Montgomery County publishes public safety emergencies online

Montgomery County's Department of Public Safety publishes emergency incidents online in several formats including a Google Map mashup.

The Montgomery County Department of Public Safety is using its Web site to post up-to-the-minute details of dispatched emergency calls, like fire, EMS and traffic incidents, garnering some attention from national government tech glossy Government Technology.

Along with a map of incidents (pictured), an RSS feed of activity, and a live audio feed of the department’s EMS and fire scanners, the department even offers a mobile version of the incident list.

According to department officials, the site was developed to reduce incoming calls from media inquiring about incidents. The site has “dramatically reduced” the number of calls, the publication reports, from 50 to 100 calls to sometimes two calls per day. The site gets 60,000 hits per month, officials say.

News to us is that Philadelphia’s police, fire and EMS audio feeds are also available online.

Shop Talk: Devon Segel CEO of Dining Info and GoBYO.com

This is something of a family business.

In 2005, serial entrepreneur Joseph Segel, a 1951 Wharton graduate who made a name for himself launching the Franklin Mint and the multibillion dollar home-shopping behemoth QVC, decided Philadelphia needed a database for its restaurants.

He started with his own personal Excel spreadsheets, detailing restaurant information, offerings and accomodations, but he wanted to expand it online.

So he turned to his 29-year-old, more tech-savvy granddaughter, Devon Segel, for help. She was busy building people-search databases for the American Red Cross with Comcast and Google during the melee of Hurricane Katrina, so occasional help and direction was all she could give.

He launched in spring 2006 an early incarnation of his idea, not just reviews or food writing but a comprehensive collection of information backed by deep data sets about the Philadelphia dining scene, which, of course, has a lot to do with BYO-style neighborhood restaurants.

But Joseph, now 78, wanted Devon to bring her design and development background to what he aimed to be another in a more-than-two-dozen-long list of business ventures.

“He and I have always had a great relationship. He’s a very serious and focused businessman. I am a young woman whom he tries to groom into a serious and focused businesswoman,” says Devon, now CEO of Voorhees, N.J.-based Dining Info LLC, which operates GoBYO.com and DiningInfo.com with plans of launching more. “He calls himself my ‘part-time adviser.’”

It wasn’t until 2007 that she took the job with pop pop, who splits his time between Bryn Mawr on the Main Line and Florida. Now, three years after first launching, their sites use a database that has some 100 data fields on 52,000 restaurants, including 17,000 BYOs, from 10 metro areas and growing.

Devon is sitting on a four-tiered revenue model, the funding to get there and, with a blurb mention due for the August issue of O Magazine, buzz surrounding a new look and focus.

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Shop Talk: Advanced Sensor Technology saving water on athletic fields and more

In 2005, Bucks County native Walt Norley was living in sunny north Palm Beach, Florida, running a successful company and making morning trips to the gym.

He’d often spot what he says is a typical suburban sight on the way: sprinklers spritzing water onto wet grass as rain poured from the sky; unintended waste caused by the use of timed irrigation systems. It struck him an antiquated practice.

Norley employed Soil Air Technologies, which developed a sub-surface aeration system used to vacuum water levels of golf courses and sports fields, and he floated the idea of measuring soil moisture to control pumps for irrigation instead of relying on timers.

His crew put together a sensor technology that measures everything that should be in soil salinity, moisture levels and temperature to grow a healthy and beautiful landscape. In the process, the sensors save, on average, 10 percent of an organization’s water use.

Today, the patented technology is known as UgMO, a proprietary wireless intelligence system that broadcasts soil information to irrigation systems, or, for the hardcore lawn geeks (and some extra green), a web-based administration system. And by geeks, we mean highly paid landscape professionals with $2 million grooming budgets.

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PECO invests $4 million in smart distribution switches

PECO customers in the Philadelphia region could soon notice improvements to their electrical service. Or if things go as planned, they won’t notice at all.

PECO announced yesterday that 50 “smart” switches, which help prevent wide outages and improve service, are being installed on its grid in Delaware, Chester, Montgomery and Philadelphia counties this year, according to a press release.

At $50,000 to $60,000 per device, PECO has invested $4 million into the project. Installation will begin as soon as this month in Media, North Wales and the Roxborough section of northwest Philadelphia.

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Trail Reporter keeping tabs on violent crime along Schuylkill River Trail

Software Developer Jonathan Bringhurst considers himself a new cyclist.

He purchased a road bike several months ago to trek from his home in Manayunk along a 10-mile stretch of the Schuylkill River Trail to work, he says.

Yet his inexperience hasn’t stopped him from becoming an active part of the biking community. For what he lacks in biking mechanical know-how he makes up for in coding expertise.

He’s helping keep an eye on an apparently dangerous ride along the Schuykill with a no-frills incident report Web app he calls Trail Reporter.

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Josh Kopelman called ‘richest man in town,’ among most networked venture capitalist

Josh Kopelman is apparently not entirely comfortable with being a big shot.

The entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, who made his name on the back of the $355 million sale of his creation Half.com to eBay in 2000, has been a bit of a big fish in an underdeveloped Philadelphia pond for some time now. But he doesn’t always take adulation so warmly.

Kopelman was reportedly put off by the label of the wealthiest self-made person in Philadelphia, author W. Randall Jones told the Inquirer. For his new book, the Richest Man in Town, Jones traveled to 100 U.S. cities to collect business wisdom from those atop the income brackets in their towns and found Kopelman to be our pick of the litter.

“He was very upset with me,” Jones told the Inqy.

While Kopelman may have disliked the thought of being placed above a host of the city’s billionaire’s boys club, it’s not the only big call he’s gotten this week.

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Bala Cynwyd firm PC Helps Support gets New York Times praise

It’s been 17 years, but PC Helps Support is still around and getting attention for it.

The Bala Cynwyd-based IT support company has 250 Montgomery County-based consultants in an industry known for outsourcing to places like India, where labor is cheaper, knowledgeable and trainable.

It’s small operation is geared toward focused services, like answering questions that Apple users have about their iPhones, and it appears to be a method that’s working, according to a glowing profile in Friday’s New York Times.

PC Helps, founded in 1992 by Jeffrey Becker, offers expertise on more than 160 desktop applications and mobile devices like Microsoft Office, the BlackBerry and, yes, the iPhone. It works in conjunction with a company’s IT department to augment or even serve as a company’s help desk to offer support, the company’s media kit says.

In March, the company launched a blog and is, of course, all about social media: follow them on Twitter, friend them on Facebook and LinkedIn, or subscribe to their RSS feed.

Friday Q&A: Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of Duck Duck Go

Duck Duck Go. It’s a name that’s sure to bring the Valley Forge-based search engine company attention just by folks trying to figure out what it means.

Some have called it silly. Others have mentioned a common childhood game by the same name.

CEO Gabriel Weinberg says it isn’t named after anything special.

“I wish I had a good answer for you. I don’t. It came to me one day and I really liked it,” he says during a telephone interview.

If anything, Duck Duck Go is just something different. In the Web search industry, that’s important. It might be one of few ways of chiseling away at Google’s dominating market share the search giant currently queries 63 percent of U.S. searches.

That’s OK with 29-year-old Weinberg. He says Duck Duck Go offers features Google can’t: uncluttered, human-sourced, friggin’ fast search results. Direct to you from the ‘burbs.

Last week, the company unveiled its Firefox toolbar, a search tool that redirects users from parked domains and spam sites, part of Duck Duck Go’s fight against typo squatting. It’s the second Duck Duck Go-branded software release, the first, a search app for Apple’s iPhone. Traffic has been good to the company, increasing steadily month by month, Weinberg says.

We spoke with Weinberg about what makes Duck Duck Go special, how the two-employee company plans to continue growing, and his vision of the future of search, after the jump.

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Friday Tech Links: State of the City, rumors of Comcast eyeing Sprint, and ‘one big diff’

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun.

Because that’s what we do best.

• The Pew Charitable Trusts released its first annual State of the City, with a ton of interesting information. Maybe one of the best things the Inquirer has done for the city in a decade or more was squeezing former national political writer Larry Eichel out in November. He went to Pew and has been making moves since.

Have more link fun after the jump and find out just what the H that photo is of.

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InterDigital drops 100 jobs

The press release said the move was about “profitability” so, you know, don’t worry about it.

One-hundred people will lose their jobs with InterDigital, a King of Prussia-based wireless technology company, as the company closes further development of its SlimChip mobile broadband modem technology, according to a company press release.

That news was buried by the company’s announcement to expand its technology development and licensing business through targeted new investment in both cellular and non-cellular wireless technologies.

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