Event Highlights for November 9 – 15, 2009

Good morning Philadelphia, I have excellent news for you: SEPTA has returned to work.

And just in time, as this week contains lots of events worth spending your hard earned tokens for.

First, meet up with The Innovator’s Club in the burbs to chat social media. The group promises the presentation will be mixed with some humor. But honestly, every time I hear a grown man say the word “tweet” I snicker a little.

Then, hop on over the Ben Frankline Bridge for the NJ and Philly Tech November meetup in a Cherry Hill bar possibly owned by Hillary Swank.

And lastly, get some sleep Friday night because Saturday is the all day party/un-conference that is BarCamp Philadelphia.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more.

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ClickEquations: Paid search, online advertising and why Google is not your friend

A screenshot of a ClickEquations client's paid-search portfolio, breaking down a variety of ad campaigns.

The ClickEquations crew say they do what they do best because they were once the customer.

Launched in 2006, the Conshohocken-based company was once strictly a search agency managing mostly large-sized pay-per-click accounts, but founder and president Craig Danuloff and team increasingly found limitations in the tools available for the accounts they handled.

“The best products are the ones created to help the consumer, right?” says Alex Cohen, the company’s marketing manager.

So, that’s what Danuloff, who got involved in e-commerce software as early as 1994, and CEO Lucinda Holt did. The duo moved the company’s focus to developing tools that company’s themselves could use to manage their own paid-search accounts  — placing and tracking links listed on search engines by chosen keywords.

Since that private beta launch last August, things have turned out alright, so far, for the company trying to own paid search, which is the targeted, contextual advertising that appears on Web sites, particularly search engines, according to keyword relevance.

Eight investors, including Philadelphia investors Emerald Stage2 Ventures, MentorTech Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, last month invested $3 million in the firm’s expansion, including growing their development staff to accelerate the number of features they offer. Nautica, Comcast, Liz Claiborne and Forbes Traveler are among their high-profile clients, with other announcements on the way, Cohen says.

For continued growth, ClickEquations will win over lots of companies that aren’t using ad management tool and, Cohen says, explain just why “Google is not your friend.”

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Friday Q&A: Jane Hollingsworth of NuPathe on Zelrix, migraines and more

The Zelrix acute-migraine patch introduced by Conshohocken-based NuPathe. Will it fight upstream to market?

Updated 9/18/09 @ 2:42 p.m. Name in title

When Jane Hollingsworth takes a pill to help fight a headache, she might get nauseous or sicker still.

More than half of American adults suffer similarly, she says, which is a bear of a nuisance for anyone with an acute migraine and a problem with the most common medicinal cure. Still many just put up with the pain.

Because it’s affecting millions of people who just might happily pay for a solution, there is admitted industry buzz swarming NuPathe, the Conshohocken-based specialty pharmaceutical company that says it could help everyone with a pain in their head who doesn’t want a pill to swallow. After a scheduled new drug application is filed next year, you just might know someone who uses Zelrix, a NuPathe-manufactured patch that secretes migraine-fighting medication into the bloodstream.

Jane Hollingsworth

“There is no patch for migraines now. There has never been,” says Hollingsworth, 50, the 25-employee company’s CEO who helped launch it in 2005. “It’s very difficult to get drugs through the skin quickly, which is important for migraines especially.”

Difficult for everybody else, she must mean. Because, as the company’s comprehensive phase-III trial data summary presentation suggested at last week’s 14th Congress of the International Headache Society held at the Convention Center, things for NuPathe are going, as Hollingsworth says, “exceedingly well.”

After the jump, the Ardmore native tells us how technology makes Zelrix work, why biomedical entrepreneurship in Philadelphia lags behind smaller hubs like Boston, why she has to cheer for the Flyers and more.

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Links: University City Science Center pulls $9B, Philadelpians love gadgets and More

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.

DEFINITE READS

• The University City Science Center rocks, or so a new study from the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia is saying. The largest urban research park in the country has a $9 billion impact on our region, the Business Journal reports. WHYY reports that more tech startups stick around in our region after being incubated by UCSC than other regional research parks see. The Inquirer’s Mike Armstrong reports that most of those firms that stuck around did so within Philadelphia, followed by Montgomery County as the second most popular end-all destination for companies incubated in University City.
• Armstrong also reports a series of nonprofits and task forces telling the city government what the heck they should be doing to foster a better business climate in the Phila-del-phia.

After the jump, a Conshohocken smart energy firm wants to boss the feds around, Philadelphians spend a lot on gadgets and four other tech tales, including our best read story of the week.

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Friday Q&A: Russell Greig of GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One

Russell Greig has come a long way.

The 57-year-old Scotsman, who still carries that signature and recognizable accent, rode a Fulbright scholarship and a nearly three-decades-long career with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to head SR One, the company’s corporate venture capital arm that is no small part of this region’s VC scene, last year.

Greig himself is a fine personification of GSK’s history, now a London-based multinational that grew through several mergers and acquisitions from a 19th-century Philadelphia research laboratory.

GSK still has Philadelphia offices, but it is decidedly an international affair now, neatly represented by Greig and his resume stuffed with international datelines.

SR One itself has, perhaps like Greig who assumed his new leadership role in June 2008, moved. It was launched 24 years ago in Center City but now is a suburban venture, nestled in Conshohocken, like what regional biomedical companies in which they invest.

The University of Manchester alumnus seems to like it here though, raving about the schools and calling those Philadelphia suburbs home to more beautiful trees and seasons than most anywhere he’s seen.

But our life sciences he says, just might not be as distinctive as we’d like to think, no matter the recent attention we’ve gotten for them.

Below, Greig explains why SR One is so Philadelphia, what he would do if he was king and why he “carefully” calls our region’s biomedical innovation disappointing.

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Events highlights for the week of June 29 – July 5, 2009

When there’s only a handful of events in the region, it makes this job easy. But the truth is, we prefer a challenge.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few events scattered on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. But hey, this way, you have practically no excuse to miss any.

On Tuesday, the Philly Ruby enthusiasts of Philly.rb bring back their popular Hack Night, where you sit in comfy chairs, plop your laptop next to your latte, and get cracking on yours and others project hurdles.

SEO Grail meets Tuesday with a talk from Web development company Goldstein Media LLC’s Seth Goldstein to discuss, what else? How to massage the Google.

The following day, DreamIt Ventures will show race film “Truth in 24.” The film has all you could ask for in a race film: action, adventure, drama and not a single sign of Vin Diesel. Oh yeah, and NFL Films Director of Project Management Alan M. Brown will be there to discuss how it all went down.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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