Friday Q&A: Ryan Davis, Philly.com President

Updated: colleague’s name @ 1:47 p.m. 1/8/10

He may not live in Philadelphia quite yet, but Philly.com President Ryan Davis says he’s “a southeast Pennsylvanian at heart.”

Ryan Davis

Of course, in the interest of disclosure, it should be made clear that Davis, who was put in charge of Philadelphia’s most visited Web site in October, lives in New York City, a rival if there ever was one.

The native of Allentown takes a daily train trip to Center City but says he, his wife and their new baby daughter — who he says has delayed the move — will be relocated to the region in the coming months.

If you’d think his location would keep Davis from the gig, the age of this 32-year-old might, too, seem like an obstacle. Yet there at the Market Street Philly.com headquarters he is, and, like every where else he’s gone professionally, he’s gotten there quickly.

Outside of college, Davis has never spent as much as three years with a single organization during his precipitous rise from aspiring journalist to newspaper dot com chief executive.

After graduating from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism in 2000, Davis spent 29 months reporting with the St. Petersburg Times and then two years and nine months at the Baltimore Sun. He spent two years in Manhattan with executive management consulting firm McKinsey before taking the director of strategic operations position with Philly.com in February. Nine months later, he was named president of the 70-person staff.

That rise, he says, has put him where he wants to be when he wants to be there.

“It’s an exciting time when a lot of people are trying to figure out what local means on the Internet,” he says.

Below, Davis explains living in New York, lays out his priorities for improving on 72 million monthly page views and talks about the coming explosion of local on the Web.

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Friday Q&A: Pennsylvania Bio President Mickey Flynn

Mickey Flynn wants to talk about entrepreneurship.

In an industry and a region dominated by major players and corporate standbys, the president of Pennsylvania Bio, a statewide trade association for the biosciences with headquarters in Malvern, seems to brighten when startup talk comes to the fore.

He’s gone that route himself. Before taking the chief seat with PA Bio four years ago, Flynn, 68, grew tiny Puresyn, which develops purification services for gene-based drugs and vaccines, from three employees to 25.

But he’s no outsider to PA Bio, rather, he’s a steady hand in the region’s bioscience scene. He was a founding board chairman of the group 20 years ago and, all told, he has just shy of four decades in the industry.

Now, the resident of Downingtown is recovering from his group’s Biotech 2009 Symposium, which drew last month to the Convention Center more than 900 attendees, better than double what it did when he first became president and the largest in its nine years of existence.

Below, Flynn gives us a recap of the conference, handicaps the region’s bioscience-entrepreneurship ecosystem and explains why Mickey isn’t really his name but you ought not call him anything else.

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[UPDATED] Friday Q&A: Robert Cheetham, President and CEO of Avencia

Cheetham asked to clarify several statements. Substantial edits are demarcated with cross-out text.

Robert Cheetham can’t quite speak Japanese anymore.

In the early 1990s, the founder and CEO of Callowhill-based geographic analysis and software development firm Avencia worked for three years as an international relations coordinator for a small municipality an hour train ride from Kyoto. It was a chance to return to the land of the rising sun after studying there during his undergraduate days at the University of Michigan in his home state.

He returned back to the United States for an Ivy League education, at the University of Pennsylvania’s graduate school of design. Unsure of his future in landscape architecture, his path led him to a class in geographic information systems, which gifted him a career in chasing data.

In 1997, fresh out of Penn, he and another landscape architecture graduate took the natural first step. They were asked to find a way to make sense of the crowd of data the Philadelphia Police Department was collecting.

“For about six months, we were tossed in a room and told to do whatever we wanted with the data so long as it came back looking interesting and allowed conclusions to be made,” Cheetham, 41, says now to Technically Philly.

By spring 1998, a new police commissioner came to town, John Timoney, high on the CompStat movement of a far wonk-ier New York City police department.

“He found our unit, and we were set,” Cheetham says. He helped lay the foundation of the city police department’s data analysis, crime-mapping and internal projection systems. By 2001, after a stop in what is now the city’s division of technology, Cheetham launched Avencia.

After the jump, we talk with Cheetham about the state of municipal government data, the company’s 10 percent time, and why they decided to base operations in Callowhill over the ‘burbs.

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TNT: Philly Electric Wheels to host opening reception, change transport in city

Afshin Kaighobady outside his new Mount Airy electric-assist bicycle shop on Oct. 8, 2009. Photo: Pam Rogow for Technically Philly

It was a yellow bicycle. That much Afshin Kaighobady remembers clearly.

On cool mornings in 1969, the 10-year-old would ride to the bakery near his home in Tehran to buy his mother fresh bread. Riding on the flat roads of Iran’s sprawling capital city at the foot of the Tochal mountains, Kaighobady can still remember his pride for riding his bike with just one hand, the other clutching a warm piece of naan fresh out of the bakery’s diesel-powered flames.

“The steam would pour off it, and so one bite and then another and soon I’d half finish the bread that was nearly as tall as I was, all the while steering this long, yellow treasure,” he says.

It is there, in Tehran in 1969, that Kaighobady first fell in love with bicycles. It is here, in the far hillier expanses of Mt. Airy in 2009, that Kaighobady, now 50, is hoping to create love for that transport’s next generation.

This Thursday, from 2 to 7 p.m., he’s hosting an opening reception for Philly Electric Wheels, his shop in this northwest Philadelphia neighborhood that he boasts is the first store in Pennsylvania, perhaps even the tri-state area, to exclusively sell and service electric-assist bicycles.

And he’s trying to convince the region that these bikes could be a large part of a greener, more comfortable, more practical way to commute.

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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: Shawn Glisson of Boost Mobile

You already know the prepaid market is thick and crowded.

That’s particularly the case for Philadelphia, the largest market in the country that has opened the floodgates to no-contract, unlimited plans, as you can well guess by the advertisements from Metro PCS, Cricket Wireless and Boost Mobile that line SEPTA trains.

As Verizon and AT&T take hold of valued contracted customers, T-Mobile and Sprint Nextel, the parent of Boost, are fighting over lower-margin prepaid plans, so the fight is only spreading.

The competition has at times raged hotly, as even Shawn Glisson, a Boost PR spokesman can admit. But then, Glisson, who had a run with former legendary West Chester electronics and 1980s home computer innovator Commodore International, knows a thing or two about Philadelphia.

He’s now based in the Irvine, Calif. headquarters of Boost, now an arm of Sprint-Nextel, but after the jump, he handicaps the prepaid battle in Philly, tells us what’s next for the market and says something nice about Cricket.

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TNT: David Clayton of the Klein Art Gallery, “at the intersection of art and technology”

"Stadium" by Lee Arnold is an example of the optically-related artwork that is part of The Vitreous, an exhibit at University City's Klein Art Gallery until Sept. 5.

An eager-looking gentleman in his late twenties with a toothy grin and a generic blue dress button-up was hanging around the Klein Art Gallery with what seemed like a few questions on his mind.

Though he remained polite, if he did get too friendly, it’d be tougher to dispatch him from Klein than most art installations. There aren’t steps worthy of an epic movie trilogy or foreboding 19th-century Gothic columns guarding its entrance. The nearly 35-year-old University City art venue, which recently opened its first nationally juried exhibition, is in the lobby of a Market Street office building.

“We don’t have a problem with foot traffic,” says David Clayton, Klein’s soft-faced, self-proclaimed “geek” curator. “You’ll get bike couriers and research scientists wandering through the exhibits. I think it’s a real success when we can just disrupt their day.”

So there’s no telling where that gentleman visitor came from or to where he disappeared after Clayton, 30, finished showing Technically Philly around the small and neat 22-artist exhibit called The Vitreous: Eyes and Optics, which explores themes of eyesight, visual perception and optical phenomena through contemporary art practices.

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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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Shop Talk: Devon Segel CEO of Dining Info and GoBYO.com

This is something of a family business.

In 2005, serial entrepreneur Joseph Segel, a 1951 Wharton graduate who made a name for himself launching the Franklin Mint and the multibillion dollar home-shopping behemoth QVC, decided Philadelphia needed a database for its restaurants.

He started with his own personal Excel spreadsheets, detailing restaurant information, offerings and accomodations, but he wanted to expand it online.

So he turned to his 29-year-old, more tech-savvy granddaughter, Devon Segel, for help. She was busy building people-search databases for the American Red Cross with Comcast and Google during the melee of Hurricane Katrina, so occasional help and direction was all she could give.

He launched in spring 2006 an early incarnation of his idea, not just reviews or food writing but a comprehensive collection of information backed by deep data sets about the Philadelphia dining scene, which, of course, has a lot to do with BYO-style neighborhood restaurants.

But Joseph, now 78, wanted Devon to bring her design and development background to what he aimed to be another in a more-than-two-dozen-long list of business ventures.

“He and I have always had a great relationship. He’s a very serious and focused businessman. I am a young woman whom he tries to groom into a serious and focused businesswoman,” says Devon, now CEO of Voorhees, N.J.-based Dining Info LLC, which operates GoBYO.com and DiningInfo.com with plans of launching more. “He calls himself my ‘part-time adviser.’”

It wasn’t until 2007 that she took the job with pop pop, who splits his time between Bryn Mawr on the Main Line and Florida. Now, three years after first launching, their sites use a database that has some 100 data fields on 52,000 restaurants, including 17,000 BYOs, from 10 metro areas and growing.

Devon is sitting on a four-tiered revenue model, the funding to get there and, with a blurb mention due for the August issue of O Magazine, buzz surrounding a new look and focus.

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Technically Not Tech: Tech training and another chance at YouthBuild Philadelphia

YouthBuild Philadelphia Leads a green build at the National Mall in D.C. on March 17, 2009. YouthBuild also has technology courses.

She wasn’t going to pass.

Testing for an ICDL, a license noting she had mastered general computer functions, is the goal of the six-week technology class at the YouthBuild Philadelphia Charter School, but sometimes there are too many challenges for some students to get there.

This young woman tried, but it sure seemed like she’d be one of the students who miss the mark. Female high school dropouts aren’t often thought as players in technology fields.

But then, she passed. And now, one year later, she’s at the Community College of Philadelphia, reaching even further.

Stephanie Virgo, a YouthBuild technology instructor who had those concerns about that student she liked, now sees that triumph as something of a lesson on how technology can challenge and motivate.

“We have students who have never used a computer before,” Virgo says. “It can be very empowering and help them pursue that post-secondary education. If you’re given a paper to write, that can be hard. If you’re given that paper and you don’t know how to use a computer, it’s a whole ‘nother challenge.”

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