The trendy, boutique Center City Hotel Palomar, operated by Klimpton, is launching its first-ever “Philly Finds” scavenger hunt for locals and hotel guests this weekend.
Using the iPhone and Android mobile application “Scavenger Hunt with Friends,” Hotel Palomar Philadelphia will put all willing participants on a weekend hunt, Fri. Oct. 14th through Mon. Oct. 17th, seeking out everything from historic landmarks to famous Philly food spots.
A new contest launching today solicits votes on what currently obscured city data should be made open.
Dubbed the OpenDataRace by those behind the nascent OpenDataPhilly.org, the project this month solicits nominations of civic-orientated city data sets paired with relevant nonprofit missions. Next month, votes will be cast trumpeting what data sets most interest Philadelphians, with $3,500 in small cash prizes for the nonprofits connected to the three winning entries.
Loffles.com boasts that it is the best way to enter sweepstakes online. And now the company is live.
The site — the name deriving from the combination of ‘lottery’ and ‘raffles’ — offers users access to an updated catalog of prizes from familiar brands. Users watch a promotional video, answer questions — to show they watched — and gain entry to a drawing for, say, a Best Buy gift card, a Netflix membership or an Xbox 360. Each entry also earns users ‘loffles,’ which can be redeemed for other prizes or used for additional contest entry tickets.
Technically Philly first told you about Loffles, which has regional roots, in October, when the company quietly sought $500,000 in funding, and received $162,000. First listing the company in Gladwyn, where co-founder Brandon Yoshimura grew up, the startup has more formally set up its headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, near where Yoshimura, 22, and his fellow co-founders met at Brown University.
The team has six other members, including the following: co-founder Steve Boland, 22, from Lafayette Hill, a graduate of Germantown Academy and Penn State; Chief Technical Officer Daniel Johnson, 29; Chief Marketing Officer James Kwon, 27; Director of Sales Vincent Tumbleson, 20, a junior at Brown; team developer Jake Buob, 20, a student at Johnson and Wales University and social media director Ashley Farquharson, 21, a student at UMass Amherst.
Loffles, which is actually incorporated in that tax haven of Wilmington, Del., is represented by Center City law firm Morgan Lewis and local PR agency Zer0 to 5ive and another co-founder is from Lafayette Hill and attended Penn State University. Though primarily in Providence, Loffles does have a small administrative office at 16th and Wood street where the team will “set up periodically,” said Yoshimura, an alumnus of the Haverford School.
Economists reveal Philadelphia’s economic identity as ‘thinking’ region [PhillyInc, Inquirer] — A report puts Philadelphia in the ‘thinking’ category, one of 12, along with cities like New York City, San Diego and Portland, Maine, as opposed to, say, the ‘innovating’ cities of Boston and Raleigh, N.C.
Below, NPR takes on Harrisburg university’s social media experiment, four in region make Forbes’ richest list and more.
At the risk of seeming too complicit in helping to promote a car company, two teams with technology community ties are representing Philadelphia in a 17-city Ford Fiesta social media branding binge.
Like their counterparts in cities across the country, each team was given the keys to a new Ford Fiesta in exchange for posting wildly about their experiences via every social media platform you ever heard of, to, as the site suggests, “re-imagine the way Fiesta gets advertised.”
The campaign features a promotional competition component which will crown one of the participating teams the winner, earning a 2011 Ford Fiesta.
