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.

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.

THE PRODUCT AND ITS FUTURE

“My grandfather will say to me, ‘de gustibus non est disputandum – there is no disputing tastes,” she says. “So we’re trying to make the objective out of subjective.”

For GoBYO.com, which Devon, 29, calls their “crown jewel” and a pattern for their future expansion, they are doing that with their “quartet of ratings,” which includes aggregating ratings from their secret stash of Web restaurant guides, a wine-friendly ratings list, Yelp ratings and a most popular list.

The Cherry Hill-native says her company is also doing restaurant listings differently with its “patent-pending find-reviews process for each restaurant.”

Searching for a restaurant in a search engine will bring you a lot more choices “and a lot more noise” than you need, Devon says, so searching on Dining Info sites will more effectively help you find what restaurant you want and know if you want it. While the Web is chock full of restaurant ratings and listings, few are as complete, deep and growing as DiningInfo, she says, which brings returns from the 33,000 table-service restaurants its database has, or GoBYO.com, which pulls from the 17,000 BYO listings of its 52,000 database total.

And that’s just why GoBYO has become the lead project. Their vision for a major part of the company’s growth, Devon says, is expanding on its full database of restaurants to feed more niche-specific sites — like ones for sports bars, karaoke joints or family-friendly restaurants.

But first, Devon says, the focus is to make their current products, which are still operating on the elder Segel’s startup funding, profitable.

To do that, four primary revenue streams have been identified: merchandising, like the stealth wine caddie the company introduced today; offering their restaurant data to third party Web sites like community-focused sites; sponsorships with wine merchants, distributors and other industry players, and information and development-based sales like their iPhone application they say is being reviewed by Apple now. For $2.99, Devon says, it lets users find nearby restaurants based on dozens of data fields like offering wi-fi or being pet-friendly or a combination thereof.

“We have a lot going on,” she says.

DEVON THE ENTREPRENEUR

If this all seems pretty involved, don’t think Devon just walked into a sweet job from a deep-pocketed relative.

“My grandfather made me earn my position,” she says with a laugh.

She certainly has serious Web entrepreneur credentials. She has a design background with a fine arts degree from Muhlenberg College, a Master’s in marketing from Wharton, an MBA from Drexel and coding experience from her time with the Red Cross.

“We can develop an authority on restaurants,” she says. “We want anyone who wants to find the best places to savor wine or information on the best restaurants out there to do it with us.

That’s a long way from her grandfather’s Excel spreadsheets.

“Philadelphia has to be at the top of the list of the most BYO friendly restaurants in the country,” she says. “That’s where we started… I hope to grow together.”

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Watch Devon on an April episode of podcast StartupsLive.TV, hosted by a very energetic young woman.

Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

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.

A sensor node, which houses an antenna, battery and radio is buried six to eight inches underground. Sensor data is transferred to an above ground router system based on a wireless mesh network. The information then controls a water flow interrupter and can be broadcast back to UgMO’s snazzy web-based metrics resource. (See graphic above)

It fit right in with the company’s client-base of commercial athletic fields. “It was very clear that the golf world and sports turf world were lacking information,” Norley says.

The company has been through a handful of name changes. From Soil Air to Advanced Aeration Systems, both based in Florida. Most recently it settled on Advanced Sensor Technology, the name it kept during its move to King of Prussia in 2007, as reported by the Philadelphia Business Journal.

Red State, Blue State, Green State

Norley is well-informed on drought issues when talking about UgMO. He has to be. It’s a significant selling point.

A look at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s U.S. Drought Monitor shows large swaths of the country in intense drought situations.

In Texas, where the data shows class C4 “exceptional drought” conditions, the lack of water has cost the Lonestar state $3.6 billion in crop and livestock losses, and is on its way to set drought records this year, the Associated Press reported yesterday. California has also been bathed in the alarming red C4 drought conditions often throughout 2009, along with portions of the Southeast.

Fortunately, the Northeast region isn’t experiencing the same drought intensity. But it has seen drought affect the local landscape business and Norley says that water conservation is happening in the region. One of the early adopters of AST’s technology, Montgomery County’s Merion Golf Club has sworn by the technology. UgMO has saved the club more than 100 million gallons of water, roughly $130,000 per year, according to the New York Times.

UgMO is split into two product offerings. UgMO Knows, an intelligence system that provides the technology along with web-based data analysis for larger operations like Merion, costs $250 per sensor and the subscription per month is roughly $8 per sensor.

The second product, UgMO Saves, is more for users who just want to stop their irrigation based on the data the system detects. It includes four sensors with a water interrupter for under $500 dollars.

“No property is alike. The grass is different, the topography is different. The end result, if you [use UgMO] is: Ten times out of ten, everybody saves water,” Norley says.

“Nine times out of ten, we’re creating a soil that’s healthier, therefore everything above it is healthier.”

The Green Marketplace

Walt Norley, CEO of Advanced Sensor Technology

Golf has contributed much to AST’s success. After all, hundreds of acres make up any given course. Advanced secured a deal with Gary Player Design, a preeminent golf course design company. The firm has developed more than 300 layouts and is currently involved with 50 developments around the globe.

But golf courses aren’t the end-all.

Norley says his sales team is working with professional athletic organizations, trying to get UgMO on baseball and football fields. There’s benefits there, too, aside from environmental and cost-savings ones. Better kept playing surfaces creates less injuries, Norley says, which might keep that pro’s “three-million dollar knee” in better shape.

Norley says that the company’s market is anything irrigated.

Commercial turf, municipal athletic fields, parks and recreation. Corporate business parks look to the technology to save on money on lawn maintenance and Advanced is finishing up pilot programs in Florida and Southern California to tailor the tech specifically to residential consumers, as well. Norley hopes that those customers can purchase the system as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.

Norley says that more and more, people want to be stewards of the environment. But he says the barriers of entry are high because going green does not often mean saving money. Not in UgMO’s case.

“One thing I’ve learned about all of this is that cost matters. If an environmental technology doesn’t have a cost-reduction component, the adoption rate is very slow.”

Norley says he’s worked with environmental companies throughout his career by chance. And of course, the work Norley’s done with soil and water on athletic fields is an, ahem, natural fit for the cause.

“I’ve been in and out of the environmental world for over 25 years. Clearly this is the focus of our company today,” he says.

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.

These new “smart” switches break up a circuit and automatically isolate issues that could cause outages. They’re even wired to communicate problems back to operation headquarters. If a circuit fails, a customer is automatically re-routed to an adjacent circuit and PECO is notified on which circuit the problem has occurred.

“These are one part of a smart system that utilizes these switches to minimize the effects of outages on customers,” spokesman Ben Armstrong tells Technically Philly.

The smart switches are known in the industry as reclosers and sectionalizers, which essentially do the same thing but on different lines of voltage.

Thirteen-hundred distribution circuits in the Greater Philadelphia area have already been augmented with the smart technology and PECO says that the switches have prevented outages for more than a half-million customers.

Armstrong didn’t immediately know how many total distribution circuits are on the system to compare with the number of smart switches.

The switch upgrades are part of a $400 million capital investment program which will upgrade facilities, improve delivery and increase energy efficiency. Sections of Northeast Philadelphia and central Bucks County have already been upgraded with the smart system.

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.

Users can report problems on the route with simple, location-based Google Maps information and a description of the time, day and specific circumstance. The site is built on Django.

The new application debuted two weeks after a June 10 of the Montgomery County Cycling Committee, where 50 cyclists and representatives of several local police agencies met to discuss recent violence on the trail.

Bicycle enthusiast Brenda Miller was riding alone on a section of the Schuylkill River Trail in Norristown when she was assaulted by a half-dozen violent youths who formed a wall on the trail in front of her and punched her as she tried to penetrate past them, the Inquirer reported last month.

Bringhurst proposed creating the web application for incidents that didn’t quite qualify for police intervention, a way to archive the trail’s history. In seemingly no time at all, Bringhurst had created a working prototype and launched it in late June.

Now, the site is linked to by the Montgomery County Cycling Committee and the Bicycle Club of Philadelphia and receives a handful of hits per day. Incidents are increasingly popping up on the site. Last Monday for example, a user reported a fishing line was strung across the bike trail and a young, amateur videographer seen waiting for victims nearby.

Bringhurst says he hopes to expand the concept to other trails, but for now, he’s concentrating on the Schuylkill.

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.

As tweeted:

Here’s the science behind the rankings from TC:

Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. �In summary,� says Dondeti, �to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.� [Source]

It’s hard to overstate what that means for the region. With news that Ben Franklin Technology Partners is on the state budget chopping block, early stage funding becomes vital. FirstRound certainly invests heavily outside our region, but it’s still a serious international VC firm just a regional rail ride from Center City.

And that’s some attention that Kopelman will have to tolerate.

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.

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.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

What put the idea for Duck Duck Go into motion? Was it planned out or did you just start tackling the project?

I’m all about rapid prototyping. The initial idea was that all these human-powered sources Wikipedia, Del.icio.us had been built-up in the past decade. There’s a lot of info, a lot of links that people have hand selected. I thought, ‘If you mashed these two things together you could get some interesting results.’

It’s interesting that you’re marrying human-powered technology with search technology. Is this where search is headed?

Human-powered sites have people on them really spending time crafting the best links, which are often better than you get through algorithmic approaches. But so many other areas could also be the future of search. Personalization, recommendation, all sorts of areas are exciting and interesting.

Is it worth chasing Google?

My take on search is that the idea that one search engine fits everyone is fundamentally flawed. Different interfaces and different results appeal to different people. Our goal has been to appeal to the non-negligible percentage of people that would prefer our engine. That’s one of the reasons that Ask, Live and Yahoo haven’t made headway against Google in the last few years; their results just look like Google’s.

You say you’re blocking 44 million spam sites. That’s still only like, .0001 percent of the Internet, right?

We actually block about 35 to 40 percent of the Internet. I work with the Parked Domains Project which is literally crawling the top U.S. domains every month. We go to 110 million a month, look at them and decide whether it’s parked or not. Duck Duck Go just omits the parked domains.

Is that a technology exclusive to Duck Duck Go?

Parked Domain Projects sells the information to interested parties on a case-by-case basis, but so far there’s no other search engines using it.

What are your monetization plans?

Plans are to put some kind of advertising on the site at some point relatively soon, but still keep it at much less advertising than other search engines. My main problem with ads is that there’s been a number of studies that say that most people have no idea on Google which ads are paid and which aren’t paid. Other people have said, ‘occasionally I do click ads and occasionally they’re useful.’ There’s some balance there where some amount is beneficial to the user.

What makes you Technically Philly?

We’re totally interested in staying in Philly for the long-term. I hope that we’re contributing to the “technically Philly” community. I love to have technical conversations, so the more of them that exist, the happier I’ll be.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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.

• Inquirer business columnist Joseph N. DiStefano does his best to seem impotent in his Comcast coverage by actually letting Silicon Insider report on the possibility of our own telecommunications giant buying out SprintNextel. I guess we’ll have to start doing his job, too. Give us time, give us time.
• Daily News technology columnist Jonathan Takiff tells you about the success of the gaming industry and a host of cheaper upcoming video game alternatives that may shake up the scene, including an online gaming service with, you guessed it, a social networking component.
  Our highlight: He uses the phrase “One big diff.”
• The Inquirer rewrites a press release announcing that BioAdvance, a University City biotech incubator (that’s their staff in the above photo), is providing $550,000 in seed-stage funding to Novira Therapeutics, which is also Philly based.  Novira is apparently trying to develop drugs against viral infections, and will use the funds for its projects and to develop its management team. Maybe it should work on its Web site.
• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that C&D Technologies, a Blue Bell manufacturer of batteries and battery systems, has opened a business unit in Shanghai. PBJ drinks the Kool-Aid from the company’s press release and suggests the move is to “take advantage of infrastructure spending intended to boost the Chinese economy,” and not, um, to take advantage of cheaper labor.

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything if you spent the week in a drunken stupor, with Friday Tech Links. See others here.

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.

“The decisions made today will result in substantially higher levels of profitability for the company,” the press release said. InterDigital CEO William Merritt made the statement, perhaps unaware of how much that must burn one of his 100 now unemployed former employees. He is depicted above ringing the opening NASDAQ bell in the simpler times of November 2006.

Technology employment has been rough all around.

Due to their realignment, the company expects its core operating expenses, not including arbitration and litigation expenses, will decline by approximately $33 million  before taxes on an annualized basis compared to 2008.

The job cuts will be split among the company’s three locations, which are in King of Prussia, Melrose, N.Y.; and Montreal, the company said. The company employed 379 at the end of last year, according to its annual report.