The software giant is said to be courting five major ad firms with the help of banker Morgan Stanley.

To refresh your memory, Microsoft acquired the agency, which has offices in Center City, in 2007 when it purchased Razorfish’s then-parent company, aQuantive. Since, many suspected that Microsoft would eventually sell the Razorfish brand.

But, according to the Wall Street Journal and other sources, the lack of credit in the market and a potential conflict of interest for buyers are putting the prospects of a sale in serious doubt.

To help sweeten the deal, Microsoft is offering advertising inventory across its Internet properties such as Bing, XBox Live and MSN.com as well as the use of the company’s “ad technologies.” Which, we can only presume, means the Bill Gates’ secret chamber of hamsters running on wheels that power the interwebz.

Some estimates even have Razorfish selling for as low as $400 million, roughly equal to its 2008 revenue.

However, it may take more than the above incentives to persuade prospective buyers. By agreeing to use Microsoft’s ad technologies, the company is forcing buyers, who are advertising agencies that often buy advertising against Google and Microsoft search results, to get into bed with Microsoft.

To top it all off, Microsoft may not even be not fully committed to selling the company in the first place. Because of Microsoft’s reluctance, the lack of a credit market and the potential of alienating Google, the chance of a deal happening in the next few months is “less than 25 percent.”

Razorfish, formally known as Avenue A | Razorfish, counts Center City among one of its sixteen worldwide offices and is responsible for the current Philly.com design, among other projects.

Updated: added grant details @ 4:35 p.m.6/16/09

It just might take a miracle to help lead at-risk Philadelphia teens away from the obstacles that have become something of a cliche in the urban education saga.

It will take a miracle or, perhaps, youth organizations that share information with each other through a sophisticated network of information sharing technologies.

That’s what NPower PA does.

The Center City organization fundraises for, organizes, implements and maintains IT for nonprofits that can benefit but don’t have the capital to do so on their own.

In January, this six-year-old group, one of 11 in the national NPower Network, completed perhaps its most ambitious project. After winning the grant in July 2007, NPower PA began integrating a collaborative data collection system in four communities — three in Philly and one in Chester — in the hopes of helping those young people better navigate the pitfalls they face.

The data collection can seem impressive.

It means in the course of a teen’s trek from school to a variety of participating programs, an ID card can give an administrator access to his school grades and attendance, family contact information, food allergies and more. The idea is that when a student walks into, say, a neighborhood rec center, organizers will be able to know what his grades look like, how to better serve him, engage him and, ideally, help him make smart choices.

A miracle it’s not, but such information sharing is one more tool, spokesman Anthony Pisapia says, in helping kids make those decisions.

The initiative, which targets students from 12 to 18 and was funded by $250,000 grant from the William Penn Foundation‘s Youth Development Initiative, is just one of the more recent programs from NPower.

They’ve helped the city’s chapter of Habitat for Humanity build more homes, Girls Inc. help more girls and MANNA feed more people. For these and others, NPower creates affordable, packaged solutions that meet the necessities of in-need nonprofits. For some its a new Web site with the ability for supporters to donate online or other features. For others, its cost-effective IT Help desk services or database management. For all, Pisapia says, it’s about innovation.

They can make legacy systems more efficient or otherwise help nonprofits save more money and bring more of it in. That means they can do more of whatever it is they do.

Since its 2003 formation with 30 member organizations, NPower PA now serves more than 330, and has worked with nearly double that through its existence. More than 100 corporations and foundations have joined the William Penn Foundation and Rohm and Haas Company in funding the organization. In 2008, NPower PA brought in more than $730,000. The NPower Network was launched in Seattle by support from Microsoft.

Contact NPower about an assessment or otherwise collaborating.

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.

The day’s sessions were organized in “tracks.” Two of the five rooms were focused on development and programming. Another room was devoted strictly to topics pertaining to the AGILE development model. Cloud computing and management rounded out the other rooms. Until Technically Philly masters the art of omnipresence, we could only attend a few of the first day panels including the keynote by RedHat’s open source evangelist Michael Tiemann. We were also unable to swing by today for an anticipated keynote by Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO of Blue State Digital, which spearheaded Obama for America’s online initiatives. If you were able to attend, be sure to let us know your thoughts in our comments.

Our take on yesterday’s keynote and sessions after the jump.

Keynote: Exonovation – Leveraging Innovation from the Edge

For the opening hour of the conference, the only session was the keynote by Michael Tiemann, Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat. The head of open source at a company known for open source spoke exactly on the topic you would guess. The UPenn grad was entertaining and informative at the same time and a perfect fit to wake up audience in the morning. He peppered his speech with anecdotes that made a dry topic appeal to the senses. For example, Tiemann spoke of his time encouraging the Department of Defense to adopt Open Source. He passed along the statistic that proprietary software averages 30 lines of defective code per 1000 lines, while a scan of Linux found only 985 errors in five million lines.

“Imagine if you had 30 insurgents in your brigade,” Tiemann said.

Tiemann’s speech focused on the benefits of Open Source, and was full of reasons and research supporting Open Source initiatives. The majority of the audience did not need to be sold on the benefits of open source, but Tiemann was aiming more to give those attending ammunition to convert their coworkers and management.

He pointed to the growth of the efficiency in the steam engine once the patent was released and used Microsoft Vista as an example of the difficulty closed source software has in squashing bugs. Tiemann even showed research by Harvard Business School game theorists that proved what motivated Open Source developers to contribute to code. The talk was a sales pitch, but instead of peddling the newsest software package, Tiemann was advocating a new way of thinking about development and it was obvious that it was something he was passionate about. After all, he is literally the President of Open Source.

Session: Introduction to iPhone Development

After getting in the iPhone session a few minutes early, it was apparent that this was the most popular session of the first round. Attendees quickly filled up roughly 80 chairs and many were forced to stand in the back or sit on the floor with their laptops on the ground, ready to code along with presenter Bill Dudney. The interest is no surprise, iPhones have quickly become the new hot market for developers with many focusing on Apple’s phone full time.

The event’s description led attendees to believe that if they just programmed along with Dudney, they would have a working iPhone application. However the talk required some sort of programming background. If you were a businessman or, say, a journalism major, you were left unapologetically in the dust. Dudley quickly breezed through the iPhone Developers Kit cracking jokes about square brackets and settling debates about syntax and memory dumps. The presenter may have been moving too quickly for some, but the hour time frame was rather limiting, and Dudley was conscience of that. However, the Twitter-verse seemed to enjoy the session.

Session: Microsoft and Cloud Computing

The last event attended by Technically Philly was about Microsoft’s future strategy of cloud computing. The session was lead by De’Porres “D.P.” Brightful, Director of the Mid-Atlantic States. While he did his best to prevent the talk from sounding like a sales pitch, that is exactly what it became. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as Microsoft often gets cast as the lumbering giant who is too slow to realize emerging technologies. It was refreshing to hear straight talk directly from the company.

Brightful lived up to his name. He was extremely charismatic and easy-going, ready to take questions from an sometimes-hostile audience. Although, as a consumer, the talk did not have any direct impact on my computing, it was interesting to see Microsoft’s new direction. The company plans to “virtualize everything” and place as much data in the cloud as possible. Thus giving its customers flexibility in how it uses software. Microsoft believes that sticking everything in the cloud is not the answer, nor is desktop computer the way of the future. The company is aiming to strike a balance between the two. Given the company’s stranglehold on business software, it seems a no-brainer. And if Microsoft seems late to the game behind Google Apps or Amazon, that may have been their plan all along.

“Our real strategy has always been to enter an existing market, lower the cost and make it a commodity. Then we make gobs and gobs of money,” Brightful said with a laugh. He, and Microsoft believe that virtualization is the next commodity, and if Microsoft seems behind now, it’s only a matter of time before they will own the space.

Were you at the expo on Friday? Please let us know in the comments!

Keynotes were presented by Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft‘s Business Division, Ahmed Mahmoud, CIO of AMD, and Clay Van Doren, Managing Director Service Design and VoIP at BT. And panels covered topics ranging from tech entrepreneurship and venture capital to cloud computing and going mobile. We showed up wearing jeans, in a sea of suits, wondering what all the fuss was about.

Our thoughts on the panels we were able to attend, details on how Philly got snubbed, and ruminations on Microsoft’s future (it involves Minority Report), after the jump.

Beyond Web 2.0 Panel: Evolution or Revolution?

With panelists including EBay, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Comcast Interactive Media, we anticipated that buzz words were going to be the native dialect.

The discussion quickly turned into each company describing what they would bring to Web 3.0, and most of the answers were centered around social media integration. We won’t claim to be experts in this space, but we gotta say, even the Wikipedia definition (how social of us to “share” a “wiki”) says Web 2.0 includes the development of social media. Why these companies feel it necessary to try and stretch this definition into new territory stunk of marketing to us.

There was a very noticeable generational and attitudinal gap between the major companies listed above, and a smaller player on the panel, Doostang CEO Mareza Larizadeh. When asked what they were focused on for the future, the big guys talked about expanding companies in any way possible to keep up with customer demands. Larizadeh, on the other hand, recommended finding niches. Not a bad idea, considering that Doostang has held its own against similar professional networking services such as LinkedIn.

Startup Panel: Young Entrepreneurs

Our first thought when entering the Young Entrepreneurs panel? We were lied to. Youth is subjective, but the panel members were no spring chickens.

But all was forgiven, as this was the most audience-friendly event we attended at the conference. The panel members, including the city’s own Jon Herrmann of Campus Philly, each told of their recommendations and regrets on their road to entrepreneurship and then fielded numerous questions from a very young audience. Advice included getting a prototype up and running before going on the hunt for funding, making sure you beleive in your first hires, and “hire slowly but fire fast.”

The star of the panel was Alcatel-Lucent‘s Wim Sweldens who made his answers quickly and succinctly, often with humor thrown in for good measure. When an audience member asked about beginning a business in today’s environment, Sweldens literally pounded the table, a sign of his optimism, and suggested that down markets breed innovation.

Venture Capital: Funding in the Eye of the Storm

The highlight of this panel wasn’t what was said, but instead, what wasn’t.

The session was controlled by moderator Brian O’Malley of Battery Ventures for the majority of the event. Each of the panelists emphasized that there is no one road to get involved in venture capital and that down markets are where they typically see their greatest returns. DFJ Gotham‘s Thatcher Bell was the resident realist, dishing out refreshing no-frills advice for those wishing to become involved in the VC sector.

When the session was thrown open to questions, Technically Philly asked the panel their thoughts on the current state of the venture capital market in Philadelphia. There was a long silence, before the panel quietly elected Michael Aronson of Penn-based MentorTech Ventures to answer. Aronson, who was the only panel member based in Philadelphia, pointed to the Ben Franklin Technology Partners as evidence of a local funding option. When Conshohocken-based angel investor First Round was mentioned, members of the panel were quick to point out that while there may be several Philadelphia-based firms, most invest outside of the area.

Jeff Karras of Levensohn Venture Partners said he’d be apt to move a funded company to San Fransisco, which we took as a sleight against smaller communities like Philadelphia’s. While we may be biased, it seemed that the local venture capital market received little respect from most of the panel. For an event held by a respected Philadelphia university, in a hotel in downtown Philadelphia, the lack of locally relevant information was discouraging.

What We Missed

One thing we can get excited about is Microsoft’s keynote speech by Stephen Elop, which we were unfortunately unable to attend. Elop shared what Microsoft envisions a decade from now. ZDNet has a imaginative recap of what Elop showed off:

Imagine drawing on floor-to-ceiling office windows with your finger, using them like a whiteboard, aided by contextual information right at your fingertips, translated as necessary. You haven’t lost your marbles you’re participating in a global corporate meeting, and your colleagues are doing the same thing on four other continents. Your son calls your office but you don’t have a phone. Instead, the call routes right to the office windows you are drawing on, which happen to be in a public meeting space in a Brussels airport. As you talk, you reach for your coffee mug, which shows  digitally and in real-time on the porcelain surface  that your beverage is cooling down from the 114 degrees it once was.

Microsoft is spending $9 billion a year on R&D to help make this a reality. Bright idea, given the admitted failure of Vista and the flop that Windows Mobile 6.5 made at Mobile World Congress this year. If we were Microsoft, we’d be telling customers about the “big picture,” too. And if that doesn’t work, throw some cute international kids in a promo video with a bunch of crazy gadgets and a million surfaces that probably shouldn’t be computer displays, and show it at the conference: