Updated Fri., Sept. 9, 8:00 a.m.: Added language that clarifies that the store has been open several weeks and that Saturday’s event is a Grand Opening celebration.

Local Apple specialist and retailer Springboard Media is set to celebrate the opening of its third location this week, perhaps putting to rest concern that the opening of an official Apple retailer on Walnut Street last summer might hurt sales.

The store’s Gayborhood launch on Saturday morning at 116 S. 13th St., will include a special two-day sale on previous generation MacBook Air laptops, external storage and iOS device accessories. You can see the list of offerings here.

In October 2009, the company set up shop in Exton, where it too saw potential competition from suburban-based official Apple stores in Ardmore and King of Prussia.

Then as now, the company has championed its own hardware trade-in service, which Apple does not provide.

Success might hinge on reports that one-fourth of Philadelphians are Apple users, according to a April 2010 report from Experion Simmons.

[Full Disclosure: Though Springboard Media does not currently sponsor or support Technically Philly, it has in the past.]

More photos of the new Center City location after the jump.

Photos courtesy of Springboard Media.

At 9:30 this morning windows were being washed at the new Walnut Street Apple Store. Apple’s flagship Philadelphia store will open this evening at 5:00 p.m., according to reports.

The Apple Store front. Photo by Brownstoner.

Our good friends over at Brownstoner have provided an update on the status of Philadelphia’s Apple Store. Pictures on the real estate blog show the glass storefront being assembled at 1607 Walnut Street. Philly Chit Chat even has a video of the new storefront being lifted into place.

To refresh your memory, rumor of the Apple Store had been swirling for years until in November when the Metro reported that the store was finally coming to Rittenhouse Square. In December, the company officially put out the call for employees and the building has been under construction ever since, though it was picketed by union protestors.

No word yet on when the store will open.

Disclosure: Apple retailer Springboard Media is a longtime sponsor of Technically Philly.

Picketers outside 1607 Walnut Street. Photo taken by Hughe Dillon.

Laborers’ union members are picketing tweeted:

“[The picketers are] against owners of [those] prepping the [building] for the Apple lease,” tweeted:

In December we reported that this, the first official Apple store to be located in the city, was hiring.

No one is suggesting that iPhone applications are going to save legacy media. But the conversation so often turns to profitability on mobile platforms, that it may be a surprise there are so  few truly local products from Philadelphia media.

NBC10 and 6ABC have free apps developed with the help of their national parents. Shopiks offers Philly coupons, and there’s the popular Philadelphia Concert Hub.

A screenshot of the app's interface. Click to enlarge.

“The rest are tour guides, canned content, RSS readers of Philly feeds or some sort of national content that is supposed to relate to our area,” says Keith McGinnis, who recently left a role heading up IT for Review Publishing, whose flagship brand is Philadelphia Weekly.

In December, PW likely made the region’s strongest big media play into mobile by launching a McGinnis-led Philly Happy Hour Guide application for the iPhone and iPod touch. The application offers users the chance to search and find the best happy hour deals at specific locations, specific bars, specific neighborhoods or wherever is nearest. There are options for calling a cab, getting directions and tracking just what’s your favorite.

Last month, the app became free to use, after a paid trial version, and so now, McGinnis says, PW has an excellent opportunity to test the waters of localized mobile profitability, ahead of anyone else in Philadelphia (No particular provision is being made for the few hundred who paid $1 for the app, McGinnis says, “I figure you saved $1 on your first drink special.”)

McGinnis is now joining the staff of Northern Liberties Web development firm o3world, but the Happy Hour Guide is still close enough to his heart that he took the time to chat with Technically Philly about how the app plans on making money, how it got made and what it means for PW’s always active competition with crosstown rival CityPaper.

[Full Disclosure: This author has written for both Philadelphia Weekly and CityPaper.]

You dropped the 99 cent price tag. How is this thing going to make money?

The two revenue streams are, one, featured placement, offering sponsors branding as the highlighted bar in our listing. As a featured listing, you also rise to the top position for any iPhone that is closest to your establishment. So users look for what has the best drink specials around, and they see the featured listing first. Two, sponsorship, like co-branding on the app and sponsorship tied to the Web site. We have some future plans around Apple push notification for the next version. I’d like to stay away from ads in the app, mostly because they aren’t very good creatives. Mobile ads kinda suck, like banner ads on websites

From idea to implementation, what was the time line like for the project?

That’s everyone’s big question: how long did it take? Take as a given that you have a CMS for the data that can organize and spit out some form of XML. Then, from commitment with a developer to first prototype was about four weeks. About another four to five in refinement, finishing and testing. So nine weeks from the start until our first submission to Apple. Add about one week’s worth of time of forty hours or so in front of that to RFP and find developers, etc. Now, once at Apple, like everyone says, it was a painful wait.

It took a full eight weeks to get approved. We submitted in late September and finally went live Nov. 3 in the store. We were rejected twice for bugs.

What were the bugs?

The first rejection was for user experience. If the lookup [for a bar] failed, the user didn’t get a warning — easy fix. The second one was a bug that did not exist under OS 3.01 when we submitted, but two weeks later when Apple actually tested, OS 3.1 was out and we had a bug. No way to avoid that one. It was another simple fix, and we were approved in a few days after that.

I’m happy to say we did this very cost effectively. The project start to finish, including the developer, CMS tweaking and gateway server cost under $10,000. Data entry and maintenance are another story. It’s not a lot, I’m just not sure [as it fits under other tasks of the organization]. The way I designed the app’s function, the content is independent of the application on the phone, so it’s always pulling the latest data. Rachel Piot [Advertising Sales Coordinator for PW] is handling the data, and she has been wonderful.

Diversions from existing print business always seem to be points of contention, even in progressive alt-weekly newsrooms. Was this Happy Hour Guide any exception?

As with any product, it gets more attention and respect once it’s generating good money. We’re well on our way to doing just that. At that point, I think we’ll have everyone’s attention.

An interesting point for concepts like News Inkubator is that this is a sales driven effort. Our sales team is fully integrated with helping design functionality that will deliver value for their advertiser.

Screenshot of map in app interface. Click to enlarge.

They also help keep this data to ensure it’s correct for their clients. I’ve been working on Web projects for a long time, so I can say that this is rarely the case.

Many times the tech side shows what it can do, rather than build to suit the revenue streams needs. I think we did a good job of balancing what was possible and ad product opportunities with Phillyweekly.com and our sister sites. This is just the beginning of maximizing what’s possible when you have truly unified multimedia publishing.

This mobile app is another step in a long  building process at Review of which you’ve been a part, yes?

More than two years of planning and building the redesign and this app has finally come to actuality… That feels good.

Speaking of which, perhaps the largest step of that process was last spring’s redesign of PW’s site. Has that proved fruitful?

Yes. But, mind you, we just launched our third site on Clickability [in December], so to us, the project is just completing. It went Phillyweekly.com in March, ACWeekly.com in September, and [third sister paper] SouthPhillyReview.com in December.

As for PhillyWeekly.com, which has been running longest, yes. We saw time on site go from under one minute to over 2.5 minutes. We saw bounce rate drop on the home page by over 35 percent.

So, what’s your take on the sizable traffic difference between PW and competitor CityPaper?

My take is that it sucks. I really can’t comment on that though.

…Thankfully, many [problems] are being corrected  in 2010. I truly feel PW’s product — its content –  is constantly growing and improving. We plan to do much, much better. The most exciting things coming in 2010, I can’t talk about. That’s kind of cool.

What I have done, through things like the CMS project and iPhone platform is work hard to prove to our internal partners and clients and audience… that we can make much better marketing and advertising tools, ones that people like using. Ones that really engage and that are just plain more fun and cooler

Do you guys see something like an iPhone app as a direct move to take an upperhand on CP in an alt-weekly mainstay like listings?

You know what. CP isn’t my worry. It’s CP and the 20 or so other sources of legit A&E and nightlife content that are everywhere in Philly. I think that products like Food Guide or Happy Hour Guide, do create a good listings product that people can use. Extending that onto mobile makes a ton of sense.

Why did you leave Review?

To build more digital solutions for more brands and businesses. And for my career, I worked very hard to get to director of tech. To do it for an advertising and marketing firm that gets digital and [does so] via 100 percent web and mobile technology,I jumped at the chance.

What can we expect in the future from the Review and mobile?

There are plans to update [PW's Happy Hour Guide] project in the spring, in addition to rolling out a similar product for bars down the shore from [PW sister publication the Atlantic City Weekly]. There will be plenty more. Keep posted.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

Ari Weinstein, 15, in the computer lab of Germantown Friends School, where he just finished 9th grade. Yukari Kane/The Wall Street Journal

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Ari Weinstein is the youngest Mount Airy-based hacker we’ve featured on Technically Philly in our long and illustrious history.

Weinstein, 15, is apparently “getting job offers from Israel and all over the place,” and will follow in my footsteps and appear on Fox 29 Monday morning (See clip here), after his place in a Wall Street Journal cover story that ran this week, as reported dutifully by our boy Joe DiStefano.

Weinstein is a contributor to iJailBreak.com, a blog devoted to help users install unapproved software onto Apple’ iPhone and iPod touch products.

Dude is keeping it straight tech raw in northwest Philly, even while he’s in summer camp on the Left Coast. Dude’s father Ken is a developing playing a large role in something of a retail resurgence in Mount Airy, DiStefano reports, including his ownership of the Trolley Car Diner.

H/T Joey D

After the jump, more Ben Franklin Technology Partners dispute, a Digital Philadelphia op-ed and six other tech stories you should read, including our best read article of the week.

Ordered by an incredibly complex algorithm rendering importance:

• eSchool News reports on complications to the doom and gloom three-year appraisal of Microsoft’s West Philadelphia School of the Future, near the Zoo.
• Plan Philly reports that another announced delay for SEPTA‘s smart card movement could actually be, uh, smart.
• Philly Tech News gives insight and detail to the conversation about state fundign for early stage funder Ben Franklin Technology Partners, after Joey D took apart BFTP.
• The Official Google Blog announces the launch of a new feature to its image search that scans for creative commons content, something awfully users for Web content creators. Will this hurt big stock photo business and drive down freelance photographers? We aren’t supportive of the Google blog making a totally lame and predictable reference to the 67th ward as the example in their post though. In other Google news, the New York Times BITS blog reports that the Beta tag on Google applications was finally dropped.
• The Philadelphia Daily News features an op-ed from stakeholders in Philadelphia’s digital divide dialogue. The op-ed was cross-posted on Young Philly Politics, which also featured a video from the Digital Philadelphia Initiative Summit, facilitated by the city’s CIO Allan Frank. See that video below.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Shop Talk: School District of Philadelphia launches probe into its computer recycling program

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Photo courtesy of a Philebrity.com reader

While Philly’s Apple community is served well by local retailers Springboard Media and Bundy, we often wonder what it takes to get some love from Steve Jobs and company.

After all, Philadelphia is the largest media market without an Apple Store, unless, of course you count the city’s suburban Apple outlets.

Well, the architecture gods may have exacted revenge on the computer company, Philebrity.com reports.

The rumored site of Apple’s Philadelphia location has suffered some sort of structural damage. Overnight, a piece of marble installation crumbled off the building and into the street, though no one was hurt, according to Philly.com.

Last year, AppleInsider speculated that Apple was eying the space at 1619 Walnut Street, formally the home of the Brasserie Perrier restaurant. PhiladelphiaWillDo’s DMac disputed the claim.

All has been quiet on the Philly Apple Store front, though the company continues to expand its number of retail locations nationwide. The company recently announced that it will be opening up a fourth store in the second best city on the East coast, ahem, New York.

According to public records, the space at 1619 Walnut is owned by “Walnut Street Retail Investments.”

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the firm responsible for designing some of the company’s New York locations, declined to comment about the possibility of a Philadelphia location when Technically Philly contacted their Philadelphia office late last week.

As part of the firm’s agreement with Apple,�it is prohibited from discussing any details of future locations and would not even confirm that Apple was considering Philadelphia.

Technically Philly friends The Skorpion Show get love from the Daily News. Photo by DAVID MAIALETTI for the Daily News.

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

• OK, first the Daily News reports this morning that the city would not continue its freshly rolled out policy of allowing access to online election-day voting results. By noon, KYW reported that Michael Nutter was sufficiently embarrassed by Philadelphia’s primitive take on Web access that the money was found to keep it going — something about $30,000 for hosting. Hell, we’ll do it for $300 and hot pretzels.

Brian Tierney talks about the Web, libraries get faster online and five other tech stories you should read — including our most trafficked post of the week.

More:

• Daily News columnist Jenice Armstrong reports on The Skorpion Show, which we first tweeted about, then PW covered and we followed the fallout. So, that’s sloppy.. thirds?
• Editor & Publisher reports on the latest Web outlook from Brian Tierney, Philadelphia Media Holdings CEO. Oh, and he says it’s, um, good.
• The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon launches a Kindle for textbooks, targeted universities. Alas, no Philadelphia colleges were among the first get on board. Predictable. Come on, Moore College of Art and Design.
• The Associated Press reports on libraries seeking federal stimulus funds to increase their Internet speeds. Books serve as fine stands for my laptop.
• The Associated Press reports that the credit crunch has slowed the process of bringing new innovations to market. My electric toilet paper dispenser will be available soon.
• Digital Media Wire reports on rumors of Apple investigating the possibility of buying Twitter. Weird. Hat tip to Philly Tech News.
• A press release on the new LEED-certified extension to SAP’s Newton Square complex. SAP, if you bring them headquarters to Philly, I’ll take a photo of it.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Ignite Philly packs Johnny Brendas � again

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn�t miss anything if you spent the week wondering why no one cared about your first 100 days, with Friday Tech Links.