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.

AT&T improves Montco 3G coverage with new cell site

AT&T's Montgomery County cellular coverage before the upgrades announced Thursday

AT&T Wireless customers in Montgomery County, rejoice.

The network has announced that it has installed a new 3G cell site that should improve high-speed coverage in Ambler, Fort Washington and Upper Dublin Township, according to a press release. Commuters trekking down Routes 309 and 152 should notice the upgrades as well.

The installation is the latest of six tower upgrades in the county. AT&T says it invested $775 million into infrastructure improvements in Pennsylvania from 2006 to 2008. Though the company makes mention of high-speed HSPA 7.2 technology, available in newer devices like the iPhone 3G, the upgrade still isn’t available in the region. Expect it later this year or in 2011, the company says.

ClickEquations: Paid search, online advertising and why Google is not your friend

A screenshot of a ClickEquations client's paid-search portfolio, breaking down a variety of ad campaigns.

The ClickEquations crew say they do what they do best because they were once the customer.

Launched in 2006, the Conshohocken-based company was once strictly a search agency managing mostly large-sized pay-per-click accounts, but founder and president Craig Danuloff and team increasingly found limitations in the tools available for the accounts they handled.

“The best products are the ones created to help the consumer, right?” says Alex Cohen, the company’s marketing manager.

So, that’s what Danuloff, who got involved in e-commerce software as early as 1994, and CEO Lucinda Holt did. The duo moved the company’s focus to developing tools that company’s themselves could use to manage their own paid-search accounts  — placing and tracking links listed on search engines by chosen keywords.

Since that private beta launch last August, things have turned out alright, so far, for the company trying to own paid search, which is the targeted, contextual advertising that appears on Web sites, particularly search engines, according to keyword relevance.

Eight investors, including Philadelphia investors Emerald Stage2 Ventures, MentorTech Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, last month invested $3 million in the firm’s expansion, including growing their development staff to accelerate the number of features they offer. Nautica, Comcast, Liz Claiborne and Forbes Traveler are among their high-profile clients, with other announcements on the way, Cohen says.

For continued growth, ClickEquations will win over lots of companies that aren’t using ad management tool and, Cohen says, explain just why “Google is not your friend.”

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Friday Q&A: Jane Hollingsworth of NuPathe on Zelrix, migraines and more

The Zelrix acute-migraine patch introduced by Conshohocken-based NuPathe. Will it fight upstream to market?

Updated 9/18/09 @ 2:42 p.m. Name in title

When Jane Hollingsworth takes a pill to help fight a headache, she might get nauseous or sicker still.

More than half of American adults suffer similarly, she says, which is a bear of a nuisance for anyone with an acute migraine and a problem with the most common medicinal cure. Still many just put up with the pain.

Because it’s affecting millions of people who just might happily pay for a solution, there is admitted industry buzz swarming NuPathe, the Conshohocken-based specialty pharmaceutical company that says it could help everyone with a pain in their head who doesn’t want a pill to swallow. After a scheduled new drug application is filed next year, you just might know someone who uses Zelrix, a NuPathe-manufactured patch that secretes migraine-fighting medication into the bloodstream.

Jane Hollingsworth

“There is no patch for migraines now. There has never been,” says Hollingsworth, 50, the 25-employee company’s CEO who helped launch it in 2005. “It’s very difficult to get drugs through the skin quickly, which is important for migraines especially.”

Difficult for everybody else, she must mean. Because, as the company’s comprehensive phase-III trial data summary presentation suggested at last week’s 14th Congress of the International Headache Society held at the Convention Center, things for NuPathe are going, as Hollingsworth says, “exceedingly well.”

After the jump, the Ardmore native tells us how technology makes Zelrix work, why biomedical entrepreneurship in Philadelphia lags behind smaller hubs like Boston, why she has to cheer for the Flyers and more.

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TNT: The state of hyperlocal online news in Philadelphia

Updated: 8/31/09 6:17 p.m., source title

Sarah Lockard should take more walks.

Earlier this summer, the Wayne native was on a long stroll when she decided she should contact Internet craft supply marketplace Etsy about working with AroundMainLine.com, the online magazine startup she launched last fall to cover the famed, ritzy swath of Philadelphia suburbs.

It was on another walk — one amid the crowds of last September spring’s blue-blooded Devon Horse Show — that the former B2B magazine sales executive decided the Main Line needed community coverage online.

Sarah Lockard

Both “epiphanies,” as Lockard called them, seem to have worked out just fine. AroundMainLine.com has partnered with Etsy to profile artisan goods from regional crafts-makers and, while she declined to disclose monthly revenue or funding, her online magazine features weekly content, has a Web designer on staff, photographers on call and a sidebar etched with advertising.

Lockard, 34, boasts that hers was the first for-profit online magazine in the Philadelphia region. But she won’t be the last.

The hyperlocal Web outfit — tied by geography, focused on a niche community and online-only — is meant to be a great wave of the future, seen by MSNBC’s recent purchase of crime and news aggregator EveryBlock, partnerships with online news startups and product launches like Outside.In and Patch.com.

Philadelphia has its first wave of adopters, but their sustainability is far less certain.

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Friday Q&A: Russell Greig of GlaxoSmithKline’s SR One

Russell Greig has come a long way.

The 57-year-old Scotsman, who still carries that signature and recognizable accent, rode a Fulbright scholarship and a nearly three-decades-long career with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline to head SR One, the company’s corporate venture capital arm that is no small part of this region’s VC scene, last year.

Greig himself is a fine personification of GSK’s history, now a London-based multinational that grew through several mergers and acquisitions from a 19th-century Philadelphia research laboratory.

GSK still has Philadelphia offices, but it is decidedly an international affair now, neatly represented by Greig and his resume stuffed with international datelines.

SR One itself has, perhaps like Greig who assumed his new leadership role in June 2008, moved. It was launched 24 years ago in Center City but now is a suburban venture, nestled in Conshohocken, like what regional biomedical companies in which they invest.

The University of Manchester alumnus seems to like it here though, raving about the schools and calling those Philadelphia suburbs home to more beautiful trees and seasons than most anywhere he’s seen.

But our life sciences he says, just might not be as distinctive as we’d like to think, no matter the recent attention we’ve gotten for them.

Below, Greig explains why SR One is so Philadelphia, what he would do if he was king and why he “carefully” calls our region’s biomedical innovation disappointing.

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Man detained in Iran is likely son of Phoenixville electronics magazine publisher

The Web site of U.S. Tech Interactive, an electronics trade mag whose publisher's son has been detained in Iran.

One of three backpackers detained by Iranian authorities on Friday is likely the son of Jacob Fattal, the publisher and president of U.S. Tech Interactive, a Phoenixville-based electronics industry magazine.

A man who would not give his name answered a call to the publication’s Chester County offices and confirmed there was a blood relationship but would not specify the link, citing pressure from federal authorities to avoid comment.

“The CIA and the FBI have been around,” the man said before repeatedly declining further comment.

Fox 29 reported that the backpacker’s father is a Jacob Fattal. A Technically Philly tipster made the connection, but declined to go on record or acknowledge how details of the relationship were known. Calls to the Fattal residence by Technically Philly were sent directly to a voice mailbox.

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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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