Black Family Technology Awareness Week luncheon at Northeast High School

A portion of the students, staff and professionals attending the 2010 Black Family Technology Week luncheon held at Northeast High School.

This story also appears on Northeast news site NEast Philly and is reprinted here with permission as part of a content partnership. See more photos here.

More than 200 students, staff, technology professionals and partners listened to the musical stylings of a high school choir last week. But everyone was there to promote technology literacy.

Held at Northeast High School, the sixth annual luncheon was again the signature event of the 11th annual Black Family Technology Awareness Week, which has some lingering events over the next few days.

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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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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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Technically Not Tech: Kevin Kiene CEO of EZ Landlord Forms

If you build a great product, your customers will be your best advertisers.

That’s something Kevin Kiene has learned. The founder of ezLandlord Forms, an online provider of property-management legal documents, remembers a time before that lesson was entirely his.

“In the beginning, we were marketing and advertising before we had a great product,” he said of his Web site, which will turn three this August. “We have a great product now.”

There were usability and design concerns and nowhere near the breadth of options the site now offers. But a lot can change in three years.

Last month, they launched a complete site redesign and are in the process of becoming a green certified business and doubling their staff. This month, they surpassed 300,000 members, many of whom are paying into its subscription model, pushing year-to-date sales by more than 225 percent. In September, HGTV’s Designing Spaces will be shooting a segment on the site to air at the year’s end.

“Business,” Kiene says, “is good.”

The company, which has office space in Cinnaminson, N.J., currently features seven employees who work from their homes across the country, including a Willow Grove-based Web developer and Kiene, 40, a native of Fox Chase in Northeast Philadelphia.

But Kiene, who now lives in Frankford, is proud to talk about the site’s national appeal, in addition to its growing traffic and how the idea for ezLandlord Forms came to him because he could never find a lease that would square away who was taking care of the damn lawn.

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Four Philadelphia ‘inner-city’ companies called nation’s fastest growing

Stroll’s company mission is nothing short of bold. They want to bring their customers products that are capable of “transforming” their lives.

And the audio-book Web retailer, which saw its revenue triple from 2004 to 2007 and ships mostly self-improvement merchandise, is doing it from 12th and Callowhill.

For that, Stroll is getting some congratulation. Along with three other Philadelphia companies, it was named to the 11th annual Inner City 100, a competitive ranking of the fastest-growing companies located in the “inner city” of a U.S. metropolis, last week. See what constitutes an inner-city here.

Only Denver and Boston, each of which had five companies headquartered there, were better represented. See the complete list here [PDF].

The list comes from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1994 by a Harvard Business School professor. The organization’s mission is to promote economic prosperity in U.S. inner cities through private sector engagement leading to job, income and wealth creation for local residents.

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Democratic candidates for city controller voice support for paperless government

Democratic candidates for city controller from left to right: Incumbant Alan Butkovitz, John Braxton, Brett Mandel. Far right: Moderator Chris Satullo of WHYY

The Democratic candidates for city controller each voiced support for paperless government initiatives Thursday night at the third and final major debate being held for the elected city office.

The rare moment of agreement between incumbent Alan Butkovitz and challengers John Braxton and Brett Mandel followed a confrontational discussion of the city’s $2.6 billion budget shortfall, real estate tax abatement and wage and sales tax increases.

In a modest side room of the John Perzel Community Center, the candidates responded to a question posed by Technically Philly in front of more than 30 residents in the Mayfair neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia.

If elected city controller, would he support recommendations made by freshman councilmembers in October that would promote digital government initiatives that would cut back on paper consumption, bring forms online and potentially save the city millions of dollars?

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Friday Q&A: Roxanne Christensen, co-creator of SPIN-farming

Roxanne Christensen is a co-creator of SPIN-farming—Small Plot Intensive farming, a system of urban agriculture that is being marketed online—that is able to gross farmers more than $50,000 from a half-acre of terse, city land.

In 2000, Christensen, an online publisher and longtime Philadelphia resident, came across the blog of Wally Satzewich, a Canadian farmer who had recently become a city-based urban farmer.

Satzewich had set up a small, sub-acre plot in the backyard of his home in Saskatoon, a college-town in the Saskatchewan province. He soon realized that the small plot, rife with high-value crops and without large overhead expenses, had the same bottom line as his 20-acre lot outside of town. He ditched the big digs.

Christensen pitched the concept to the Philadelphia Water Department, who had been in touch with her about reducing maintenance costs on land that it owned in the city.

The pitch landed in the form of the Somerton Tanks project, a sub-acre demonstration farm in the Somerton neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia which earned $68,000 gross sales in its fourth year of operation. It has since closed because, as Christensen puts it, “we had proven what we needed to prove there.” Christensen and Satzewich launched the online SPIN-farming learning series in March 2006.

We talked with Christensen to see how the online distribution model has driven the concept and to see if it’s time for Technically Philly to ditch our computers and get our hands dirty.

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Technically Not Tech: Graphic novelist Duane Swierczynski

Crazed graphic novelist and Philadelphia-native Duane Swierczynski isn’t the first comic-author using social media.

Last month, we spoke to the South Philly minds behind the Black Cherry Bombshells. But Swierczynski, 37, who has blogged since October 2004 and tweeted since last summer, recalls when fan chasing was a real game.

“I remember writing a fan letter to Clive Barker back in 1988, and I went through a lot of trouble trying to figure out the address, typing the letter, retyping the letter when I realized that I made a few bone-headed mistakes, and finally, waiting many, many weeks for a response,” Swierczynski said. “I still have the letter framed.”

“Now it’s extremely easy to reach out and say “yo” to your favorite writer. This is great, but perhaps some of the magic has been lost, too.”

That’s because fans of the man behind the newest editions of The Punisher for Marvel Comics can just get online and come find Duane Swierczynski in an instant.

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