Friday Q & A: Mark Loschiavo, Executive Director of the Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship at Drexel University

Mark Loschiavo, Executive Director of the Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship at Drexel University, believes the region’s universities are key to heightening the city’s profile when it comes to entrepreneurship.

“Part of our mission is to not only drive entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurial thinking,” he says.

Since 2001, The Baida Center has been a business incubator in Drexel’s Lebow School of Business that houses eight to ten companies on average, mostly winners of the school’s incubator competition. The center is also a big reason the school was named one of the top three entrepreneurship programs for graduate students in the country (three spots ahead of, ahem, Temple University).

Technically Philly sat down with the man behind the scenes: Executive Director and Senior Executive in Residence Mark P. Loschiavo and asked him how the incubator works and why, like the rest of us, Loschiavo has trouble pronouncing “Baiada.”

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DreamIt Ventures Demo Day 2009: our awards

A crowd of more than 200 in the Independence Visitor Center ballroom for the second Dream It Ventures Demo Day.

Demo Day marked the end of the second session of DreamIT Ventures, with the box score showing growth: one company sold, several pledging to retain ties to Philadelphia and six already moving on user acquisition.

A collegial crowd of 200 — t-shirt adorned developers, business casual 20- and 30-somethings and a crush of lawyers and investors — piled into the Independence Visitor Center ballroom, away from cloudy skies and occasional rain, to hear presentations from 10 tech startups that were housed in the University City incubator this summer.

The buzz was just how few of the 10 presenting startups were actively and openly seeking funding — just three by our count — and the growth DreamIt has seen.

Some estimates put the audience size at nearly double last year’s inaugural Demo Day, during which the incubated companies present their progress after the three month program. There was national attention not present last time, with coverage from ReadWriteWeb and Tech Crunch on record.

Below we run through the ten companies and, more importantly, give awards for their presentations.

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Technically Not Tech: Kendra Gaeta and KidsZillions on branding and allowance saving

Kendra Gaeta is facing branding issues with her allowance service for kids but remains bullish on the idea. Here she presents her concept at Ignite Philly 3 on May 3, 2009 in Fishtown's Johnny Brenda's.

Updated 3:02 7/20/09 for copyright clarification

It’s KidsZillions now and legal vagaries may force that to change once more, but that doesn’t make Kendra Gaeta any less passionate about the mission.

You may have seen her present at Ignite Philly 3 in Johnny Brenda’s on May 3 (where we declared her to have given the best performance), but the allowance chore management savings site for kids that Gaeta described was then called KidsMoney.

During her presentation, she briefly alluded to the possible name change then and made the move not long after, respectfully forfeiting the brand to a juvenile financial management author with a similar mission.

Her team is now dubbed KidsZillions, but some legal advice has left them feeling compelled to make another jump.

An e-commerce company called GiftZillions owns their similar trademark, and while it doesn’t appear to have anything near the same education mission as KidsZillions, Gaeta is getting more advice that branding may be a problem there, too. (Her company is tweeting at the far less distinctive @KidProject)

“I’ve been told we could have enough of an e-commerce edge that users would see us as a kids versions of GiftZillions,” she says. “It stings a bit, that we [could] have the copyright for a name we really like and yet are told we shouldn’t do anything with it.

“But I know building the project is more important.” So that’s what she’s doing.

While the name debate continues and their Web site’s interactivity features remain in development, the company, which is part of the second class of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures, this week launched the Allowance Project, a video blog that will feature interviews of a broad, diverse cross-section of people explaining their savings and spending habits as children.

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Drexel boasts tech, with smart grid system and incubator entrants

The City Six school with the computer science cred boasted its tech influence from two different places in big ways in recent weeks.

Drexel University is planning on deploying a smart grid system that will provide real-time measurements of location-specific energy outputs across its 65-acre campus in University City, as reported by inTech yesterday. The real-time pricing technology, which will come from Conshohocken-based Viridity Energy, will give Drexel the wherewithal to purchase power at low-demand times of the day and sell excess power back to the general power grid for profit.

That bit of news followed an announcement from the school’s LeBow College of Business that three new startups were welcomed into its Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship business incubator, all with a touch of technology. The three new entrants are Ranter, a social-networking tool that allows users to text groups; Konnect.me, a business-to-business Web portal and Stabiliz Orthopaedics, which is developing bone fasteners with bio-absorbable materials, as first reported by Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer.

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University City Science Center welcomes three new companies

University City incubator and research park the Science Center includes a series of facilities hugging the Market Street corridor between 34th and 38th streets. Photo courtesy of the Science Center.

Europe’s largest organization for advancing chemical sciences has landed.

The Royal Society of Chemistry, which has a worldwide network of members and an international publishing business, needed to set up an East Coast base to continue its expansion.

So, RSC and two other organizations, including a second foreign group making their first U.S. home in Philadelphia, have moved into the University City Science Center, the historic nonprofit  incubator and research park, according to a press release from the center [PDF].

With RSC, GADORE Center USA, an outpost of a German collaborative focused on renewable energy, is the newest participant in the center’s Global Soft landing program, which aims to help international companies develop a presence in the region’s life sciences and information technology markets. The program is housed at 3711 Market Street.

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Profit and conscious with new South Philadelphia incubator

They’re going to incubate profitable good works.

That’s much the angle of GoodCompany Ventures, which opened its Philadelphia Naval Yard Business Center offices with a ribbon-cutting ceremony highlighted by appearances from Mayor Michael Nutter and Chuck Lacy, a former president of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, yesterday.

All the startups they take in will be for-profit and looking to make a difference or two.

Yesterday, the incubator was also welcoming its inaugural 2009 class of “social entrepreneurs,” including the following: Cyrus-XP, which focuses on advancing the management and delivery of healthcare; CalendarFly, a single source scheduling solution for families (for a test drive, use “student” for username and password), and VolunteerBIG.com, a philanthropic social network that was gunning for grant money earlier this year.

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