It Happened Here: location-based iPhone, Android discovery app launches Philly version

It Happened Here, a location-based, news-driven U.S. city exploration application for iPhone and Android, has launched a Philadelphia version.

Featuring 200 geo-located events and growing for Philly — from the familiar Revolution-era notes to more modern sites like film locations and celebrity sightings — the application has versions for five other cities. The $2.99 price gets a user a single city.

Built by D.C.-based development firm Mobile Surroundings, the application adds to the discovery craze by doing a good job of including both the historic and the modern. Though the density of events are reliably highest near Old City, other inner-ring neighborhoods are represented, too.

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PNG file format, now ubiquitous on the web, was shaped by P’unk Ave developer Tom Boutell

Tom Boutell is a modest guy. Considering that one of his most notable achievements is so much a part of the background of the web, figuratively and literally, maybe that character trait makes sense.

Boutell is responsible for heading up the working group that designed the framework and specification for Portable Network Graphics, known more commonly as the PNG file format. It’s a format that you’re likely to find on any page on the web, seated beside and behind JPEGs and GIFs, more well-known image formats. “It would be hard to find a website that doesn’t have at least one PNG on it,” Boutell says. There was even a book written about the format, published by the industry leader O’Reilly, pictured above.

Boutell moved to Philadelphia in 2002 to be close to family, while working with his consultancy, Boutell.com, selling web analytics and image map editing software he had written. Eventually, the business fell behind the wave of web innovation as a solo act, and Boutell joined P’unk Ave, the South Philadelphia web development firm, where he cherishes the ability to “work with people of complimentary skills,” he says.

But back in 1993, Boutell was hooked into a community that was helping define the future of the World Wide Web. We caught up with him to hear the back-story, after the jump.

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Augmented Reality by PhillyHistory.org and Azavea launches on iPhone, Android

Click to enlarge.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

In February 2010, the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities awarded the Philadelphia Department of Records a Digital Humanities Startup grant to investigate the use of augmented reality applications for mobile devices.

The prototype application, AR by PhillyHistory.org, is available for free download on iPhone and Android. It allows users to view historic photographs as 3D digital information overlaid atop their current location using the camera, GPS and many other sensors that came stock with nearly all consumer smartphones.

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ENIAC: What is the future of preserving Philadelphia’s super computer legacy? [Video]

Engineering students at the University of Pennsylvania walk by the ENIAC. Photo by Sarah Schu for Technically Philly

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

In a small corner of the University of Pennsylvania’s Moore School of Electrical Engineering, marked by a small paper sign, sits Philadelphia’s portion of the remains of the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer, or the ENIAC, what many say is the world’s first general use electronic computer.

A small panel of what used to be a massive 30-ton machine rests off in that corner in the Moore Building while engineering students sit a few feet away, browsing Facebook, chatting and eating lunch. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., which technically has ownership of all of the ENIAC, has a majority of the remaining pieces of the super computer, but much of it has either been destroyed or otherwise lost.

Last Tuesday, Feb. 15, marked 65 years since John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert debuted the ENIAC in Philadelphia at Penn’s Moore Building in 1946, an event that Bill Mauchly, a Video Architect at Cisco Systems and son of John Mauchly, said in an interview with Technically Philly marked a massive shift in technology’s history. Learn 10 things you need to know about the ENIAC.

“It was like if today you could walk, and tomorrow you could fly at 5000 miles per hour,” explained Mauchly.

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Links: How Portland, Ore. has grown a local software community and More

DEFINITE READS

• Two Wharton Pals Take Same Road To Riches [Wall Street Journal] — Nat Turner of Invite Media and Jack Abraham of Milo.
• President’s House: Quite A Site [Brownstoner] — The impact the Independence Hall Association website had on the development on the new President’s House display in Old City.
• Portland, Ore., Invests in Homegrown Software Community [Government Technology] — “The city has invested almost $600,000 as part of an initial attempt to nurture the local software community…Over the past year, Portland’s software industry has been on the rise. At least 10 companies have brought in $68 million of venture capital, said Baugh. Unlike years past, the companies decided to stay in Portland instead of taking the money and moving to nearby larger technology markets.”

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Area Chamber of Commerce chief ‘kicking it up a notch’ with political advocacy [Inquirer] — Of a more active role taken by Philly Chamber CEO Rob Wonderling.
• Penn to start transplanting hands [Inquirer] — “The Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania on Tuesday announced it will offer one of the most technically and ethically challenging surgeries in modern medicine: hand transplants.”

GIVE A GLANCE

• Scientific community unites to save bats [WHYY] — I am including this because I like bats and science and it sorta has something to do with tech. But mostly because bats are awesome and important.
• PBJ reporter’s family signs deal for musical, no riches yet [Philadelphia Business Journal] — We like tech writer Peter Key, you should too, and his father was a celebrated artist.
• 5 Reasons HP Should Acquire SAP [CRN]

10 coolest (mostly interactive) online maps of Philadelphia

This 1838 map of Philadelphia from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania didn't make our list of the 10 best maps of Philadelphia.

We love maps.

For hundreds of years, they have helped us better understand our world. That understanding has grown wildly with time and technology, but, still, maps help.

In a place as inwardly focused, we have plenty of maps in Philadelphia. You also may know that we have something of a technology community here.

So there are resources like the Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access, or PASDA, which offers just a wild glut of GIS shape files for mapping geeks. We’ve seen cool mapping tools that are of broader scope though Philly got some love: from the addition of bicycle directions to Philadelphia Google Maps to the Google Building Maker to mapping the homes of those in the U.S. armed services who died in the Mideast this decade and many more.

But we wanted to highlight the coolest maps made for Philadelphia of Philadelphia.

Taking into account our own map obsessions, suggestions and calling out our community, we took on the task of listing, in no particular order, the 10 best online maps of Philadelphia.

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As funding dries, Historical Society’s PhilaPlace unveils compelling new features

Update: April 1, 12:39 p.m.: Historical Sociey of Pennsylvania spokesperson Lauri Cielo clarified with us that though a lack of funding may affect the possibility of new features and expansion to other neighborhoods, the Web site will remain available to users and staff is budgeted to keep the project going with story uploads and maintenance. Project Director Joan Saverino makes note of these clarifications in her comment below.

Funding is running dry for an online historical project that is a powerful example of the intersection between forward-thinking technologists and history-minded academics.

Organizers of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania‘s three-year, $500,000 PhilaPlace project, an interactive documentation of “beyond the bell” 19th century ethnic and immigrant working-class history, are seeking new grants and innovative ways to keep the project sustainable.

The news comes as impressive new features were unveiled last week, coordinators tell Technically Philly.

Adjacent to PhilaPlace’s historic Google Map overlays that show the city’s dense development at the turn of the century, the site now features a “Streets” section that details ethnicity, land use, occupation and population, showing rapid change over time in several prominent Philadelphia neighborhoods.

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Technically Not Tech: The Travelocity Traveling Gnome

Courtesy of the gnome's Facebook page

For a city that is used to being voted to the wrong end of top ten lists, Philly is making a comeback. Ugliest? Fattest? Psh.

This is the birthplace of American democracy, and we are finally starting to show it. Earlier this month, Philadelphians rose up en masse and voted Phillies CF Shane Victornio to the final roster spot in the MLB All Star game, beating out players from San Fran, Washington and Los Angeles.

In our latest victory, thanks to the urging of the Greater Philadelphia Tourism and Marketing Corporation, Philly won the right to host Travolcity‘s traveling gnome for a week over Boston and D.C.
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Abraham Lincoln loves technology and Philadelphia

Today is President’s Day, so why not tip your hat to perhaps the most technology-loving president in our nation’s history.

No, not iPod-tripping, Zune-dismissing, social media-loving Barack Obama, but Abraham Lincoln, who was born 200 years ago and has a particular affinity to Philadelphia, which has more monuments to Honest Abe than anywhere else.

Despite his image as a backward country bumpkin, turns out Lincoln was incredibly interested in technology, particularly for his time, access and education.

Find out how after the jump.

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