This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

CityRyde leadership is making some big changes.

The bike sharing consulting practice is due to relaunch under a new brand and, as of next week, the startup’s co-founders will be leaving University City to make their headquarters elsewhere.

CEO Timothy Ericson and COO Jason Meinzer, the startup’s two co-founders, have decided that if their six-person startup is going to continue to grow traction, the Quaker City isn’t the place to do it.

“Philadelphia claims that they want to be the greenest city in America, however they are the only major city in the Northeast that does not have direct plans to launch a bike sharing initiative,” said CEO Ericson, 25, a native of Fair Lawn, N.J. who says he fell in love with his new city while studying at Drexel. Despite both having Drexel ties, he met his co-founder Meinzer, 28, while they were in London. The pair visited Paris to see the launch of that city’s bike-sharing program, which prompted their venture.

The departure of an entrepreneur named Meinzer may sound familiar, considering that just in September Jason’s brother Ryan, who was behind language learning tool PlaySay, told Technically Philly that he was leaving and taking his startup with him to D.C.

Next week, Dec, 1, CityRyde leadership, too, will officially move, setting up shop in Cambridge, Mass. — which is to Boston about what Conshohocken is to Philly, if Conshohocken was home to two of the most respected universities in the world.

Below, Ericson discusses why this is the right move and if there’s anything Philadelphia could do about it.

Edited for length and clarity.

Why is Boston a better fit than Philadelphia for CityRyde?

A few months back we decided to apply to the TechStars Boston program. Since that decision, we have spent a lot of time getting to know the Boston community. We were impressed with the community as a whole, the talent that we would have access to and the companies and mentors that were located in the area.

We determined that one of the best ways to demonstrate our commitment to the TechStars program would be for the management team to relocate to Boston. We are still in the application process, but we feel that it is the right move regardless of our acceptance into the program. A lot of the companies in our industry, such as Zipcar, one of our investors from the most recent round, and the law firm we use, are all located in the Boston area.

For the time being we are still planning to keep our University City office [at 32nd and Arch streets, where two of six employees will remain], as we still have some team members that will remain in the area.

Why is Boston the right move, outside of applying for the TechStars program there?

After making the decision to move to Boston, we realized that other cities like Boston just offered more in terms of support, mentorship and investment.

We found ourselves gaining traction with various groups in cities other then Philadelphia. Moving to Boston in bittersweet, I really enjoyed my time in Philadelphia and have made great friends and business connections but to really get our business to the next level, we needed to move to the city that could help us accelerate the traction we already built while in Philadelphia.

Was there a specific event or moment that you realized you wanted to move the company?

It was the application process for TechStars Boston program that made us realize that there was a lot of potential in the Boston area. Going through that process forced us to spend a lot of time getting to know the community and after awhile the decision was easy. After being involved in another entrepreneurial community, we started to see differences in the level of talent, companies and mentors in the area.

Was there anything that could have been done differently to keep you?

I think Philadelphia has a growing community of great entrepreneurs and companies but is still lacking behind other locations likes Boston and California.

All of the investment money that we ended up accepting was from entities outside the Philadelphia area. I think that the industry we are in, bikes and carbon credits, just did not fit the investment style of the investors in the region. Philadelphia claims that they want to be the greenest city in America, however they are the only major city in the Northeast that does not have direct plans to launch a bike sharing initiative.

There has always been a major push for bicycle sharing in Philadelphia, even before most of the other major cities in the U.S., yet it looks like we will be the last in the Northeast to launch one. It is really frustrating to be in the bike sharing industry and live in a city that doesn’t even have one.

Could you see yourself bringing CityRyde back to Philadelphia?

The next few months are going to be very uncertain, as we are really considering the move a pilot test to see if it will fit for us long term.

I wish that there was one thing I could list here that would motivate us to move back to Philadelphia but for all of the reasons listed previously, moving to Boston just makes sense at this point for our company. We will, however, miss the extremely low cost of living compared to Boston and other entrepreneurial hot-spots.

When someone you meet from outside the region asks about Philadelphia and its tech community, what do you tell them?

I would tell them I consider it to be a growing community. There is a lot of potential with great programs such as the Baiada Center at Drexel University, Dreamit Ventures and Philadelphia Startup Leaders. I cannot stress enough how important the Baiada Center was to helping our company get to the point where we are at today. If it was not for the Baiada Center, we would not be having this conversation today because CityRyde would not still exist.

What is the perception you most often find of Philadelphia?

I think that most people who have not spent time here are unaware of the growing entrepreneurial community. I know first hand that once someone gets to know the community, their expectations are certainly surpassed. Philadelphia has a reputation, a long standing problem the city is working on, where we are losing talent after graduation from the great universities located in Philadelphia to other cities.

What advice or specific action would you take to improve the tech community here and retain others in the future?

I am not sure that there is anything I can pinpoint specifically that would help improve the community. Our company was located in Philadelphia for three years and during that time we just kept getting traction with investors, partners and mentors from other cities. Just as a startup business needs to find their competitive advantage, I think Philadelphia needs to find its niche in the entrepreneurial marketplace.

Simon Hauger, one of the lead organizers of the Workshop School, an alternative high school experience launched this academic year at the Navy Yard.

Four years ago, Stefon Gonzalez was a freshman at West Philly High School.

Like others interested in working with his hands at the school since the late 1990s, Gonzalez joined the Hybrid X Team, an after school program that grew national fame for building electric and bio-diesel cars that outperformed college-level teams. Now Gonzalez is finishing his high school career at an experimental, project-based program at the Navy Yard.

This fall, the Hybrid X group, started by West Philly High teacher Simon Hauger, has launched the Workshop School, which embodies the science-driven, hands-on learning of the after school program but expands it to a full school day. Featuring 29 seniors from three different public high schools, Hauger’s effort is housed in a Victorian building overlooking hulking ships at the Navy Yard.

When Technically Philly visited on a cool, bright November morning, the students were in a half dozen groups, working through different assignments as part of a project to build a solar-powered workshop on the building’s front lawn. One team was charged with financing its construction, another with design and building materials, another with site planning, another with permitting. The school, which was also developed by Hauger’s former West Philly High colleagues Michael Clapper, C. Aiden Downey and Matthew Riggan, and has been a concept in their minds for more than a decade.

Discussions and projects drive the curriculum, and hands-on action trumps much else.

The school is funded in part by a grant from the Greater Philadelphia Innovation Cluster and endorsed by the School District, which is administering the school’s lunch program, said board member Ann Cohen.

Below, watch a short video documentary.

Mayor Michael Nutter and Mark Group U.S. CEO Jeff Bartos launch 'the Heat Seeker' outside the Andrew Jackson Public School in South Philadelphia

A home heat-loss, thermal imaging tool fashioned to a specially equipped van started patrolling Philadelphia last week.

Dubbed the HeatSeeker and the first of its kind in the country, the patented technology, which can evaluate and geo-code 1,000 thermal images in an hour, is something of a signature of the Mark Group, the British energy efficiency company that launched its U.S. headquarters at the Navy Yard in October 2010. The vehicle is a clever lead generation device for the company.

“As the region braces for the colder fall and winter temperatures, residents face increased energy costs to heat their homes,” said in a press release Mark Group President and CEO Jeff Bartos, who kicked off the vehicle’s work in Philadelphia at a ceremony with Mayor Nutter. We look forward to sharing this technology throughout the Delaware Valley so residents can be empowered to take control of their homes’ energy efficiency and reduce their monthly energy spend.”

The HeatSeeker vehicle, which patrols at night and in colder weather when heat systems will most likely be used, has its own system to connect the images it takes to home addresses with a GPS mapping system. The Mark Group staff ‘thermographers’ evaluate and rate those images based on visible heat loss. Homeowners whose properties have relatively high heat loss will be notified by mail to be able to view their property’s ‘thermograph’ online through a secure password.

The Mark Group aims to sell more detailed home evaluation and insulation services, pitched as longterm cost savers.

In 2009, the Mark Group first launched the HeatSeeker in the United Kingdom, according to the press release.

“Thermal images provide compelling, irrefutable evidence of how and where homes are losing heat – a valuable first step assisting homeowners in making an informed decision to properly seal and increase insulation,” Bartos also said in the release.

Tangent Energy Solutions, the Kennett Square-based solar technology provider, launched last week solar energy generation installations at three Colonial School District schools in suburban Montgomery County, according to a press release.

The three schools are the sites for two separate solar energy projects; one at the Plymouth Whitemarsh High School/Elementary School Campus, and a second at the Colonial Middle School. Combined, the projects will provide CSD with more than 825,000 kWh per year of clean electricity, which annually saves more than 1.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. CSD is projected to save more than $1.5 million over the course of the 20 years agreement.

MORE

Renogy employees in Wuxi, China working on solar panels in September 2011. Renogy and Kensington-based Solar States are partnering on a Philadelphia project.

Updated: corrected the location of Renogy Solar.

Solar States, the Kensington-based commercial solar power provider, has signed a supply contract with Renogy Solar, a major solar panel manufacturer based in Baton Rouge, LA with major facilities in China, according to a press release.

Solar States will install 30kW of solar panels on the rooftop of Finanta, a financial educating and community lending group also in Kensington at 2nd and Thompson streets. The installation, which will begin in November, will support 100 percent of the building’s energy needs, said Solar States spokesman John Steele.

The agreement also makes Solar States the East Coast distributor for Renogy.

In shoring up the deal, Solar States founder Micah Gold-Markel visited the Renogy facilities in Wuxi, China, touring the facility and writing about the experience and sharing photos of the facility.

The announcement comes on the heels of the controversy surrounding the bankruptcy of Solyndra, a Caifornia solar manufacturer that had received U.S. government support. Gold-Markel wrote about what he calls the misrepresentation of the situation here.

• Saving Electricity on a Philadelphia Subway Line [Green: New York Times] — “in Philadelphia, on the Market-Frankford line of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transit Authority, a new company called Viridity Energy will install batteries to capture a lot of that electricity and hold it while the train is in the station. Then it can deliver the power when the train starts up again or store it for a time of day when it is needed more.”
• NuPathe gets more funding to launch Zelrix migraine patch [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• FTC seeks more information on Teva, Cephalon deal [Reuters]
• New chair for Science Center [Philadelphia Business Journal] — “University of Pennsylvania Executive Vice President Craig Carnaroli has been elected chairman of the University City Science Center’s board of directors, succeeding Richard P. Jaffe, a partner with the Philadelphia law firm of Duane Morris”
• GPTMC drops advertising with Travel + Leisure after it calls Philly dirty [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• BioNanomatrix Opens West Coast Headquarters, Expands Senior Team to Accelerate Commercialization of its Whole Genome Analysis Platform [press release]
• Lockheed Martin’s space business to cut 1,200 jobs [AP] — “The cuts will most heavily affect areas where Lockheed Martin is winding down its contract work, such as Sunnyvale, Calif., the Delaware Valley region of Pennsylvania, and Denver.”
• Philadelphia2035 Master Plan Approved [Flying Kite] — It includes mention of broadband access, something Technically Philly pushed on with this coverage. Watch video below.

A mock up of what the new Yikes offices on Girard Avenue in Fishtown could look like.

Tracy and Mia Levesque say they first started a so-called triple bottom-line company because they were selfish.

And, for them, Yikes Inc., their web design firm in Northern Liberties that is waiting on the completion of new LEED-certified offices in Fishtown, is keeping them happy.

“We wanted to create a company that we wanted to work for,” says Mia. “A lot of the things that make a socially resposible business starts with how you treat your employees, it’s about treating people first then profit.”

So, while the couple has built a web design shop that recently dropped a Penn Medicine Livestrong campaign site and has an e-commerce platform launching for another client soon, when you chat with the pair, they seem to be just as excited to talk about construction.

Specifically the construction of their new LEED-certified offices on Girard Avenue in Fishtown, which, when completed this July, just might be the first LEED rehab in the state. And the four apartments above will be among the first such designated rental spots in all of Philadelphia.

That puts them in a fine place to suggest how your small business can take smaller steps to being a bit more green-friendly, before you’re ready to buy a couple rowhomes for $348,000 and renovate them for $800,000, including architecture, certification and other soft costs.

Residents of Bella Vista, the couple started off doing pro bono web work for nonprofits in 1994 and now have an eight-person staff and a portfolio of work.

Yikes Inc. Founders: Tracy on the left, Mia on the right.

“They were like a puppy with three legs,” says Tracy, noting that buying a complete shell allowed them to be able to push for LEED certification. “Historically it’s been trouble, from a crack house to boarding house. The building itself was a wreck.”

The building’s certification comes down to a lot of factors, but three clear ones are its ‘thermal envelope’ or insulation, reclaimed building materials (including, Mia says, material from the movie set of M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘The Last Airbender‘) and efficient systems, like its HVAC unit.

Taking a century-old Fishtown building and making it again a beautiful, functioning and fitting part of its architecture is a “dream come true,” says Tracy.

“It’s the Holy Grail of the triple bottom line business, our headquarters being this green building,” Tracy goes on. “The opportunity to take one of these beautiful buildings, renovate it and contribute to Philadelphia is the greatest thing in the world.”

Though the eco-friendliness continues to become less movement and more mainstream, obstacles still stand in the way of businesses, particularly smaller companies, to lessening their impact, the pair says. Below, they share a few simple, cost-effective ways to make a big impact.

1. Reduce your trash — “How much trash are you producing a week?” asks Tracy. “We recycle and re-use everything we can, something that’s gotten a lot easier in Philadelphia since we started.” The company also uses Bennett Composting to collect every week compostable materials (starting at $10-15 a month).
2. Be smart with your e-waste — If you’re a technology company, reducing paper might be in-born, but old computers, keyboards and other IT hardware with hazardous materials can end up in dangerous places. Remember what happened to a piece of equipment from the School District of Philadelphia? Yikes has an e-trash container and contracts out with a company to ensure the proper recycling. “We also look out for e-trash days, like ones held at the Northern Liberties Community Center, to find a proper home.
3. Little stuff helps — They use cloth towels that get washed rather than paper counterparts, an eco-font that uses less ink when they do print and use a paper-use calculator to have trees planted to replace whatever use they do.

It goes beyond sustainability, of course, and back to a desire to run a company they would want to work at, says Mia.

“We have flex time and generous vacation time — four weeks of vacation to start,” says Mia. “You get paid time off for your birthday and on Halloween… and we just generally treat people with the kind of respect that we try to offer [the environment].”

From left to right: Cody Ray, Dr. Joan Weiner and Aleksandra Wolchasty standing in front of the Drexel Smart House

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.

The is the second of a two-part series about residential technologies being developed or explored in the region. See the first here.

Frat houses are usually synonymous with keg-stands and jungle juice. There, eco-friendly house technology would seem as important as finishing homework.

But a group of Drexel students are trying to alter that perception, using an abandoned frat house as a great green opportunity.

The Drexel Smart House, located at 34th and Race Streets, is a 19th century Victorian home that is being transformed into a living, working laboratory for green tech. The Smart House team, a student-run organization, hopes that after it is built, it can serve as a platform for green design, technology and research.

“We are also trying to maintain the character of the house, and that’s because we respect the neighborhood and we want everyone to comfortable with the design and although it will be modern, it shouldn’t be obnoxious,” says Aleksandra Wolchasty, an architecture student involved with the project.

Co-founder Eric Eisele says he has been helping plan the idea since very early in his college career. “I couldn’t wait until my freshmen design product started because we were formulating our own research, formulating a team and getting our hands dirty,” he says. “I thought it’d be great if there was a student organization that would do this, and it’s been my goal to put this in place.”

Drexel Smart House opening in Fall 2011

The students hope that the house will become a place to showcase their ideas and concepts allowing them the opportunity to put their ideas into practice.

“When this idea was brought to us we were immediately excited by the notion that we would have a student-driven organization that would be able to foster and enable a lot of useful research, a lot creativity and innovation, and thereby strengthen the educational experience,” Dr. Milton Silver, director of Drexel’s mentor program, says. The university’s mentors meet with students on a regular basis to provide support, guidance, and encouragement.

Many student-run organizations are only as strong as their founder, but it goes deeper than that with the Smart House team, organizers say. “One of the unique things about this organization is that this is the third-generation. Many times student organizations can’t establish themselves to take it past a good idea,” says Dr. Joan Weiner, faculty advisor for the project.

WHAT THE TEAM HAS PLANNED

A green roof is fitted with soil and grass in order to absorb rainwater, and in the process, reducing contaminated rain run-off. The natural roof also helps insulate the house. Installing a green roof on an existing structure can be difficult due to the weight of the soil and water. “A regular green roof can weigh anything from twenty to sixty pounds per square-foot, so that is kind of a very significant weight on the structure of the building,” says Monika Mickute, the student leader of the green roof project.

Mickute is developing a lightweight green roof that will weigh less than 10 pounds per square foot, a load that could easily be supported by the current structure of the Smart House. The initial plan is to replace the soil with a synthetic lightweight material like perlite, hollow microspheres, or polystyrene beads. “The challenge we are facing is nutrition,” she said.

Another idea for the roof is a cool-roof coating, which is essentially a white roof that reflects instead of absorbs heat and light. “What we are trying to do is selectively target infrared radiation to reflect that out to where it doesn’t absorb as heat,” says Drexel’s Smart House President Cody Ray.

“This has the additional benefit of not only cutting your cooling bill but also reducing the urban heat island effect, where cities are either a few degrees or significantly warmer than the surrounding countryside.”

Geothermal heating is another project the team is investigating. “The idea is basically using the earth as a giant reservoir for keeping a steady temperature in your house year-round,” says Ray.

Geothermal pumps could include a closed-loop system that would circulate water in and out of the ground to transport heat as needed. “The earth just has this huge thermal mass and it doesn’t change temperature drastically during the year,” he says. The team is looking to drill 500-foot deep wells but they’re not yet sure if the rock formation under the house will support the plans.

When the house is completed in 2011 it will be a viable housing option for Drexel students.

“I think it’ll be really inspiring. I think people will wake up every day thinking how can we lessen our impact on the environment. I think it’ll be really awesome for whoever lives there,” Wolchasty says.

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.

THE BICYCLES

Philly Electric Wheels or, yes, PHEW, if pressed, came to mind after Kaighobady watched his wife Meenal Raval use an electric bike to commute to work and found a buzz around her method of transport. Since opening his store Oct. 1, he’s spending his days offering free test rides — also available at this Thursday’s reception — to show people just how practical his bikes are.

“They have everything that is good about regular bicycles,” he says. “But with the option to have someone gently push you in the back when you’re going up a hill or speeding in bad weather.”

He currently stocks 16 models from four bicycle lines — Currie Technologies, EcoBike, eZee, Ultra Motor — all of which cost roughly a penny a mile to operate, range up to 40 miles per charge, can cruise as fast as 20 miles per hour and require no license.

The cheapest model he currently stocks is $500 — the starting cost of a new traditional bicycle at many bike shops — and the most expensive is $2,700. A removable battery powers the bikes and are plugged into the wall, to be charged as easily as a cell phone battery, though it’ll take five to six hours for most bikes.

All bicycles come with warranties, many including a one-year maintenance guarantee from Kaighobady himself.

And Kaighobady, with an engineering degree from the University of Bridgeport and a background in tinkering, is probably someone from whom you want a warranty.

HIS BACKGROUND

After leaving Iran in 1979 — unrelated to that country’s Islamist Revolution, he says, though that year “something big happened there” — Kaighobady followed family to Oklahoma City. He built a computer consultancy firm on the East Coast, and then moved to Mount Airy in 2000 with wife Meenal, a native of India.

“This neighborhood has been very good to us,” he says.

He’s been involved in a half-dozen eco-ventures, though PHEW is his first swing at retail. Since 2006, the couple has tried to create a low-carbon household, which fits well into living down the block from his store. Also, the store is located in Green on Greene, a mixed-use building with a mission of sustainability. An environmentally friendly household-products manufacturer is also based there.

Kaighobady has used his mechanical mind for greener transport before.

In July 2007, he finished making a homemade electric-powered Volkswagen Vanagon, and says two men who claimed to be Chevron employees in March 2006 paid $3,900 for a 1979 Jetta he rigged to run on a biodiesel from used fryer oil.

“But these bikes,” Kaighobady says, in his stark corner storefront, a half dozen store models carefully arrayed on the hardwood floor, “are really going to be part of the future.”

-30-

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.

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

• Innovation Philadelphia reports that our fair city was ranked the fourth most innovative U.S. city in a recent large survey by 2think2know. Philly lagged behind Boston, which was ranked No. 1 globally, San Francisco, New York and Washington D.C. We were 32nd globally.
• Good magazine hits Center City to talk the innovation surrounding the recently installed BigBelly trash cans that are showing up on our busy city streets. There’s a hotly edited video that includes Oscar the Grouch.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

• TechCrunch just seems dumbfounded by the profitability of the little social network that could, myYearbook based in New Hope, Pa., co-founded by Catherine Cook, whom we spoke to earlier this year.
• The Inquirer reports that the next big innovation in rural health care may come from two small towns 150 miles northwest Philadelphia.

GIVE A GLANCE

• As part of a big green business package in its Sunday edition, the Inquirer reports on a Warminster firm that is betting its future on the growth of LED light sales.
• Philly Tech News reports that two scientists from our region were named to the MIT Technology Review’s TR35, representing the top innovators under 35 years of age.

Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Section 8 bash at Tattooed Mom on South Street: A Technically Philly and Geekadelphia co-sponsored event

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