Philly Tech Week update: WHYY headquarters, civic hackathon and more

Philly Tech Week is starting to focus in on impact. Today we have four big announcements for the April 25-30 week of events.

HEADQUARTERS: WHYY, the region’s public media organization based in Old City, will be the official headquarters for Philly Tech Week, offering up its beautiful, modern Dorrance H. Hamilton Public Media Commons.

Working with TEDx, Barcamp Philly and Refresh Philly event planner and community builder Roz Duffy, WHYY will play host to a brown bag lunchtime speaker series that week, in addition to our Friday night signature event, which will serve as the week’s highlight. More details to come there.

CIVIC HACKING: In other exciting news, as part of the third annual national BarCamp NewsInnovation, held Saturday, April 30 at Temple University, we’ll also be hosting the Open Gov Hackathon organized by Tropo. Coders, designers and developers will be creating civic-minded tools, largely using newly shared government data. We want the hacker crew and journalists to work together to create projects that will be utilized and have the best chance to make impact. It’s a good fit with our Transparencity coverage. Find out more on the BCNI blog here, and expect more to be finalized soon.

GETTING THE WORD OUT: We’re also proud to announce that we’re working with Grid magazine publisher Red Flag Media to land the first Philly Tech Week print supplement on the streets that week, which will feature the week’s calendar, but also fresh content on our community and sponsor shout outs. That’s in addition to that hot Philly Tech Week website from the Jarv.us development team in Northern Liberties and the forthcoming Philly Tech Week app from Alkali Media.

NEW PARTNERS: New sponsors include the City of Philadelphia Commerce Department, Chariot Solutions, Reed Technology, the University City Science Center and Tropo, and new event organizers include Wharton, First Round Capital, the Philadelphia Science Festival from the Franklin Institute, Indy Hall, the African American Chamber of Commerce and more. Many, many more conversations are still alive.

Check out our Sponsorship one pager and Event organizer guide to become a part.

Expect lots more events, partners and details soon. Clear your calendar for April 25-30 and get involved!

Introducing Technically Philly office space

As part of Transparencity, the grant-funded reporting project we’re leading, we’re proud to announce that Technically Philly now has Center City office space.

Based in Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street, we’re still figuring out some logistical hurdles — like security, schedules and actually having functioning internet that visitors can use — but we have notions of using this great space as another way to get to know our community better.

Give us a heads up if you want to visit and co-work for a day. We accept one form of currency: you have you to teach us something interesting. …You know, or beer.

Sean Blanda gives you the quick tour below.

Technically Philly offering tech insight for Philadelphia magazine’s Philly Post

Please give a warm welcome to our new readers.

Yesterday, by way of a link, we forged an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog. From here, we’ll be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals, first hinted at last week. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

I’ll be writing as Philly Mag’s online tech columnist, offering a fresh and often more in-depth and behind-the-scenes look at the goings-on of Technically Philly’s daily news. For those of you who have been following along regularly, the weekly column at Philly Post will be a different taste of what you already likely read between the lines in our news entries. For those just joining us, we hope you’ll enjoy the breadth of technology content that we’re humbly able to offer here.

Be sure to check out the first column, on the City of Philadelphia’s pitch for Google ultra-high speed Internet, at Philly Post.

StartPhilly: SemperCon’s cloud computing

This post originally ran on Start Philly. It is re-purposed here with permission, as part of a previously announced partnership.

In talking with people in technical fields, day-to-day verbiage can sometimes come across to the layman as robotic jargon. That’s when the interpreter comes into play.

When SemperCon‘s CEO described his work as “cloud-based,” it took some dissecting to understand his reference to the Internet.

SemperCon first appeared on StartPhilly at the beginning of the year, with a contribution by President and CEO, Rick O’Brien.

O’Brien started this software development enterprise for young startups or already established companies. SemperCon works closely with its clients to build web-based and mobile Internet applications that leverage its motto of “always connected, cloud computing capabilities”…

Read the rest here.

Technically Philly and Start Philly to partner around content and more

The virtuous are the collaborative ones.

After announcing our one-year birthday here at Technically Philly and following for the past few months the insightful and experienced content coming from the entrepreneurs at Start Philly, our two organizations have decided to form a bit of a working relationship.

We met last week inside a Sansom Street restaurant and got familiar over drafts of Yards and comped whiskey. By the end of the night, we had an understanding.

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Temple interns to report on city technology issues

You just might see some new bylines pop up here at Technically Philly in the coming months.

Chelsea Leposa and Jared Pass will be among the first. They come to us as interns from Temple University’s journalism capstone class, the Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, which features a neighborhood-focused newsroom that publishes to the Philadelphia Neighborhoods news site. Thusly, Leposa and Pass will be chasing down stories on Philadelphia technology issues and those working to remedy them.

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Our City of Philadelphia logo design contest winner: Sara DeMarco

Click to enlarge

It turns out the Liberty Bell doesn’t have to be lame.

After the city’s new logo — featuring that cracked ringer — was blasted and we issued a challenge for submissions that were better, we didn’t expect much to come the way of Independence Mall’s most famous attraction.

But more than one of the submissions did, including the eventual winner: Sara DeMarco, as voted on by you in comments and tweets. As depicted above, she submitted how an array of citywide departments could get their own design, while conforming to a general theme. (We’ll be drinking to Sara at our meetup tomorrow)

Great thanks to all our submissions, particularly our two other finalists, RJ White with ‘the Richardson Dilworth‘ and Larry West with ‘Birthplace.’

Below, we remind Sara what she won and again share her example of how the mayor’s office stationary might look like with her design.

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City of Philadelphia design contest submissions

Many of you joined in the criticism over the city’s new logo.

We figured that if it was that bad, our community could put together in five days of a holiday week a slew of better choices. So we challenged you. Others put out the word until last night, when we closed the door.

We at Technically Philly narrowed down the submissions to what we’re calling our top three. Now it’s up to you by way of a day’s voting.

We’ll count each tweet and comment as a vote. By 5 p.m., we’ll close the polls, as it were, and hire an overpriced accounting firm to audit the tally. Or just count ourselves. Oh, and we absolutely encourage politicking.

Wednesday morning, we’ll announce the winner.

Thanks to everyone who submitted! We hope you’ll see more of these contests — with better prizes to boot. For now, check out the three finalists below and let us know which is your favorite.

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Submit your logos for the City of Philadelphia

We asked, many of you responded so we now offer up the challenge.

Corporate branding Web site Brand New called a new design for the City of Philadelphia one of the year’s worst.

In the spirit of the new year and because we know you don’t want to do any real work this week, we put an open call out to the designers and developers and tinkerers and artists in our community. Make a designer’s design for the City of Philadelphia.

Submit your ideas for a logo that would better suit the City of Philadelphia — yes, it can be sarcastic or heartfelt. It can even include the Liberty Bell or a cheesesteak if you think they sum Philly up well … and you can endure the taunts of your peers. We’re thinking standard display images, but we won’t begin to limit you, the audience. If it fits in an e-mail or can be linked to, we want to see them.

All submissions need to be sent to info [at] technicallyphilly.com [files or links] by the final whistle of this Sunday’s 4:15 p.m. Eagles last regular season game, against those bastard Cowboys.

The best design — to be decided by an incredibly complex algorithm that combines RTing, commenting and how surly reporter Brian James Kirk feels that morning — will win an incredibly disappointing prize package featuring the following:

• Pride in winning TP’s first hastily thrown together contest (maybe we’ll even design you a button… maybe)
• One cold, tasty local beer purchased and served to you by the TP staff at our next meetup, to be announced shortly
• A promise that we’ll submit your idea to the appropriate persons at City Hall… if they would only take us off hold.

Digital Philadelphia: what it is, what it means and what’s standing in the way

Before Friday, the City of Philadelphia, specifically its division of technology, will submit a proposal to the federal government, asking for a big slice of at least $4.6 billion set aside for municipal broadband development.

When city chief technology officer Allan Frank first announced his bold plan for a $100 million 10-year strategy, we were surprised no other news organization in this the fourth largest media market in the country seemed to care. And as it turns out, Allan Frank has corrected us: that $100 million is just for the internal IT overhaul alone. Oh, the things you find out when you hit the streets.

So, we’d like to introduce a large package on Frank’s Digital Philadelphia plan. Go and explore just what your city government is spending so much time pursuing.

Follow this link for the full report, or continue reading about the project after the jump.

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