Philly invades South by Southwest

Indy Hall founders Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi lead "How Geeks Grabbed Philadelphia by the Balls."

AUSTIN – In the Courtyard Rio Grande Hotel, just across the street from the Austin Convention Center, BarCamp Philly organizers Roz Duffy and Kelani Nichole walked up the escalator with a burlap sack and hustled down the hall.

“It’s our bag of balls,” said Duffy with a smile.

Culminating Philly’s strong presence here (TP has seen our share of Phillies caps and jerseys) was the Saturday session “How Geeks Grabbed Philadelphia by the Balls,” a panel led by Indy Hall co-founders Alex Hillman and Geoff DiMasi that aimed to help residents from other cities foster a tech community.

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Community launches support portal for Google gigabit fiber

Philadelphia’s tech community is looking for your support to bring Google to our backyard.

After announcing last week its intent to apply to be a test bed for Google’s ultra-high speed fiber, city officials have collaborated with community developers to launch an external initiative to drum up buzz for its proposal.

Working at Independents Hall over the weekend, the groups helped launch a portal—at gigabitphilly.com—that solicits feedback from local users to help fulfill Google’s Request For Information. The page drives home Philadelphia’s notability as a “city of firsts,” much like it would be for Google’s broadband pilot program.

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Startup Roundup: Baltimore visits Philly, RailBandit updates NJ Transit offering, TrapCall supporting Sprint

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

Baltimore coworking space BeeHive visited IndyHall last week, according to the Philly coworking site’s newsletter. And at IndyHall’s weekly Show & Tell lunch meetup, several startups showed off their goods, like MyClin which claims to “revolutionize clinical trials,” and Johnny Bilotta’s UI prototyping software for Photoshop and Illustrator.

We’ve received word from Ignite Philly 5 organizers about some of the speakers set for the March 2 event at Johnny Brenda’s. We’ve got limited details, and organizers anticipate changes in the schedule, but so far, Asheesh Laroia of OpenHatch will talk about food trucks and open source, Philly Startup Leaders‘ Blake Jennelle will discuss startups and nonprofit survival, Mike Levinson of DreamIt will offer ideas “that make it (and don’t),” and Happier.com Founder Andrew J. Rosenthal will tell you, mysteriously enough, “how to get people to like you.” Thank god for that.

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Event Highlights for January 25-31, 2010

Our calendar continues its upward trajectory this week with an event every night.

On Monday, for less than a Hamilton, you can head on over to the coolest building in the city (that would the Cira Center for those keeping track at home) for Mobile Monday’s DEMO night. It’s a veritable who’s who in the mobile space.

If your business dress code requires you to look more like John Hodgman than Justin Long, stop in and visit the Mac Business User Society at UArts where the group will be talking about the Apple Tablet.

And on Saturday, bring the kids to the Franklin Institute for a life-sized game of “Operation”. And this time, your older brother won’t be bothering you as you try to remove the funny bone.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more.

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Startup Roundup: Lifehacker has trust issues with Lose It Or Lose It, myYearbook donates to Haiti

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch. Several of the tips in this week’s roundups resulted from a quick email to TP. Without further ado….

DEFINITE READS

Lose It Or Lose It founder Randy Schmidt offers insight into the how, why and how much of launching a startup Web product, and it doesn’t sound so daunting: Twenty-one grand and some serious, uhm, sweat equity.

Lifestyle-meets-technology aggregator LifeHacker ragged on Schmidt’s project, practically begging readers not to give money to the product. LifeHacker likely picked up the story when CBS3’s Nicole Brewer interviewed a contributor for her piece highlighting Lose It as a tech-savvy way to lose weight.

In light of the recent magnitude-7.0 earthquake in Haiti, New Hope’s myYearbook has pledged to donate at least $15,000 and up to $25,000 through its Causes social networking application this month. The company donated more than $250,000, contributed by members, to charities in 2009.

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Orpheus Media Research seeks funding for Clio, music analysis tool

A team of developers located in Old City’s Independents Hall is seeking an initial round of funding for their music composition search engine.

After launching an online pre-alpha beta and graduating from the Wharton Business Development Program late last year, Orpheus Media Research—which is developing Clio, a content-based music search engine—is inviting investors to review its business plan.

The investment would be used to hire developers, protect intellectual property and market and support Clio. The group made the announcement in an e-mail to Technically Philly last week, after it decided that funding was the best next step.

“For a couple weeks there, we had to press pause and figure out what was going to be the most flexible development path,” Founder and Chief Science Officer Dr. Greg Wilder said in a telephone interview.

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TNT: coIN Loft brings coworking to Wilmington

According to Wes Garnett, Delaware is the only mid-atlantic state that does not have a coworking space.

“It’s not just because no one has started it,” he says, “but because no one has even heard of coworking.”

Much like many Philadelphians, Garnett sees a northern neighbor taking technology talent from his city when there are plenty of reasons to stay home. Though Delaware is well-known as a tax shelter for large corporations, the state hasn’t exactly been rolling out the red carpet for entrepreneurs, something Garnett and his partners hope to change through coIN Loft.

“In 2007, Delaware was ranked 50 out of 50 for attracting entrepreneurs. The next year we jumped to 35,” he says. “Either way we suck.”

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Event Highlights for December 28 – January 3, 2010

The kids are home from school this week, and the events calendar looks like it.

Aside from an open house with a growing institution and a new member lunch with the Indyhall boys and girls, this calendar is as empty as reporter Sean Blanda’s social calendar or, uhm, last week’s events roundup.

We can only assume we don’t have anything for the night of Dec. 31 because our technology and entrepreneurship community versions of New Year’s Eve are just like everyone else’s — and that might not involve getting up at 8 a.m. for the Mummer’s Day Parade, even if Kevin Bacon came to their rescue.

Everyone is sure to rebound for a big, bold 2010. We’re going to share our resolutions with you in January — seriously — so why don’t your tech ones with us? For now, the last week of events in 2009.. and one in 2010.

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Event Highlights for November 30—December 6, 2009

Updated 11/30, 10:24 a.m., with date and time edits.

Aaand we’re live.

We’re glad to be back in this big ‘ole city, and apparently you are, too—our calendar is packed solid with some great events.

We’ve even got a geographical spread throughout Philly’s neighborhoods, so if you can’t find something within walking distance, well, you haven’t visited our calendar. If not for the networking, get out for the fresh air—we know what it’s like being holed up in your home or office in front of that computer. Trust us. We know it all too well.

Independents Hall is launching a new monthly series of events to introduce the community to companies based in Philly and abroad, kicking-off with Apstrata, a business doing cloud-based application distribution. Man, that cloud voodoo blows our minds sometimes.

Net Tuesday is doing it like Oprah this month, except with a lot less tears and no free cars. The regular meetup introduces its new Book Unclub, where they’re talking books in a casual setting. We’d call it Oprah 2.0, but a second coming of the talk show diva frankly scares the bejesus out of us.

Agile Philly wants to teach you some new tricks to influencing folks around the office, sans Yoda. Finally, let loose at Philly Creative Jobs‘ Creative Mega Social. And yes, adding “Mega” to your event name does make it that much more impactful.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more.

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Links: Alex Hillman and Kelly Lee spar, the Baltimore tech scene and More

DEFINITE READS

• The Inquirer jumps into the fray of criticism lobbed at Innovation Philadelphia and their Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit by Independents Hall co-working co-founder Alex Hillman, most notably through a lengthy post on his personal blog. Community response was less than enthused. Read our Q&A with Innovation Philadelphia head Kelly Lee.
• The Baltimore Sun’s tech blog has a guest post calling for advancements in their tech scene. Now, Philadelphia is bigger, more historic, cooler and totally owns Edgar Allan Poe’s legacy, but we’re way down with Charm City and totally dig that both of our towns get the short stick even though we’re the realest two in this urbanized eastern corridor we have here, so cheers to them. We hope to see their community grow just like ours has and continues to do. It ain’t Baltimore, my friends, it’s Balti-most.
• The Inquirer reports that Gov. Rendell announced an electric car manufacturer is looking at property along the Delaware River — get this — within city limits. But business columnist Joey DiStefano reports that state legislation that would make street legal the low-speed electric vehicles in question has stalled.

After the jump, a Ben Franklin expansion, Thrillist cats called coolest and eight more tech stories, including our best read piece of the week.

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