Headshot at center courtesy of Candace diCarlo.

Updated: 5/30/10 @ 11:48 p.m.: Wrong David

It’s 2026 and a lot has changed.

Online databases, tracking codes and service applications have washed over much of the country’s municipalities, making leaner, more transparent and effective local governments, and Philadelphia became among the movement’s leaders. A smarter, cleaner, more efficient mass transportation system shuttles residents from a reshaped Frankford to a recast Kingsessing.

Philadelphia exports enough entertainment, eating, music and culture that we can cool it on the cheesesteak and Rocky references. Our sports teams win, and City Council has enacted smart policies around affordable housing, education and healthcare. Every flashy magazine city list — however those magazines are distributed and in what form — explores our depths.

Philadelphia is again regarded as among the best places to live in the world.

Sometime in the muggy July of 2026, our mayor, whose name we probably already know, will trot out to a stage on Independence Mall, flanked by the U.S. President, Congressmen and women, historians and dignitaries.

Behind them or in front of them — somewhere anyway — will be a pack of gray-haired men and women, of different backgrounds and experiences, who will be prouder than most. It will be the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence and, once again, the world’s eye will be on the most historic square mile in all of the United States. It will be Philadelphia’s day, but then, that old pack of leaders may take some ownership themselves.

That, at least, might be a vision, if only in passing now, of Steven Wray.

Wray is the executive director of the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and while day to day he is at the helm of an organization’s whose mission is to promote sound public policy to increase the region’s prosperity today, he’s looking to get as many eyes on the prize as he can. The Economy League’s World Class Greater Philadelphia initiative is a multi-party scenario planning project pushing for regional advances in a fast evolving world, wanting impact now but orientated toward an internationally captivating metropolis when Americans come back to the altar and its cradle of liberty to celebrate a quarter millennium of developing democracy.

“We’ll have a good story of the past,” Wray tells Technically Philly in the front conference room of the Economy League’s fourth floor offices on the Avenue of the Arts. “But we’ll also have a great story of the present.”

We talk to the native of Pittsburgh about how entrepreneurs can help save 2026, how the city can work with the ‘burbs and why we should all be a bit more like Comcast.

As always, edited for length and clarity.

After 15 years with the Economy League, what has changed most prominently in Philadelphia and the region from your perspective?

The first change that comes to mind is how much more energy there is in Philadelphia now. I think it is fair to say there is more belief in the future of this region today than 15 years ago for sure. There is this core of younger folks — a lot of them aren’t from here — who are enthusiastic about this city in a way that locals here can’t be or haven’t been.

I’m from Pittsburgh and, really, what you find in a lot of the regional economic development conversations are a lot of people who aren’t originally from here but care about it passionately.

What about the Economy League, what has changed there in 15 years?

Well, we’ve really gone from a government watchdog of sorts to be much more focused on connecting and developing the new regional economy. As an organization, we’ve rolled up our sleeves and tried to bring together leaders from industries of all kind in the region and tried to get together for partnerships and conversations that are ultimately going to help this region. One of the ways we’ve done that is through the travel programs of our Greater Philadelphia Leadership Exchange program.

What are the value of these travel programs?

There are three big reasons these trips can be so valuable.

First, it’s a chance to take best practices. When we took a group to Chicago, we learned more about the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus where [Chicago] Mayor [Richard] Daley got together the mayors of the municipalities of that region to come to common sense solutions about problems. So we came back and talked about that and then Mayor Nutter enacted something similar here to try to connect the region.

Second, it gives us a chance to look back at our own region and see both the bad and the good that we might not have recognized or appreciated before. It’s about looking back through the lens of another place. When we went out to Atlanta and heard their leaders talking about needing a better regional transit agency and sidewalks and ways to make their communities more walkable, I think we all thought about how very special Philadelphia and much of the region is in having that already.

So with a few years of lessons behind you, what are our clearest strengths and weaknesses as a region?

What first comes to mind is how our region’s complex makeup can be both a challenge and a benefit.

When you think about it, there are really at least three states in our region — Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware. Those three states can be a challenge because it means working with three systems, navigating those waters, getting consensus and bringing on support for a unified vision moving forward.

But, of course, when we agree, if we can come together, our region can be a real force in Washington because that means six senators and more than 20 Congressional representatives backing our interests as a region.

We have our standard assets of eds and meds — the universities of the region and the pharmaceutical, biomedical and health innovation work. For the meds, we have to make sure that remains a strength and not a crisis… which can happen in a field so dependent on technology and advancing and competition. With the universities, we always need to do better in bringing in a diverse group of students and then retaining them here to do good work.

For a benefit, it’s increasingly our location. There’s the thought that being in between New York and D.C. hurt, but we’re only seeing that location becoming more and more of an asset, being between the two, we’re not overshadowed, we’re right in the middle. We’re a day’s drive from a quarter of the U.S. population. It’s valuable for travel and tourism and our ports and industry.

If there was only one thing that I could change and you gave me a magic wand, it would be to make our political institutions to modernize, become more open and effective and transparent to make tracking its work possible… We’ve fallen behind some of these trends [of online government openness.]

You talk broadly about the Philadelphia region, a perspective the Economy League sticks to. Does that broad view undervalue what Philadelphia proper, the 135-square mile city with an international draw, has and needs to be?

We need to have growth in all parts. We can’t be in competition. That’s important.

That said, Philadelphia is our central magnet community. It’s crucial that Philadelphia is successful and the more successful it becomes, there will be more than enough for those who live in the suburbs. Philadelphia is a draw for those in the suburbs, and those in the suburbs can help fuel Philadelphia, so we have to be in this together.

But we need to get to a place where you live where you live by personal choice not because of business limitation. If New Hope [in Bucks County] makes sense to your business because you’ll be closer to your primary clients, then that’s where your business should be. If you have clients from throughout the region and from New York and D.C., then you should be in a place like Center City. Then wherever you want to live, you live there.

I think our region is special in that our suburban towns have identities. It’s not all sprawl. I say all of this as a suburban resident. I live in Newtown in Bucks County. Newtown was developed as a small town. It’s [more than 320 years old]. It’s a town that the suburbs grew to.

So we have a lot to celebrate here. Philadelphia is where it starts. It sets the tone, but we need to succeed as a region.

People think about this as a zero-sum game. That a company leaves Philadelphia and goes to the suburbs, so the city has lost. But I see that like a new company grew in Philadelphia and expanded to the suburbs and now there’s room for someone else to prosper in Philadelphia.

The Economy League is a public policy advocacy organization, so what are some policy objectives your organization leans on?

Let’s start out and work in.

In the suburbs, we should rethink how we deliver services. It’s not about getting rid of local governments, but there are inefficiencies and wasted money in repeated services that could be shared to save costs.

I think there needs to be more support for the Ben Franklin Technology Partners and ideas like it that are market driven and are about growing from within. That can be done better when we start to fight one-size-fits-all policies for the entire state. Pennsylvania is diverse, so spreading evenly money for programs like Ben Franklin really doesn’t make sense.

If you have an economic engine, then you need to feed it. The benefits can come back in other ways.

I’d say something else.

I think we need a regional news entity that covers the region and covers it serious and completely and in context. It would need to be an entity that covers the economy like we cover sports, completely and with great knowledge and long view vision…

That kind of news coverage could help connect us all.

So what is the real goal for 2026 and how is the Economy League working to make that goal attainable?

It’s about growing wealth and giving opportunity to everyone here. It’s about outwardly having a reputation as a place people admire and want to visit and learn from.

That’s happening already, but there is so much more.

We need to celebrate growing small businesses, not just recruiting outside businesses and needing to give away tax breaks and incentives. How do we get more Comcasts? We want distinctly Philadelphia companies that grow here and base here and spin off opportunity.

Really, we want to this be a place where young people will come and crash on a buddy’s couch before they take a job here. That’s a thought from David [Thornburgh, former Economy League chief] David [Cohen, Comcast Executive Vice President, whom we recently interviewed] but I agree.

And we’re getting there. There’s a lot of talk about how Philly has become cool and is getting cooler…. We need the jobs and opportunity throughout the region to allow people who want to be here to be able to stay here.

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

It’s going to be that anthem you hear over and over again this summer, and the artist behind it happens to have grown up in Bucks County, a half hour Regional Rail ride into Center City.

Like a growing collection of young artists, Asher Roth, the artist behind “I Love College,” found his path to a major label album by way of MySpace. But it seems likely he’ll see more than Internet fame.

I helped profile Asher Roth on the cover of today’s Philadelphia Weekly, but during our interview last month, we also spoke about the role social media have had on launching his career.

Roth just might be the first genuine star to have not only been discovered via a social network but also stapled his career prospects to social media.

He is regularly pushing next Monday’s release of his debut album “Under the Bread Aisle,” to his 20,000 followers on Twitter. He’s on the basics like Facebook and Flickr.

And, of course, you can follow his growth on YouTube.

Watch him rhyming before his record deal. There was the time he first met fellow SRC label mate Akon last May. He drove around with Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley, who makes an appearance on Asher’s album, and had dinner with Ludacris in July. When his first mainstream media came on Late Night with Carson Daly in November.

“The street is the street… but that’s changing,” says Steve Rifkind, the founder of SRC, the label Asher is on, a division of Universal. “It’s also wherever the college street is, and, also, the street’s on the Internet now.”

But, for Roth, it started with MySpace.

“It was everything. I was promoting without promoting. I wasn’t going to open mic nights telling people to go to my MySpace… I didn’t have to,” says Roth, a native of Morrisville and graduate of Pennsbury High School. “I didn’t realize the power that MySpace is now.”

In fall 2006, Atlanta-based manager Scooter Braun received a MySpace friend request from Roth.

“I took one look, saw a white boy in a hoodie, and I said ‘What the fuck?’” Braun says. The music was good enough, Braun says, but he liked Asher’s rhymes. “He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin. I was interested, but not sold.”

At that point, Roth had 112 MySpace friends and just 64 Facebook fans. Now those numbers are more than 65,000 and nearly 33,000 respectively.

“I think at the end of the day, all these resources on the Internet, you might meet someone, you know, on Twitter. All of these have value because at the end of the day, it only takes that one phone call,” Braun says. “Whether that person finds you on MySpace or YouTube or Twitter or wherever, they end up finding you. Take advantage of all those resources because it only takes that one eyeball of the millions that are online.”

Braun called a number listed on Roth’s MySpace profile and, weeks later, they met in Atlanta. Weeks after that, a deal was inked and the next great social media star was born, but Braun takes issue with Roth being called a MySpace star. If anything, he says, Roth should be called a blog star.

“The way Asher has broke in, no one has done it before. No one has broken in on the blogs and gone gold in five weeks,” Braun says. “The distribution line in my marketing plan was the blog. Nah rights, the 2DopeBoyz, the illRoots, the SOHHs, even the one time he was on Perez Hilton. The blogs are where people are turning for their information. They are the mixtapes and the magazines combined. And they’re really a distribution tool.”

Now, he’s showing up everywhere, from MTV to the Wall Street Journal.

“It would be foolish not to really use the Internet now. That’s where everybody is,” Roth says. “The CD that’s about to drop is huge for the blogs. If this album is extremely successful, it’s going to show that the power is back with the people.”

“You don’t have to go to the radio anymore.”

Below, watch Asher talk to Grind.TV about how the Internet helped give him the megaphone he has today.

And on those ties to Philadelphia? Well, he has them whether he knows it or not, as you can see from a nice rhyme he gave BET’s Rap City with Center City in the background.

Two regional subsidiaries of Lockheed Martin, Bethesda, Maryland’s friendly neighborhood military logistics multinational corporation, got good news this week.

Yes, it’s another round of scary regional military tech innovation.

Their Newton-based space systems arm was part of the design and construction of a new global-positioning satellite that was rocket-launched into space on Tuesday, according to a company press release.

That came a day after the company’s maritime systems and sensors firm won a $10.7 million contract from the U.S. Navy, according to another presser.

Their GPS Block IIR-20(M) satellite took to the skies from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It was a joint project with the U.S. Air Force under a $6 million contract.  The launch was the seventh in a line of eight IIR satellites that the company’s team modernized for the Global Positioning Systems Wing, Space and Missile Systems Center at Los Angeles Air Force Base.

Their maritime division’s Navy contract is to provide training to Japanese and Norwegian crews whose ships are equipped with the Aegis Weapon System, which Lockheed develops in beautiful Moorestown, N.J.

The Japanese crews will be trained in Moorestown or at the Dahlgren, Va., home of the Naval Surface Warfare Center, which awarded the contract. Lockheed will handle the Norwegian crews in Norway or Dahlgren.

The training is expecting to complete the training by March 2012.

Let’s just place the warning up front: iamguiltyof.com is not safe for work. Seriously, if you’re in a cubicle, go browse our events calendar. The site, created by Bensalem-based Web developer Brian Driscoll can be raunchy, disgusting, enlightening and tragic all in one. And it could also get you canned.

The concept is simple: users can confess their sins to the world. The entries appear in a single column on the site’s homepage. There is no sign up process, and the entries are 100 percent anonymous. Confessions range from the mundane (“I am guilty of…watching ninja Warrior!“) to the downright chilling (“I am guilty of…pushing you down the stairs when you were prego.”).

“It occurred to me that when it comes to things like Twitter and Facebook, it’s hard to say what you want to say because everyone can identify you,” says Driscoll. “For the most part they tend to be benign … they lack a certain level of honesty.”

The site is very much like PostSecret or Fmylife except boiled down to a paragraph; something that could begin as a voyeuristic lunch time distraction and end up as an easy way to lose an hour of your day. The Temple graduate Driscoll started the site as a side project to sharpen some of his Web development skills and to finally give him a site of his own. Driscoll has seen his small side project slowly picking up steam and collect over 600 confessions in a matter of weeks while gaining coverage in mainstream media outlets.

“Those aren’t huge numbers by any stretch, but they are kind of huge to me because I don’t think I have ever worked on anything that has gotten so many visitors in such a small amount of time,” he said. And while he knows the site’s 100 to 120 views a day aren’t on pace to surpass the Twitters of the world, Driscoll has been receiving more and more attention. The site was covered in the Phillyburbs.com and has been mentioned on several radio stations across the nation.

As his early success indicates, and as a read through the site will verify, Driscoll has found that guilt is universal. According to his metrics, men and women post confessions equally, and the more educated someone is, the more likely they are to post. Many of the confessions are receiving comments and some have been favorited over 100 times. Only 20 percent of users end up posting confessions.

In the future, Driscoll plans on adding features such as a mobile version and categories for confessions. He is exploring partnerships and advertising deals but hasn’t settled on anything quite yet. But for now he’s dead set on promoting the site.

“In my plan for global domination, the site should be getting 1,000 users a day at least,” he said.

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

There’s a solution, of course.

From its launch in October 2003 to February, SwapaGift.com had been “the leading online marketplace dedicated solely to buying, selling, and trading gift cards,” said Mike Kelly, who was the early Web adopter who launched the site with his wife Mary Jane out of their Langhorne home.

Last month, a deal was announced in which Swapagift.com was bought by Wolfe.com, the Pittsburgh-based online marketing company and parent of GiftCards.com, which included a drop of their trading option.

That makes the Eagles departure from the NFL playoffs and subsequent Steelers Super Bowl victory the second indignity Pittsburgh has bestowed on our fair metropolis this year.

While their operation has largely moved to Pittsburgh’s GiftCards.com processing facility, the marketing, promotion and business development remain with the Kellys in Langhorne.

Mike Kelly, 45, declined to disclose financial details of the acquisition, but he said business is good and that his company’s ties to Philadelphia won’t falter.

Today, their in-person, gift-card repurchasing services can be found in 500 retail locations nationally, including five in Philadelphia and others in the region. They expect more than 1,000 by year end.

That’s quite a surge since the end of 2006, when SwapaGift had just 35, most of which were only in the region. From 2004 to 2008, SwapaGift.com saw revenues grow at an average annual rate of more than 200 percent, Kelly said. Despite the recession, Kelly still estimates a full 100 percent boost in 2009.

Below, watch how their business works.

Kelly said Jason Wolfe, CEO of GiftCards.com, was interested in SwapAGift.com’s acquisition strength of cards in the secondary market. The Kellys liked their technology investment and that potential to increase their sales reach.

“In the end, both parties saw the opportunity to bring together and leverage our unique capabilities so we decided to make it official,” he said, noting both company’s customer satisfaction. “Our customer base prior to the acquisition was over 50,000 registered customers, with very high repeat customer loyalty.  We were the first web site to offer this service. ”

Kelly said he and wife Mary Jane, 38, are proud it happened in the Philadelphia area. Mike graduated from Temple University’s Fox School of Business, and Mary Jane received an MBA from LaSalle University.

“We have every reason to believe in the Philadelphia area continuing to develop its strong tech reputation.  There’s an enormous pool of talent right here, coming from great universities and world-class private organizations in pharma, biotech and technology,” he said. “Philadelphia is well-positioned to strengthen it’s tech reputation.”

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.