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.

“So, a lot of shit has happened in the past three years,” said Hillman to a crowd that was half-filled with non-Philadelphia residents.

DiMasi and Hillman did their best to chronicle the development of Independent’s Hall, from the time the two met on a PANMA mailing list to the expansion of the space last year. The duo fielded questions from audience members asking how to replicate Philly’s rapid arrival to the national technology community.

One of the main talking points was Philly’s tech community’s relationship with local government. Several people asked if they should chase down government grants, and Hillman and DiMasi preached a hands-off approach to local government, repeatedly referencing CTO Allan Frank‘s and Councilman’s Bill Green’s recent interest in the community.

However Hillman was quick to criticize aspects of the government’s involvement saying that Frank “totally blew” his Ignite presentation and said his following presentation (“How to get people to do what you want”) was a direct reaction to Frank’s.

“I don’t know if he was upset, and quite frankly I don’t care,” he said.

The crowd responded strongly to the recent Google Fiber effort and the hackathon meeting that took place last weekend at Indy Hall. DiMasi and Hillman said that Councilman Green even said that he would think about working from the co-working space.

To emphasize the panel’s title, DiMasi and Hillman then tossed out rubber bouncy balls, surprising those looking down and taking notes on their laptops.

Elsewhere

While “How Geeks Grabbed…” was the only Philly-specific panel, Philadelphia residents had a presence elsewhere here:

• Happy Cog, with offices in Philly and New York City also led its own panel titled “We F*cked Up: Happy Cog and Friends, Exploring Failures, Together”that was well-attended in one of the Convention Center’s main ballrooms.
• The Science Cheerleader, Darlene Cavalier, is on the scene, holding contests to promote science literacy.
• Good Company Ventures tweeted:
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• Daring Fireball‘s John Gruber led a session with The Deck‘s Jim Coudal about Daring Fireball’s early struggles to monetize and The Deck’s less-is-more approach to an ad network.
• Azavea developer Reed Lauber, Allied Pixel designer Brian Crumley, Blue Cadet’s Jason Grandelli and consultant Michael Lies were also in town (Thanks to Crumley for his Twitter list).
• At SXSW Film, “Lebanon, Pa” detailed the plight of a Philadelphia man who has to bury his father.
• Dr. Dog and Drinkup Buttercup, both Philly staples, are set to perform at SXSW Music.

Who did we miss?

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

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.

• Geekadelphia shares photos from the first of many video game competitions to come from IndyHall. Geek also covers the winner of the Cadence Watch Company’s design competition.
• Frazier-based pharmaceutical firm Cephalon (included in Armstrong’s middle class) has agreed to buy Malvern’s Ception Therapeutics for $250 million.

GIVE A GLANCE

• DMNews lists its 30 Under 30, calling Justin Premick, the director of education marketing at Huntingdon Valley-based AWeber Communications, a “thought leader in the e-mail marketing industry.”

Every Friday morning, we make sure you didn�t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

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.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Mobile train scheduling app RailBandit has announced v2.4, including track assignments for NJ Transit. With the new feature, users can see which track a train is set to depart. If you want to depart on them. Jersey joke? Natch—two of our co-founders are native.

Tom’s River-based TrapCall, which lets users unblock anonymous phone calls, has launched a new dashboard with better organization and simplified design. The company also announced support for Sprint mobile phone service.

GIVE A GLANCE

University City-based mobile payment service Venmo gets some national coverage from GigaOm. “[A] big issue with Venmo is the privacy and security of tying payments directly to your phone number. [Co-founder Andrew] Kortina said Venmo will allow a high level of user control over every transaction, therefore protecting users,” GigaOm’s Liz Gannes writes. We’ve been hard at work testing the service.

DreamIt Ventures incubated ticket marketplace startup SeatGeek gets some love on Lifehacker.

Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a Philly startup story left to link to on the Internet. See others here.

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.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

IndyHall intern Parker Whitney is hot on the beat of interviewing the coworking space’s members. This week, Bart Mroz, one of the first guys in the trenches when Independents Hall launched in 2007, talks about those humble beginnings.

Cloud computing is continuing to gain edge with mainstream business use, and Web doc-sharing app Vuzit recently got some love for its related thoughts on the Web’s future at a recent SalesForce.com conference. Those aren’t dark clouds, friends.

GIVE A GLANCE

South Philly’s P’unk Ave has redesigned its Web site. It’s minimalistic, sure. Admittedly, we thought�that’s it? But never second-guess a designer, we suppose. After all, it doesn’t seem that P’unk is hurtin’ for clients. The dudes have been hard at work on their impressive in-house content management system, Apostrophe. Period.

Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a startup story left to link to on the Internet.