Seed Philly founder Brad Denenberg, at right, with the Center City accelerator's project manager Bill Mellinger.

The furniture, TVs, whiteboards and beer are now in Seed Philly, so the warm bodies are beginning to follow.

The self-styled mission-driven startup accelerator in Center City will officially welcome its first partner company on March 1, says Seed Philly founder Brad Denenberg.

That first company, OneTwoSee, which creates TV companion programming for mobile devices, doesn’t have a long commute. Previously, OneTwoSee, which has already transitioned, was being housed at Green Village, the incubator for sustainably-focused startups that is nearly adjacent office space on the 19th floor of 1650 Arch Street.

“Green Village was a great fit for us as we were getting into the starting blocks,” said OneTwoSee CEO Chris Reynolds. “As our business continues to grow on a daily basis the infrastructure and platform that Seed Philly can provide is a better fit for the business.”

With 11 offices, a few of which are already secured, and a bullpen of programming space, Seed Philly expects to house flexibly 50 people, Denenberg said. The incubator is also rolling out its event programming, hosting last week another in its series of paid Microsoft development workshops.

Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg announcing Project Liberty, which includes the incubation program and tablet initiative. Photo by Liliputing

There is real movement on the $250,000 startup incubator program which will be housed at a legacy newspaper company and supported by local and national organizations with stakes in entrepreneurship and new media.

According to a press release sent on Friday, Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Philadelphia Media Network have announced that they are seeking applications from startups looking to be a part of the inaugural class working inside the partners’ Project Liberty incubator. The project has also includes a widely cited tablet program, announced by PMN CEO Greg Osberg as depicted above and detailed by tech news site Lilputing.

We first reported on the program last November, when Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg announced the program at a Temple journalism seminar. The incubator program was later formalized with a $250,000 grant from the Knight Foundation.

The program starts October 31. Those interested can apply here to Ben Franklin Technology Partners before noon on Friday, October 14th.

“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.”

As always, edited for length and clarity.

First thing is first, how do you pronounce the name of the center?

It’s BAY – ADA.

If it’s any consolation to you, I was running the center for several months and I knew Mel Baiada quite well and always heard him pronounce it “Bi – ada.” But I was at CN8′s Money Matters one night (see video here) with his brother Mark and I introduced someone to him as Mark “Bi – ada” and he corrected me. I thought “Dang, I have been running the center and pronouncing it wrong for six months.”

How does Baiada work? Are participants all students?

It is predominately not students. Within the last couple of years, we piloted a student incubator program. That is, students could incubate a product while still in school.

We don’t limit it to Drexel student or alums, but that’s mostly what we have here. There are two ways to get into the center: One is through winning our incubator competition. The other way is through what we refer to as “exceptional merit.”

Which means we review the team, the business plan, and the market to determine weather or not the company has a better-than-average chance to be successful. And based on that, we will let people in. We’re pretty selective.

What kind of financial support does the incubator offer the companies?

The winners of the competition are given seed capital [up to $10,000], the amount of that depends on whether they win first, second or third place. All three also receive space for the first year for free. We also provide in-kind services.

We do not take an equity position in the companies. After the second year, the fees kick in. We charge half the market rate in year two and full market rate in year three.

So what’s in it for the university to house these companies if you are not taking a stake?

The primary reason we are doing this is to enhance the entrepreneurial ecosystem in the region and also to further people’s interest, passion and best practices in entrepreneurship. We really view it as part of the educational mission.

We hope, down the road, that these companies will ultimately give back. We hope that the ones that are successful will someday write a big check to us as a benefactor.

What is one of the most successful companies that have come from the incubator?

One that folks recognize in this area, especially when they park, is Ompay. Ompay is the company that develops SmartCards, the solution for the Philadelphia parking authority so you can pay for your meters.

Temple has its own entrepreneurial program, Penn has MentorTech Ventures. How do you view the landscape when it comes to the university-led incubator?

I think both Temple and Penn have some really good stuff that they’re doing. It’s exciting that this region has as much activity as it does around entrepreneurship.

Temple has been strong in women entrepreneurship. They’ve also done some interesting stuff in global entrepreneurship.

If you look at a majority of Temple business plans they tend to lifestyle businesses, ours tend to have more tech-type businesses that are more scalable.

The Wharton Small Business Development Center is for people in the community who are trying to learn the business of business. They do a nice job with that. Our training is quite different.

We have a program called GAP [Growth Acceleration Program] that is not meant for the individual on the street. It’s geared more toward companies, small and mid-size.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings you an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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.

Those companies crashing at LeBow’s incubator will be in decidedly more energy efficient digs once the university gets its smart grid system up and running, it boasts.

The technology from Veridity, called “virtual generation,” is said to give customers the chance to develop independence from the public grid by storing and dealing power. The grid reduces energy waste by using computer monitoring instead of a switch to allocate energy resources by use.

“Drexel has a long-standing commitment to apply the University’s technical and research capabilities to solving challenges in our communities. One of the greatest challenges we face today is the ability to meet current and future power demand through investment in clean and distributed energy resources,” interim University President C.R. “Chuck” Pennoni told inTech.

The new incubator bunkmates — who join 15 other businesses housed at Baiada by Armstrong’s count — all won a competition to earn the space, in addition to seed money, including the $12,000 awarded to Stabiliz.

The 20-something principals behind the Ranter texting tool seemed to catch Armstrong’s fancy — highlighting the crush of Drexel’s recent Web news.

Ranter will have a beta version of what Armstrong called a “would-be Twitter killer,” in three months.

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.

If the oldest and largest urban incubator and science park in the world wasn’t draw enough, Philadelphia’s growing reputation as a life sciences hub might help. And, yes, the companies also made mention that a big draw was Philly’s location between the American legislative capital and de facto financial home.

It doesn’t hurt that the center is zoned both as Keystone Opportunity and Innovation zones, which gives participating companies the opportunity for significant tax incentives. Resident companies employ some 7,500 people. See a list of those resident companies here.

The National Center for Patient Interactive Research, a newly established advocate for patient-generated data included in health information technology, also joined the center, opening operations at the center’s port business incubator, located at 3701 Market Street.

The center, which encompasses 15 buildings and 17 acres on the Avenue of Technology, boasts assisting the growth of more than 400 companies. The nonprofit is owned by 32 academic and media research institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple and Villanova universities. The center also has a campus in Newark, Del.

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.

GoodCompany aims to provide guidance and support to those for-profit startups that want to tackle large, unmet social needs. Like others, the incubator will offer those accepted training, mentoring, administrative and other pro-bono services. The new effort is co-founded by Resources for Human Development, a social finance firm and Murex Investments, an equity fund backed by leading financial institutions — both of which are based (barely) in Tioga — in addition to other business support.

At yesterday’s event, Lacy, the former Ben & Jerry’s president who is now president of the Vermont-based social capital firm Barred Rock Fund, addressed the attendees, as did Stephen Goodman, a partner at law firm Morgan Lewis, according to a press release from the incubator.

GoodCompany is sponsored by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, the Center City love child of the city and the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce that promotes economic developing in town, Trellist Marketing, the Wilmington, Del. Web marketer and the Wharton School of Business.