Friday Tech Links: Unbreaded’s Ben Kessler could be leaving, Peter Key almost dies and More

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. See others here.

DEFINITE READS

• Geekadelphia launches its new Geek of the Week department with the co-founder of food blog Unbreaded, Ben Kessler, a freshly graduated Drexel University marketing major with brains, drive, personality and a total social media obsession. But here’s where it gets juicy. As Kessler implies in the interview, his hunt for work in Philly has proven unsuccessful. The word we’ve heard? That the first Geek of the Week interview from Philly’s premier geek blog is considering a move to the 67th ward. Guys, if we can’t retain someone like Kessler, we have a real problem here. Can someone do something about this?

• Philly Tech News reports that rumors have put Google CEO Eric Schmidt‘s recent interest in acquisitions directly in Center City, namely in online advertising startup Invite Media, yeah the company whose offices were caught up in a fire scare in February.

• The Business Journal’s Peter Key, who, we’re telling you, in any other city would have a cult following, regales us with an admittedly strange story about how he was almost killed by Leap Wireless 20 years ago. The next time someone criticizes social media, just mention to them that blogging brought you the chance to read a Peter Key story in which he mentions Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

After the jump , video of a South Jersey Apple store robbery and more than 10 other Philly tech reads that you just might need to know about, including our best read story of the week.

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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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Philly Startup Leaders to throw BBQ

Update: Corrected the date Jennelle moved to the city.

Philly Startup Leaders has come a long way from eight guys talking shop over beers in September 2007.

“I knew right away it was not going to be a one-time thing,” co-founder Blake Jennelle says.

Jennelle had been living in the city for two years before deciding to start his own company in 2007. As he attended various events, he met those in similar situations, each thinking they were alone. After speaking with one entrepreneur after another, he encouraged them to all come out and talk business.

Since that fateful first meeting, PSL has blossomed into the largest and most active community of startup entrepreneurs in the region.

“You wouldn’t have recognized the city two years ago,” says Jennelle pointing to explosion of technology and startup organizations in 2007, including his own.

Since 2007, PSL has added roughly 400 members and is preparing for what they consider their third major event — a BBQ offering a chance for startup companies to mingle and network with one another.

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Friday Tech Links: Startup double takes, Solar industry coming to town and More

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. See others here.

We found some redundancy in technology startup news this week.

Remember back in April, we introduced you to Stealth Rowing, which was constructing indoor training equipment for crew teams? Remember how you thought that was a novel idea and then forgot about it because no sensible person gets up at four a.m. to splash in the Schuylkill?

Well, maybe it wasn’t all that novel an idea.

As Inquirer business columnist Mike Armstrong reported late last month, two Philadelphia University graduates are rolling out the Benson rower, a piece of machinery that, yup, simulates rowing on open water. This city is silly with those silly narrow boats.

That isn’t it.

Callowhill-based Avencia has released two data-heavy, online mapping displays in recent weeks: on legislative data and election data. Well, there are other wonks in town. Mikey Armstrong, of Philadelphia Business Today fame, again introduced us to a player in startup bizarro world.

Center City-based neighborhood revitalization group the Reinvestment Fund has won some praise of late for its PolicyMap.com, a freemium-model display that maps block-by-block statistics on things like household incomes, foreclosures and employment.

The more the merrier, I suppose.

After the jump, Geekadelphia talks horror films, sex addicted principals on MySpace, the solar world comes to Philly and four other regional tech stories you need to read, including our most trafficked story of the week.

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RJ Metrics makes a rap video and admits it

Jake Stein at left and Robert Moore at right of business dashboard firm RJ Metrics performing in their "Business Intelligence" rap video.

And now for something totally different.

You may be tired of the ironic rap video — we know we are — but sometimes an old idea can pass. Does this?

Jake Stein and Robert Moore, the two Ivy League-educated entrepreneurs behind the business intelligence dashboard RJ Metrics that opened up shop earlier this month, have broken from their cipher and put business on wax.

Stein, who lives in Center City, sings the hook and plays straight man to Moore in their single “Straight Outta Camden,” noting their recent move to the Rutgers University-Camden tech incubator.

Peep the video and score an exclusive download after the jump.

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Lockheed Martin developing smarter robotics in South Jersey

A major corporation’s subdivision in our region is becoming a leading innovator in “brain-inspired computing,” according to a Philadelphia Business Journal story by their technology writer Peter Key, who, our sources tell us, can rock a mean air guitar.

The Cherry Hill-based Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories has spent the last four years researching “brain-inspired computing” and is poised to make inroads in the science fiction-style technology, fueled by recent funding from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — which is credited for offering the initial funding for a little project that helped lead to the Internet.

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Shop Talk: Anthony Ruiz of Samurai Virtual Tours

Samurai's Owners: The husband and wife team of Carole (left) and Anthony Ruiz at the March Refresh Philly event.

You may have seen Anthony Ruiz in the corner of events like Refresh Philly diligently setting up his tripod.

While Ruiz may first appear to be another semi-serious amateur photographer taking pictures for his Flickr feed, he is the owner of Samurai Virtual Tours, a South Jersey-based company that stitches together photographs, audio and video to create vivid virtual experiences for businesses and events.

“We’re loving meeting the technology lovers in Philly,” said Ruiz who originally started the business in upstate New York, but moved to the Garden State to be closer to family. He says that South Jersey offers a proximity to several big cities as well as bunch of untapped non-tech related business in New Jersey.

Creating interactive tours takes a lot more work that using the panoramic mode on your point and shoot. After the jump, Ruiz gives us a peak into how he turns a dozen pictures into the closest thing the Internet has to virtual reality, and all without that awkward headset.
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RJMetrics mining business database information

At least two Ivy League kids graduated in 2006, took fat-salaried jobs at the same New York City equity firm and returned to Philadelphia to reach fame and fortune by mining data for the nation’s small businesses.

The story continues still.

Today is the public opening of RJMetrics, a business intelligence dashboard and brainchild of a pair of 25-year-olds with regional ties: Robert J. Moore and Jake Stein. They want to help small and medium-sized businesses that collect data about their customers better use that information to chart user behavior.

And like any good idea, it came to them while they should have been doing something else.

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Friday Q&A: Chuck Sacco, CEO of PhindMe Mobile

It’s a helluva school project.

While completing MBA degrees at Drexel University in 2006, Chuck Sacco, Doug Bellenger and two others founded PhindMe Mobile, with vague plans on improving the mobile Web-based interaction between businesses and their customers.

Since then, two have bailed and now CEO Sacco and COO Bellenger are leading a small team crafting the future of mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising.

Sacco, who did his undergraduate work at St. Joseph’s University, has a few technology startups in his past and has learned from them, he said.

“For me, it’s always been about having platforms where you can plug in functions and take them into new markets as the world changes,” he said.

PhindMe, has to be an example of that – one on which Sacco was willing to bet. He and Bellenger put in about $80,000 of their own capital to launch, and last June they borrowed nearly $225,000 more from friends and family, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. They launched in October, and they say they’ll break even as early as June – helped by the national attention they’ve gotten in advertising communities.

Below see how the South Jersey native – who says he has “always considered Philadelphia as home” – describes PhindMe’s future and for whom the alumnus of St. Joe’s and Drexel cheers in Big Five basketball.

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Lockheed Martin engineers get a chance to play on Space Day

There’s something about Lockheed Martin’s Space Day plans that reminds us of the 1983 geekcult classic WarGames.

Maryland-based Lockheed Martin, which has offices throughout the region, including Cherry Hill, and is usually embroiled in our ongoing coverage of scary regional military tech innovation (yes, we’re considering a regular category), is doing something for the kids.

The company plans to ooh-and-ahh middle-schoolers by showing off human-computer interaction concepts with Nintendo Wii remotes, according to a press release.

The demonstrations will take place on May 1 at Lockheed’s Advanced Technology Laboratories locations in New Jersey and Virginia in celebration of the company’s international Space Day, its effort to scout K-12 geeks globally.

“Shall we play a game?”

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