SUMO Heavy Industries, Bart Mroz and crew building new e-commerce development firm

If Bart Mroz was pushed to give you a piece of advice, it just might be to limit yourself.

The founder of the recently re-branded SUMO Heavy Industries says a lot of firms doing web work get caught up in trying to do too many things and come up short doing them well.

“We started as a web development company that did all kinds of things like brochure sites and app development for different clients,” Mroz tells Technically Philly. “Then we decided to only do e-commerce work — the best decision that we made.”

In March 2008, Mroz co-founded round3media and by last November, Mroz had learned his greatest skills were focusing strictly on e-commerce site development. After his two partners in round3 wanted to work on different projects, Mroz started anew, launching e-commerce heavy SUMO with new partner Robert Brodie and creative director John Suder.

With a new name and a freshly announced, local client, Mroz is — and forgive us for this — entering the dohyō and fighting to build his company’s name as the top e-commerce development company in the region.

Read more

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.

Read more

Links: Pharma’s middle class, IndyHall gaming and more

DEFINITE READS

• Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer writes about the region’s pharmaceutical ‘middle class,’ with between $1 billion and $10 billion in annual sales.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• Keystone Edge has a Q&A with Drew Becher, the new chief of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, discussing his interest in sustainability and technology in the nonprofit’s mission.

Below, a middle-class pharma company gets a little bigger, a 30 Under 30 nod for an e-mail marketer and more.

Read more

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.

Read more

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.

Read more

Biggest tech community stories we covered in 2009

Happy New Year, folks.

It’s been an exciting year for us. Though we’ll be celebrating our first birthday in February, we’ve had a chance to take part in Philadelphia’s vibrant technology community for 10 months. We’ve seen the amazing things that this community offered in 2009. Coming up on our 500th published story about this community, we’re proud to be a part of it. And we’re ecstatic to see what lie ahead.

No, Technically Philly has not started its own Mummer troupe. We do, however, want to ring in the new year by taking a look back at our top stories of 2009. Our month-by-month perspective, after the jump.

Read more

TNT: Randy Schmidt on losing weight with Lose It or Lose It

The failure of some business plans are more productive than others.

If an online service that Web developer Randy Schmidt launched last week has enough success in helping people lose weight, Lose It or Lose It might be remembered as among the most productive failures to come out of the IndyHall co-working scene.

“It’s basically just a friend that keeps track of you and your weight loss for 10 weeks,” says Schmidt, of iSepta fame. “You sign up and put up dollars per pound and set a goal of pounds to lose per week. If you meet your goals, it costs you nothing.”

That’s the kind of pressure that Schmidt says he needs himself.

Read more

Event Highlights for October 26-November 1, 2009

It’s the last week of the month, and October isn’t going to go quietly. Our events calendar is chock full of fun times to close out the month. And, as a bonus, only one involves costumes.

IndyHall double dips our event highlights this week with a town hall and a Halloween party with the help of our friends at Geekadelphia. Meanwhile, we partner with Young Involved Philadelphia and others to host a forum about the future of news, and designers converge at Rittenhouse for free lectures.

Oh, and as an aside, can we end the horrible Halloween puns? It’s not Rocktober. It’s not Shocktober. And I will NOT have a “frighteningly good time” at your party.

So without delay, let’s get to our highlights. Because they’re so good, its scary.

Read more

Friday Q&A: Kelly Lee, Innovation Philadelphia President & CEO

Updated 9/11/09, 2:15 p.m.: Clarified summit tracks, noted “no frills” package clarification, and updated Philly panelists.

If it wasn’t for the first Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit in June 2006, Innovation Philadelphia may not have found it’s niche in the creative industries.

President and CEO Kelly Lee says that it was the attendees of the inaugural event, hosted three years ago, who inspired the economic development organization to shift focus from the broad spectrum of technology-based businesses to creative ones�art, design, web development, and others, in place of biotech and life sciences.

This year, Lee is spearheading the second of the summits, the well-marketed and polished 2009 Global Creative Economy Convergence Summit, which happens next month, October 5 to 6 at the Philadelphia Convention Center. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly is a panelist for GCECS2009, "Creating a Culture of Entrepreneurial Journalism" on Oct. 6]

The summit focuses on economics, entrepreneurship, workforce, technologies and sustainability, five interdependent tracks that Lee says make up the creative economy and that cities and regions need to have a strategy for.

There are dozens of workshops, panels, roundtables and presentations that include innovators and leaders from across the globe and the Philly region, like keynotes from author Elizabeth Gilbert, entrepreneur Peter Shankman, game guru Jane McGonigal and global economic developer Randall Kempner.

From flyer to Web design, packed-schedule to text message update technology, there’s little doubt that the nonprofit has invested quite a bit in this year’s summit. The organization has even launched a series of glossy, high-def videos on the conference website this week that features local entrepreneurs and policy-makers who will attend. It certainly doesn’t appear that Innovation Philadelphia is taking GCECS2009 lightly.

But critics aren’t taking their words lightly, either, including high-profile members of our business and technology communities.

Read more

Event Highlights for September 7-13, 2009

Fall weather is in full force and Philly’s tech events are starting to light up the calendar like summer fireflies.

This week has a handful of events that sound right down our alley, and we have a feeling you won’t have trouble finding one that interests you�or at least awakens the good person within.

Drew Olanoff’s tongue-in-cheek, not-sure-if-we-should-laugh-about-cancer fundraiser Blame Drew’s Cancer has made us re-think charity. It’s not about guilt anymore! It’s about Doing The Right Thing. Join Drew along with organizations like Open Chefame, Two Guys On Beer, IndyHall, LiveStrong, Taco Bell and more than a dozen musical performers on Wednesday for the Blame-A-Thon. The 24-hour fundraiser will happen throughout Philly and should be a blast, while simultaneously scaring the pants off that jerk called Cancer.

Also on Wednesday, don’t miss Creative Connects hosted by the BOSS Group, a mixer of local media professionals and Web developers. We’ll be darned if we said we don’t love the idea of those two getting together. Fall in love please, it’s a match made in heaven.

This Weekend, join Hacktory heads and analog and early digital computer enthusiasts at the Vintage Computer Festival in Jerz, a two-day event devoted to all things pre-Pentium. We recommend buying up some old tape drives and 2400 baud modems and trying to hack NORAD Wargames-style. The government will never expect an attack from a brute force app made in QBASIC.

Also on Saturday, join fellow Twitter folk at the Philadelphia Twestival. Hosted by Lucky Strike Bowling, this is the only chance you’ll have to play a game with fellow followers that isn’t hosted by Facebook. Damn if we don’t love us some Mafia Wars, but you’re gonna look great in those bowling shoes, we promise.

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

Read more