come up with something to build to get class credit, so we thought, ‘wouldn’t it be the coolest thing if we could build an app for the school,’” says senior Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi, who worked with Friends Select graduate Dufrene on the application.

The students built the application on top of the administration’s scheduling and resource management software, provided by Blackbaud, a nonprofit software provider. By exporting the data in CSV format, which contained schedules and student and teacher listings, the students were able to import that data into Cocoa to design the iPhone app.

“It was pretty exciting to have developers from our student body provide a useful app for students. They’ll be able to immediately see where a teacher is and find out when a teacher is available,” Brubaker says.

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Open Angel Forum presenter Contently aims to clean up Google

There’s a good chance you’ve noticed the recent decline in the quality of Google’s search results.

While the search giant says it considers dozens of factors in its search rankings, most believe that the culprit is “content farms” like Demand Media and Associated Content that pay writers as little as $15 for a formulaic blog post or article, often laden with keywords to ensure a high ranking.

Contently, based in Philadelphia and New York City, hopes to stop these junk search results by helping to better crowdsource professional writing.

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Philly Homegrown: GPTMC unveils new look food site and campaign by Maskar Design

You, the proud and savvy Philadelphian, might get more out of the new food site from the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. than, well, you know, tourists. And that would make for one hell of a strategy.

The updated VisitPhilly.com/food, unveiled this month, is now caught up to last year’s overall GPTMC rebranding campaign that was heavy in big photos, colorful serif fonts and a deluge of deep Philly strains. Understand, this new food site focuses on GPTMC’s new Philly Homegrown campaign, one the celebrates a rich food world and, seriously, doesn’t feel the necessity to use the c-word (cheesesteak).

Built and themed by Rittenhouse design shop Maskar Design, whom we highlighted this month, the Philly Homegrown initiative has a food-driven blog, a content-heavy Facebook page and a monthly newsletter (email phillyhomegrown@visitphilly.com).

In truth, there may be just too many directions here for an average tourist to not feel overwhelmed and come short of action. But, Technically Philly might suggest, if more proud and savvy Philadelphians were exposed to more of our rich and culturally significant food culture, then they may be the best messengers to go out in the world and celebrate our food, without ever needing to use the c-word.

Tap DJ: Creating a success out of the “touchy, black box” that is the App Store

No, it’s not because Jason and C.C. Laan spend their weekends deejaying local club parties that they decided to create Tap DJ, an iPhone app that lets users mix songs and create samples, mimicking the experience.

“It started with a coffee shop conversation. Our goals were initially based around the fact that Apple had released new APIs to access the iPod library. We asked, ‘what can we make with this?” C.C. says. “The first thing that came up was a DJ app.”

What was originally a few cool and interesting features, says C.C., grew organically. “Once we saw the features we had, we thought it could be pretty good app. We created a website and added the extra polish that might push it.”

And those extra features helped. Since launching after six months of development, Laan Labs‘ Tap DJ has been featured by Apple at least 3 times, placing the application in the spotlight, and bumping it within the top ten iOS applications in February. It has been one of the best successes for the company’s independent line of applications. “There were a lot of iPhone DJ apps that do similar stuff. Ours just put all the pieces in the right order.”

[Full Disclosure: Laan Labs will be demoing Tap DJ at Technically Philly's Switch event on April 26, a part of Philly Tech Week. Tickets are available here.]

So, is there a formula for great app sales?

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Tek Lado magazine closes, relaunches as Hispanic tech, pop culture blog

After only two editions, Tek Lado magazine, the every-other-month Hispanic tech, pop culture magazine that first landed in September, is no more. But, after a month of silence, the project isn’t done.

While Bartash, the Southwest Philly-based publishing house that put the mag on the streets, dropped the title, Editor Liz Spikol, with whom we spoke last fall about the new gig, and former publisher Mel Gomez have struck out on their own, aiming to build Tek Lado as an online-only brand, grabbing the naming rights and the tek-lado.com domain.

The Tek Lado blog will still feature English and Spanish writing on geek culture, gaming, gadgets, social media and the like, the same as the magazine, but won’t have to remain tied to this region exclusively.

In a press release, the pair, who are working out of West Philly office space, focused on that value of being able to reach more globally. Rather than needing to be a Philly Hispanic tech niche print publication, the product can attract all Hispanic readers interested in geek culture online.

Spikol said the pair are seeking funding and moving on revenue plans. In its new iteration, Tek Lado is currently a sole proprietorship of Gomez, who founded the title while at Bartash.

CityRyde’s bike sharing software close to being awarded carbon credit certification

Timothy Ericson remembers well the time he spent volunteering and thus helping to steer Paris’s bike sharing program Velib, one of the first of its kind in the world.

It gave him and his buddy Jason Meinzer intimate knowledge of the mechanics of the bike sharing model.

Something clicked for the two friends, who realized that carbon credits, which can be sold in an open market to companies that hope to reduce their carbon footprint, factored in to it somehow.

When they came home in 2007, they founded CityRyde, a software company that provides bike sharing programs with fleet-management capabilities and soon, the ability to track carbon reduction provided by bike travel and sell those credits.

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