Startup Roundup: Tickets available for second Startup Weekend; RJMetrics growing fast

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’s RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

MUST READS

Organizers are gearing up for the second Startup Weekend Philadelphia, a 54-hour hackathon intended to help teams build a business in a weekend. The event will take place at Drexel on October 14 to 16. Tickets are available here. Former launches include LaunchRock, which has since moved to the Bay Area, and presented to investors yesterday at incubator 500 Startups’s demo event.

RJMetrics has published a case study on customer JackThreads, an email-based shopping club for men’s fashion brands, which Thrillist acquired in 2010. The company says that JackThreads was looking for a way to keep track of user data with its rapid growth after acquisition. That in mind, the metrics company has added new features recently, like real-time analysis and drag-and-drop functionality, to its data dashboard. Co-founder Robert J. Moore tells us that the company broke internal records last month for customer acquisition, and has made three new hires in the last two weeks.

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Philadelphia ranks well in cybercrime report, but concern remains

Mary Lou DiMaggio is still trying to resolve her father's identity theft

In partnership with Temple University’s Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab, the university’s capstone journalism class, students Chelsea Leposa and Jared Pass will cover neighborhood technology issues for Technically Philly and Philadelphia Neighborhoods through May.

Like so many others, Kenneth Swope, a hard-working tile setter and self-described family man, was taken advantage of when his identity was stolen.

“[Someone] got a hold of my social security number, and opened up a couple accounts in my name,” Swope, 50, says.

He didn’t find out that his identity had been compromised until he applied for a home equity loan to pay for his daughters’ college tuition. When he applied, he found something on his credit report that shouldn’t have been there. “I had to call the credit company to find out who opened the account, and they wouldn’t tell me. They said it was me,” Swope says.

After some investigation, he found that the accounts were listed under his parents’ home address, where he had never lived.

Swope suspected a relative who had been living at the address, but
because he wasn’t sure—no charges have been brought against anyone—he faced difficulties with credit agencies. “Every creditor and credit agency wanted me to prove everything,” Swope says, “but nobody wanted the person who opened the fraudulent accounts to prove anything.”

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