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.

Tuesday, November 10th: Conshohocken is a town with a funny name and on Tuesday it will host a man with a funny speech to give. There, David Newman is set to chat social media at the Great America Pub. Newman is a professional speaker that has over 2,000 followers. He also has a picture of a bodybuilder as his Twitter background. 6:00 p.m. Conshohocken. RSVP. [view more events]

Thursday, November 12th: You can’t ride SEPTA to this one (though you could technically take PATCO to Camden and get a ride) the NJ and Philly Tech meetup gathers at Swanky Bubbles in Cherry Hill. The group’s meetup page says that technology is the topic of discussion, but we can only hope that the group decides to help South Jersey finally succeed from the North. 7:00 p.m. Cherry Hill. RSVP. [view more events]

Saturday, November 14th: We’ve covered BarCamp Philly before on TP (and even held a BarCamp of our own) but the original BarCamp Philly returns this weekend and hundreds are set to gather at the University of the Arts for some unconference fun. The event is sold out, but there is an after party and an after-after party and even a kick off party hosted by Two Guys on Beer. 8:00 p.m. Center City. INFO. [view more events]

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.”

“The challenge of advertising in the past was that you didn’t know what was happening. You couldn’t know,” he says. “Now, of course, the problem is that you have more information than most people know what to do with.”

So, the result is most don’t do anything, he says.

“Eighty to 85 percent of the possible market isn’t using any tool at all. Most of the rest are often using what’s available from Google, Yahoo or MSN or what they’ve hacked together themselves,” Cohen says.

The tools from ClickEquations include a Web-based reporting application and an Excel-based ClickEquations analyst, all of which can be shared among employees and are meant to give your company more metrics based around your paid search in a more easily read and organized format than anywhere else.

Your company, Cohen says, will be able to tell not just what keyword-based paid search campaign is working, but why. Their browser-based reports, he says, are silly with data and easily compare across all the major search engine platforms in a single interface.

Separating your search campaign from the companies on which that campaign is hosted is important because, as Cohen readily says, “Google is not your friend.”

“Everyone has this Apple-esque fuzzy feeling toward Google, but it’s becoming more aggressive in monetizing their properties,” he says. “The tools they provide you are actually about you spending more money. Our tool is focused on making you more money.”

Cohen noted for examples Google’s notorious lack of transparency about the tweaking and changing of its keyword algorithm for paid search and shifting paid search results to get more — not necessarily better or more relevant — clicks, which make them more money.

ClickEquations’ target audience — which Cohen describes as a company that is spending or hopes to spend more than $25,000 a month on paid search — will be able to get a much better view of effective conversion rate than any search engine would like to make clear.

“The other tools out there are much more focused on the engines, what’s profitable for the engines,” he says. “When there is data that helps you really see what your campaign is doing, it’s often buried. We change that.”

That is how ClickEquations expects to ride the building tide of the paid search market, Cohen says.

“Everyone sees the trends of advertising moving online, but not everyone is seeing that once on the Web it’s moving disproportionally to search marketing over display,” he said. “So paid search is stealing market share from print and from even online display.”

“It’s a market that is already big, and we think it’s going to explode.”

Below watch a ClickEquations video on paid search analytics.

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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.

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.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Explain the technology behind Zelrix.

We’re using [migraine medication] sumatriptan and an anthretic device, which means an exchange of ions. It’s a positively-charged drug moving with a salt solution.

The device is powered by a very small, almost-like watch batteries. You push the button, and it starts an exchange of ions, positive chasing negative. It’s iontophoresis, our [proprietary] iontophoretic transdermal technology [known as SmartRelief].

Image courtesy of Ubergizmo.com

So why is the patch so necessary?

With the device, we can deliver the medication very quickly and control that deliverly for as long as we want. [We're using] a four-hour patch, meaning you don’t have to swallow a pill, which will be comforting to the millions of people who can get nauseous from an oral treatment, myself included.

Because we control how much drug gets into the blood stream, far more than a pill, for example, there are lower side effects, the Triptan side effects, chest tightness and panic, tightness of the neck and these other problems many people face when taking migraine medications today.

Sometimes you shoot  high because you’re going into work and want to stave off the pain. Now with a non-oral solution, we control it.

According to our data, under two percent of our users have Triptan effects. …That can be compared with an oral average of 10 percent, or the other non-oral solution, injection is in nearer to 40 percent.

What’s next in the uphill slog to getting Zelrix to market and what other work is NuPathe doing?

Well, now we wait some. We’re waiting for some more long-term data to be completed sometime next year. Then we submit [a new drug application with the Food & Drug Administration]  to get marketing approval.

…In terms of other work, we have NP 201, which is a Parkinson’s disease product. We’re still getting data for our research on our work. But now in these earlier stages, we have high hopes for the product. I hope to hear something exciting within the next month or so.

Tell us something about you that has nothing to do with science.

Well, my husband and I have two boys and we live in Fort Washington. [laughs] So, I’m surrounded by male pursuits, ice hockey and the  Flyers particularly. So, yes, we are sports fans. …There’s a restaurant we like called Allison Two. It’s a good one, and there aren’t as many in a place like Fort Washington as, say, on the Main Line.

Tell us about your ties to the region.

Well, I was born and raised in the region… in Ardmore.

It’s as good a place to live as any, especially being from this particular industry. My father worked his entire career, nearly his entire life as general counsel for SmithKline. I spent my life hearing about pharma.

It’ an exciting place. There are a  lot of resources. You can start a company in a place like San Francisco more easily and maybe get more funding, but when you talk about building a company, nowhere else are there the commercial resources and other assets.

When we wantd to launch NuPathe, we did look around about where to start, but we decided what we needed, what is hardest to find, is the people. Money is fungible. Science is fungible, but this is where you have the smart people in the biomedical fields.

Now that you’ve brought that up, last month I spoke to Russel Grieg, the CEO of SR One, GlaxoSmithKline’s biomedical venture capital firm which has invested in NuPathe. He said he has “always been disappointed” by the level of biomedical entrepreneurship in Philadelphia, though he credited NuPathe with being an exception.

Why do you think Philadelphia, which has such a reputation for pharmaceutical and health care development, lags behind in biomedial innovation?

One of the pros and cons in this region is we have a lot of big pharma companies. For a comapny like us, that means there’s a large talent pool. That’s great. But wha’ts made more difficult for entrepreneurship is that folks tend to find their way into big companies. The talent tends to be fed into big companies here, so they aren’t out doing things on their own, vying for funding to start out on their own.

I do see that evolving. As a region we’ve gotten much more cohesive. State funding in this area does work, but the industry needs to do better to work together to help each other to use their collective resources to spawn new companies, to help the region and the industry evolve more. You see this contraction, like Wyeth and Pfizer merging, and with this combination, well, maybe there will be more collaboration and a more startup mentality [in the Philadelphia region's biomedical sectors].

…I’d like to see that happen.

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

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.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

• Mint.com reports that Philadelphians spend more discretionary income on gadgets than people from any other city. Is that possible? Am I misreading what is being suggested there? Anyone have any explanation for this and can share it in the comments?
• Philly Tech News reports that Conshohocken’s Viridity Energy is seeking a chance to help the federal government implement its smart grid technology.

GIVE A GLANCE

• Philly Tech News reports on another one of these damn lists — the Information Week 500 — in which a bunch of suburban companies get called the most innovative business technology companies. The Harleysville Group kills it at No. 7. Check out PTN for other regional nods.
• The Inquirer’s Joey DiStefano reports that apparently Philadelphia is a great big hub for cyber insurance.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Announcing our jobs board, free postings for the next week

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

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.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about SR One and its relationships with GlaxoSmithKline and Philadelphia.
SR One was launched in 1985 as a very small corporate venture on the 24th floor of Franklin Plaza. It was set up as a financial play to make investments in what was then a rapidly growing biotech sector… In May or June of last year, it was a function of the R&D business, so we reported to R&D.  When our former CEO Jean-Paul Garnier retired and Andrew Witty became the new CEO, the function and composition of SR One was changed quite rapidly. We were taken out of R&D and now report directly to the CEO, quite conventional now for corporate venture funds… We have 11 professional investors, 9 in Conshohocken and the other two are in London. But, I should add, something that many people don’t know, the SR in SR One stands for Schuylkill River… So SR One is very much a Philadelphia-based organization.

Your background is through the research and development arms of GSK. What have you learned in your decades-long work in that portion of the industry?

I’ve seen the trends, the big companies merging and consolidating. And when that consolidation hasn’t been particularly helpful, you aren’t seeing de-consolidation but rather externalization. Once 90 percent of the [R&D] budget of GSK was for in-house work, but now almost 50 percent is funding research outside of our four walls, mainly in collaboration with biotech companies on a global basis.

That leads to second point and perhaps a challenge for the region. We would love to fund in the Pennsylvania area for obvious reasons. But we’re seeing the development of life sciences throughout the world, most prominently in the BRIC markets, with some exception… That means for good biotech work, the competitive field has gotten an order in magnitude tougher. So, maybe 25 years ago there was innovative work being done by a company in Malvern or Collegeville and so we’d look to make an investment. Now, that work is being done in Malvern, but it’s also being done in Shanghai or Taipei.

What is something you learned about Philadelphia in your first year at the helm of SR One.

I’m going to say something controversial. I’ve always been disappointed, well, I’ve always felt that Philadelphia punches the lowest weight when it comes to producing successful entrepreneurs, particularly in what we would fund. By and large with the amount of money spent at Philly research institutions and universities, why isn’t the immediate geographical area more successful in creating and retaining really innovative entrepreneurs [in the life sciences]?

So what’s the answer?

The great portion of the money SR One invests goes to companies in Boston, San Francisco and San Diego. Maybe as little as five percent of our investment goes into this mid-Atlantic region. There isn’t a large city or state that hasn’t tried to find that secret sauce. But it’s been much more difficult for them culturally to get their act together and become competitive. We’re still looking for a spark here.

What was the last innovative company in our region that SR One invested in?

One was NuPathe in Conshohocken, which we topped off maybe 18 months ago… They’re taking an existing drug for migraines and developing a patch form to simply put on the skin and receive the dosage. Many patients with migraines get nauseous when using oral doses, so we’re very optimistic about the possibilities for that product.

If you were made King of this region tomorrow. What would be the first step you would make to increase the biomedical innovation in Philadelphia?

If I was made king, if I was governor of Pennsylvania, well, I’m going to say this very carefully [laughs]. What I would try to do is consolidate administratively and bureaucratically the major life sciences intellectual centers in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania — universities and research institutions — and bring them together into one unit under one office of technology transfer, and, like at a place like MIT, link compensation and tenures for professors to their ability to generate spinoffs, put those companies in the metrics for evaluation. Yes, we have to have intellectual freedom, but create jobs and add value for taxpayers, that should be part of the responsibility too.

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

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.

Tuesday, June 30: Philly.rb will meet out in the ‘burbs to help you get post those project hurdles that are holdin’ you down. Join them at a comfy new coffeeshop to get down and dirty with that project you can’t wait to get done. 6:00 p.m., Conshocken. RSVP. [view more events]

Tuesday, June 30: SEO Grail meets Tuesday as well, with local web developer Seth Goldstein on point. Goldstein founded Goldstein Media LLC to help small business owners drive traffic to their sites with Optimized Engine of Search, or whatever order those letters are supposed to appear in. 7:00 p.m., Old City. RSVP. [view more events]

Wednesday, July 1: Catch DreamIt Ventures‘s showing of the award-winning race film “Truth in 24,” along with a follow-up chat discussing the entrepreneurial spirit of the production with Jersey-based NFL Films Director of Project Management Alan M. Brown. 5:00 p.m. University City. RSVP. [view more events]