Al Schmidt: new reform GOP city commissioner talks about changing Board of Elections [Q&A]

New City Commissioner Al Schmidt ran on a campaign of reform for the beleagured Board of Elections.

When Al Schmidt first walked into his first elected public office as a new City Commissioner, he said it was like walking into a time machine.

Often criticized for being among the least transparent offices in Philadelphia, the Board of Elections has received an injection of new blood this year, with two new, reform-minded candidates winning seats.

Democrat and former mathematician Stephanie Singer shook the city’s political machine by besting the 36-year entrenched, if damaged, Marge Tartaglione, and then coasting through the general election. Because the city charter mandates one of the three Board of Elections seats be reserved for the minority party, Schmidt was caught in a testy battle with aging incumbent Joe Duda, from a decidedly different Philadelphia Republican Party since his election in 1995.

In the end, Singer and Schmidt, who ran similar campaigns on embracing web transparency and technology innovation for the office, won out, joining incumbent Democrat Anthony Clark.

“In Philadelphia today, the divide is less between the Democrats and Republicans, and more between the machine and the reform candidates,” said Schmidt. “The trouble is that some are good at pretending to be both.”

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Technology often a vehicle for fraud, waste, mismanagement: City Controller Alan Butkovitz [Q&A]

City Controller Alan Butkovitz and his office are good at finding the lede.

The elected official charged with auditing city government and council spending continues to make news by highlighting the most egregious examples of waste, fraud and mismanagement.

Like yesterday’s announcement that half a billion dollars of taxpayer money is being managed by outdated, unsupported technology from 1996 in the city’s procurement department. Or an October audit that showed, among  other shortcomings in the city’s often criticized Sheriff’s office, that its less-than-stellar website had apparently cost $2.9 million over five years. (Yesterday, a sheriff’s employee was charged with a scam that bilked the city out of $400,000, ahead of state Rep. Jewell Williams taking office in January.)

In his second term since first being elected to the position in 2005 following a 15 year tenure in the state House of Representatives, Butkovitz, 59, seems to enjoy the gig. He is serious and detailed, eager to discuss the 400-page audit report on the Sheriff’s office one recent November afternoon, with a tuft of his gray hair falling toward his cheek in a sunny corner office of the Municipal Services Building in Center City.

Butkovitz, a resident of Castor Gardens in the Northeast,, has not been without his critics. In his 2009 Controller campaign against a younger, more progressive tax advocate, Brett Mandel portrayed Butkovitz as a machine politician who focused less on auditing each city agency as the City Home Rule Charter [PDF] requires and more on bigger, headline-grabbing and politically-strategic investigations.

Still, with increasing frequency, Butkovitz’s claims of waste, fraud and mismanagement at the city level involve technology: IT infrastructure, agency software and the shortcomings of it all.

Below, Technically Philly talks tech, taxes and hackathons with the West Philly native and graduate of Overbrook High School and Temple University.

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City Director of Communications Desiree Peterkin Bell on social media strategy [Friday Q&A]

Photos courtesy of the City of Philadelphia. Photo Credits: Mitchell Leff

It’s been a year since the City of Philadelphia hired Desiree Peterkin Bell as Director of Communications and Strategic Partnerships.

In that time, we’ve seen a more proactive approach to social media across Philadelphia city agencies, and even outside of it, like this week’s announcement that the Philadelphia Parking Authority would pursue an aggressive social media strategy.

When Technically Philly interviewed Mayor Michael Nutter last fall, social media was barely a blip on his radar.

Since Peterkin Bell took the helm of the office and began pushing the City toward social media engagement, Mayor Nutter has taken to Twitter, growing from 300 followers a year ago to more than 18,000.

That count doesn’t yet match the brand of Newark Mayor Corey Booker, Peterkin Bell’s employer from 2006 to Fall 2010, who has engaged 1.1 million followers. But it’s a far cry from the city’s once inept social media strategy, which only a year ago was blindly sharing press releases typed out in all-caps, a strategy much satirized by Philly’s tech community.

Though her early career impact will likely be attributed to her social media chops, don’t call Peterkin Bell — who earns a $150,000 salary from the City and lives in a home on South Broad Street, the Avenue of the Arts — platform dependent. In New York City, she worked under Mayor Bloomberg as Senior Director of Government Affairs for the New York’s marketing development corporation, working with brands like General Motors and Universal Studios to sell city assets for marketing purposes. She now uses that experience to persuade national media organizations to recognize Philadelphia’s assets as a continually growing and prosperous city.

At the heart of her role, she’s coordinating a centralized communications strategy that includes interface with national media, the city’s public access television channel, and making sure that no matter the citizen and no matter the message, the city is working to reach them.

After the jump, Peterkin Bell shares her experience in New York and Newark, the extent of her role as Communications Director, and where she think the city’s communications strategy is headed.

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Sam Katz, investor and past mayoral candidate: Philadelphia is becoming more entreprenurial ‘without permission’ [Q&A]

Sam Katz is widely known in Philadelphia for campaigning. But he has had considerably more success in business.

More than a decade ago, he lost the mayoralty to John Street in one of the closest and most controversial big city elections in at least a generation, enough to warrant a celebrated documentary. Running a competitive Republican campaign in an overwhelmingly Democratic city was enough to make him a recurrent candidate suggestion, as recent as this mayoral race. No matter that a mayoral primary loss in 1991, a governor primary loss in 1994 and a failed rematch against Street in 2003 has tied losing in politics to his legacy.

Where Katz, 61, has maintained his air of success has been in business and government oversight.

In March, Katz was named the chairman of the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, the state-created panel that oversees city finances and quickly became the public face of an important body that has often operated in relative public obscurity.

Katz, a former Central High School honor student and Johns Hopkins basketball star, made his wealth working from 1976 to 1994 for Public Finance Management, a firm that advises government authorities on efficient large-scale project management, as the Inquirer reported in 1999.

With that accrued wealth, the West Mount Airy resident dove into investing, taking roles in a half dozen or more investment properties of note in the region.

The native of Wynnefield in West Philadelphia formed in the late 1990s the early stage private equity fund Wynnefield Capital Advisors (though it went by variations of that name) and invested through that organization in a variety of ways until 2004. He is board chairman of BioAdvance, investing in “very early stage life sciences companies,” and a limited partner in Osage Ventures, which is being credited with rethinking how universities profit on intellectual property. Katz has also been involved in launching or leading WellSpring Biocapital Partners, Biotechnology Greenhouse of Southeastern Pennsylvania and other small boutique investment groups.

With that background and with personal computing roots dating back to 1983, it’s no surprise he’s also taken to direct partnership, including investing in Fort Washington-based data-driven campaign analysis firm CampaignGrid and advising cWyze, the interactive video startup with Queen Village roots that presented at the spring 2011 Switch.

And just to show that investing remains something of a hobby, Katz has set his eyes on producing The Great Experiment, a seven-hour series on the 400-year history of Philadelphia the city, kicked off with a pilot proof of concept on 6ABC this past spring.  [Support its Kickstarter here].

With that background, below, Technically Philly asked Katz about how Philadelphia has changed, how it’s stayed the same and what we can do about it.

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Alex Hillman: ‘I want Philadelphia to outlast other cities,’ a Q&A with Indy Hall co-founder four years later

Photo by Chris Sembrot.

Alex Hillman partied last night.

If Technically Philly were to suggest that Hillman was celebrating the anniversary of a building, he probably wouldn’t like that very much. Last night, the co-founder of Old City coworking haunt Independents Hall was at Frankford Hall in Fishtown with more than 100 other members of a community celebrating four years of formal partnership.

In 2007, Hillman and P’unk Ave co-founder Geoff Di Masi brought together a cast of freelance web developers, software programmers, graphic designers and their ilk to put an end to home office isolation and bring about greater collaboration and creativity. Thus was born the affectionately nicknamed Indy Hall. Four years later, the community has grown, as has Hillman — to full blown entrepreneur, handling a few roles aside from community architect.

Hillman, a week into his 28th year, came to Philadelphia in 2002 by way of Drexel University, after growing up “on 18 acres between corn and horse farms an hour north of here that surely pushed me to be a city boy.” He went to Drexel for the co-op program but even that couldn’t keep him, dropping out three years into the program to start work on his own.

Now, in addition to Indy Hall fame, he has helped build business strategy for ChoiceShirts.com, is working with web services shop Wildbit and is one of two behind creative directory WeWorkinPhilly, which could see some partnership with Technically Philly.

After years of coverage, Technically Philly grabbed Hillman for our first Q&A, talking to the Hellertown, Pa. native about coworking, business and what his plans are for his future.

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Philly Geek Awards recap and other Links

• Philly Geek Awards: Recap and Thank Yous [Geekadelphia] — We rounded up the media coverage here.
• Q&A: Brandon Yoshimura, Loffles [Flying Kite] — After we chased their initial SEC filing and then reported on the Philly part-time startup Loffles and its co-founder Brandon Yoshimura, Flying Kite follows up. Yo, thanks for the link! Oh, wait…. Don’t worry the Business Journal did the same thing again.
• Q&A: Tayyib Smith, Little Giant [Flying Kite]
• Philadelphia’s 50 biggest firms’ stock prices fall [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• The Jawn: Explore, Discover & Improve Philly [Geekadelphia]
• A look at Philly-area companies on the Inc. 5000 [Philly Tech News] — Including the fast moving NextDocs, as we have reported recently.

Adel Ebeid: a conversation with the first ever City of Philadelphia Chief Innovation Officer

The City of Philadelphia has a new chief of IT.

As reported first by Technically Philly Thursday, Adel Ebeid, the former New Jersey state CTO, will be announced as Philadelphia’s first ever Chief Innovation Officer at a press conference this afternoon.

Described as “the perfect immigrant story” by the city’s Managing Director Rich Negrin, Ebeid, who was born in Egypt but raised in Jersey City after losing as a teenager his father to skin cancer, rose through the ranks of New Jersey state government to become among the only cabinet level leaders that fiery Governor Chris Christie kept on.

Now, after ‘flatly’ turning down the offer, the soft spoken and succinct Ebeid is preparing to move his wife and new daughter to a city he admits he doesn’t know well to help inject innovation into the City of Philadelphia. Answering directly to Negrin, himself an immigrant story who lost his father young and grew up in a smaller North Jersey city, Ebeid joins Mayor Nutter’s cabinet in a role that is meant to “bring the most impact at the least cost,” he says.

Below, Ebeid talks to Technically Philly, before he even knows what neighborhood he’ll call home, about his priorities, his childhood and if he’s going to join Nutter and Negrin on Twitter.

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Deb Crawford, Drexel Vice Provost for Research on evaluating cells a thousand times smaller than a human hair and more: Q&A

Debbie Crawford isn’t from around here.

The native of Glasgow, Scotland moved from Alexandria, VA to take the Vice Provost for Research gig at Drexel University in September and is awash in a continued University City renaissance that most Philadelphians from even five years ago wouldn’t recognize.

The engineer-by-training spent 20 years at the venerable National Science Foundation and is here to push forward Drexel’s reputation as a serious research institution.

“The tipping point for that is going from the individual cottage industry notion of research with deep expertise to a place where we are bringing the researcher across a variety of other fields to create a sum greater than the parts that can attack bigger challenges,” Crawford tells Technically Philly , her accent aglow. “So it’s taking new technologies and bringing together the creative arts and engineering or whoever else and pull them in that sandbox to have the largest impact possible.”

Now living in Center City, Crawford says she brings from NSF “an understanding of the topic barriers in these large projects.”

Below, Crawford talks about why Drexel was the right choice, the coolest research happening at the university right now and more.

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Rob McCord, Pennsylvania state treasurer: Philly is one of country’s two best low-cost entrepreneurship spots

Rob McCord, your Pennsylvania state treasurer, wants you to have empathy for him.

Just about the highest ranking Democrat in state politics has an easy laugh and a friendly manner. But, he says, if you’re going to describe him, you ought to start first with his entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurs ought to stick together.

Since 1994, McCord, 51, served as a senior executive at Safeguard Scientifics and founded the Eastern Technology Fund. He co-founded Pennsylvania Early Stage Partners and, from 1996 to 2007, he led the Eastern Technology Council [Official bio here].

He’s a venture capitalist in background, a Harvard kid and a Wharton grad by education and now he’s in his first term safeguarding $120 billion in public funds. In that role, McCord is offering the office up to his base –  whom he describes as “job-creating, technology-orientated entrepreneurs”– for advising, investing and as a potential client.

If nothing else, he thinks the Philadelphia technology community ought to know who he is. If only because he grew up on the Main Line, invested in tech businesses here and, well, because when it comes to statewide representation, Philadelphia could use a friend.

Fortunately, McCord is swearing by the position for now, despite prognostications to the contrary that suggest he is a sure bet to run for governor.

“I love being treasurer. People who watch me will know, it looks a lot more fun to be treasurer than in Congress, which was another option,” McCord told Technically Philly. “I plan to run for reelection [in 2012], and I do not take it for granted. So I’m obsessively focused on the treasurer’s office.”

In between calls on his Blackberry, McCord met with Technically Philly in a crowded Cosi in Bryn Mawr to talk his background, how he could have a big impact if only he had a billion dollars and illiquid assets.

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Tommy Jones, interim City of Philadelphia CTO: Top Three Priorities for 2011

Tommy Jones

Allan Frank and Tommy Jones could probably make a decent buddy team movie together.

Frank, who will next week leave his post as the Chief Technology Officer for the City of Philadelphia, is, by all accounts, high energy, a self-described ‘ideas man’ with a gravely voice and an ability to capture the attention of audiences that are usually expecting a stodgy bureaucrat to talk about servers and network capacity.

Jones, who has been Frank’s deputy since November 2009 and will become interim CTO on Feb. 1, would probably be the straight man of the duo. Though he has a playful chuckle, he is more serious and details-oriented than Frank.

In a phrase, if Frank might be more likely to ask ‘why can’t we?’ Jones would be the one to ask ‘how do we?’

Jones had been Deputy Chief Technology Officer in Washington D.C. for two years when he moved to Philadelphia to take a similar role with Frank, whom he had met at a function three months earlier.

“I like people telling me how impossible something is to do.,” Jones told Technically Philly earlier this month in a small conference room on the 18th floor of the Market Street Division of Technology headquarters. “[Frank] was telling me what he had going on, and he said ‘Tom, I need someone to come make this happen.”

Come he did, in November 2009, eventually settling into the Art Museum area. Now he has to actually make this happen. Fortunately, he says he has energy too — saying he’s a 26-year-old in the body of someone who is 53.

Jones, who grew up in Charles City County, Virginia, boasts a career that has taken him to various corners of the technology world, from retail to software development to accounting and other fields, including four years in the U.S. Air Force in the 1980s. Below, he talks about why slowing down is the best way to get the most done and what’s going to be different under this interim leader.

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