Edited: Corrected Campus Sponsorship details.

In part two of our DreamIt Demo Day preview series, we preview two companies that continue a noticeable trend in this year’s DreamIt class: the reliance on social networks for user acquisition.

With the exception of Adapt.ly and Giveloop, all of the companies previewed yesterday lean heavily on Facebook to create a frictionless login service and to help promote user actions to friends and these two companies are no different.

After the jump, read our previews of 8tysix and Campus Sponsorship to get you ready for August 11th and see which company told us that its site has “double rainbow possibility.”

Campus Sponsorship

Who:

Dan Levin – State College, Pa.
Rob Falcone – Broomall, Pa.
Nick Yang – Canada
Sunny Patel – Mayfair, Northeast Philadelphia
Tony Colantonio – Conshohocken
Matt Morabito – Philadelphia
Colleen Foley – Philadelphia

What:

Founders Rob Falcone and Dan Levin think most companies do a bad job of marketing to college students, often resorting to setting up a table on campus and giving away T-shirts or fliers.

“You always see students take the flier and then immediately throw it in the trash,” says Levin.

They also noticed friends in student organizations struggling to raise money. At Penn State, for example, some student groups clean 107,000-seat Beaver Stadium to raise cash.

“I’m a Penn Stater,” says Levin, “and there’s no amount of money you could have paid me to do that.”

To solve both problems, the company has created Campus Sponsorship, a website that rewards college students for engaging with brands by watching a video, answering a quiz or completing some other interaction with an advertisement. When a student logs in, she can create a page for her student group or click to help support an existing one.

(click to enlarge)

After a user chooses a group, they complete an engagement for a brand (i.e. taking a quiz, becoming a fan of a company’s Facebook profile etc.)

A sample engagement (click to enlarge)

When a student competes an engagement, the brand donates money to the student’s organization. If a student pushes the promotion to Facebook, they can earn additional cash for their student group.

Campus Sponsorship says students remember and appreciate the brand that donates money to their organization and brands don’t have to waste any more money on fliers.

The company hopes to open the site to the “City Six” universities (Temple, Penn, Drexel, St. Joes, Villanova, La Salle) in the fall and, on Aug. 2nd, the company is hosting a “cash dash” where 20 student groups will raise money from noon until midnight.

Oh, and the company promised a “big surprise” at Demo Day.

Business Model: Campus Sponsorship charges on a cost per engagement model and then splits the revenues with the student organization.

8tysix

Who:

Mo Yehia – Business Development, Chicago
Avand Amiri – Technologist, Chicago.

What:

In the company’s short history, 8tysix has already undergone a re-branding. The company started as Dish86, a “Priceline for dining” that had three features: friends were able to post where they wanted to go to dinner and then other friends joined in while restaurants made bids for their business.

Yehia and Amiri decided to simplify the business and drop the restaurant component to create 8tysix, a website that allows users to list all of the things they’ve been “dying to do.” Users can have friends view the to do list and offer to join in. The idea is to provide motivation for all the things people have been putting off — such as going skydiving, currently 8tysix’s most popular to do list item.

“We help friends get together to do things they wouldn’t do alone,” says Yehia. “A friend’s invite is the biggest indication of whether you’ll do something.”

After logging in with Facebook Connect, users are notified of friends already on the site and can then begin assembling their to do list.

(click to enlarge)

After posting an item it’s pushed to Facebook, and friends can join the to do list item and comment.

(click to enlarge)

The site just launched its beta last week, but 8tysix has a laundry list of features it hopes to add in time for Demo Day and a wider launch. The site will soon be able to connect users with friends of friends and make friend and activity suggestions based on the compatibility of to do lists. The site will also connect two people who have similar list items such as “see Inception” and “see a movie.”

And 8tysix has already considered the possibility of people finding dates on its site.

“The site has double rainbow possibility. Maybe even triple,” says Yehia.

Business Model: A mix of affiliate discounts and advertising. The company also envisions an iPhone app and possible partnerships with geolocation services.

Online dating sites ought to have nearer the success rate as a search engine, says John Myles White.

“When you compare the people that big dating sites suggest to you with the pages that Google gives you in response to a search, the difference is staggering,” says Myles White, a Ph.D candidate in Princeton’s psychology department.

John Myles White

Last week, Myles, 28, and partner Jim Keller, 29, the founder and CEO of Willow Grove-based web development and strategy company Context, announced the launch of Junebug, what they call their answer to “the lack of innovation in online dating.”

The duo is entering the crowded online dating scene because they say their competition isn’t leveraging contemporary statistical techniques to their fullest extent. Now all they need are the users and data to prove it.

So on July 4, they threw Junebug open to the public, focusing on bringing on users from the crowded Philadelphia and New York City markets. With enough users ranking other profiles, in time they say their algorithms will make Junebug among the most successful online matchmaking services out.

Jim Keller

“I’ve become increasingly convinced that the big players in the online dating market are either unaware of or simply indifferent to the tools that computer scientists can offer them,” says Myles White, a native of Hoboken, N.J..

Keller’s hand comes in developing Junebug with a level of user-friendliness that has become expected throughout the web but that the pair says most online dating sites haven’t met.

The pair says a short-term goal is to establish advertising as a revenue model for the self-funded project, but the focus is on bringing on users to make sure their product is everything they hope it to be. Which is a good goal because they’re making a big swing — not only railing against free dating competitors, sites like PlentyoFish and OKCupid, but also the paid giants like eHarmony and Match.com, though Keller says he doesn’t see free sites being in direct competition with paid versions.

“Perhaps the paid sites are doing something clever, but it’s hard to believe that given the experiences that anyone I’ve known has had with those sites,” says Keller who is charged with the heavy development of the site. “Reading through their patents suggests that they’ve played around with things like neural nets, but never invested much work into using more contemporary techniques like SVMs, Bayes Nets or NMFs.”

Deep math aside, the pair seems to be saying they can do to online dating what sabermetricians have done to baseball. That’s not to say, the web isn’t nearly a decade deep into concerted efforts to harvest data to improve online matchmaking. Of late, prominent movement has been made to focus on data elsewhere online. Fellow free service OKCupid has created something of a following around its popular blog known for crunching the data it collects.

But that, too, Keller says, shows a weakness.

“[The OKCupid blog] suggests that they’ve not begun working with developers who have a real mastery of modern statistical techniques. I’ve been surprised by how many of their analyses … are conducted using the most basic statistical techniques,” says Keller, a native of the Northeast who now lives in Hatboro.

Keller says that contrasts with what he and Myles White are doing.

“Junebug is built on a totally automated backend that only needs normal end-user inputs to provide the data for our algorithms. We’re asking users to rate the profiles they read on a scale from one to 100, which, amazingly enough, seems to be something that other dating sites have never pushed, even though it’s precisely explicit rating that makes the algorithms that won the Netflix prize so powerful,” Keller says. “In fact, those algorithms were so fascinating because they were able to extract semantic information about genres and other structure in the data set that were implicit in the ratings.”

Keller says they’re using a similar set of algorithms, in addition to other approaches like automated text and image analysis.

Though user acquisition is the next step, Keller speaks surely: “I’m confident that these tools have not been used by existing free dating sites and that they can provide substantially better matches than existing dating sites.”

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

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.

Hosted by the Secondary Robotics Initiative Department, IBM and the Mayor’s Commission on Technology, the luncheon aims to highlight particularly the technology work of young people, particularly nonwhite and other youth less likely to be involved in tech, and connect them with IT professionals of color.

“The event was held at Northeast because they have a technology lab and a stellar robotics program,” MCOT representative Kyasha Tyson told Technically Philly.

In addition to IBM, students interacted with representatives from Black Data Processing Associates, Emelle mE, Urban Youth Racing School, the Oglesby Group, Urban STEM Strategy Group and the Genaera Corporation.

In addition to the school’s choir, last Wednesday’s event featured Northeast High’s robotics club, a former hot rod association world champion and, yes, former Eagles linebacker, 610 WIP personality and online sports news entrepreneur Gary Cobb.

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.

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.

“It came out of a need, being a landlord for more than 15 years, knowing that I couldn’t always find a good lease agreement that could really protect me,” he said. “You’d call a friend who is a landlord, or you contact a real estate agent and say, ‘Hey do you have a lease? I need a lease.”

What lease documents he has bought were rarely up to date, Kiene says, and they rarely detailed responsibilities like cutting the grass, shoveling snow and switching batteries in smoke alarms. So he created his own basic lease and added or subtracted items and details as he saw fit.

That formed the core of what has become what Kiene says is the largest, most comprehensive property-management legal document resource on the planet.

It’s a subscription model: two weeks for $25 designed for one property; six months for $40 and one year for $76. It costs less than $10 per year to add an additional property. Membership gives users access to, as Kiene puts it, “the whole ball of wax.”

That includes the site’s robust Lease Builder Wizard, which puts users through a checklist of details to create a state-specific, tailor-made lease agreement, and its state assist features, guiding users through different laws, practices and expectations from state to state, including how large a security deposit, return-check fee and pet fees.

The site also has a network of real estate attorneys from each state, and just about every property-management document with a wide variety of details. Of course, the site’s staple products are its rental agreements.

“If you have to buy each form, is it really worth it?” Kiene says. “We give you a central source.”

Below, watch an animated tour of the company’s development, which cost a cool $20k, Kiene says

Kiene says he’s proud to be building this business in his native Philadelphia. (He says the above video was made by a Chicago-based firm, which plunked in the New York and Windy City references, much to our displeasure.)

It’s here where he found his real estate experience. At peak, he owned 10 rental properties in other parts of Northeast Philadelphia and “Kensington in the beginning,” he says. Now he says he’s filling a new role in a trade that became his career.

And Kiene isn’t done growing the site. He wants to develop a premier and secure resource for tenant credit checks and eviction history

“We want to build the best system,” he says.

That’s how your users will spread the word about the good work you do, he now says he knows. He continues to have the site’s usability tested, with the help of volunteers, and he keeps plunking down money that he says could score him the big suburban home some might dream of over a modest Frankford rowhome.

“Four years ago, this was just an idea. It took a year just to get the product together,” he says. “We have more to do, but there’s still nothing that comes close to what we offer. There’s nothing more important than that to me.”

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly�s tech scene, but aren�t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

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.

Stroll, ranked 62nd, was accompanied by the following four companies: its Callowhill community neighbor Avencia, the geographic analysis and software development firm that was ranked 13th; East Frankford design collaborator and fabrication company Amuneal, ranked 51, and Perryman Building and Construction Services, which was ranked 94th and is based in West Philadelphia at 45th and Market (help me with what neighborhood that is in the comments below).

The Inner City 100 list has no industry specifications, but from Stroll’s Web base to Avencia’s software development and the high-end design and fabrication of Amuneal and growing sustainable requirements of construction for Perryman, all four of Philadelphia’s representatives could be considered members of our region’s creative economies.

Stroll’s neighbor Avencia, no stranger to Technically Philly, was the highest ranked Philadelphia firm, at 13th. Their five-year compound annual growth from 2003 to 2007 was 647 percent. No decimal point needed.

Philadelphia was better represented than each of the five cities with larger populations, see at right. No New Jersey or Delaware companies were listed.

Other cities represented by multiple businesses include Detroit, Miami, San Diego, Baltimore and Buffalo.

Pennsylvania was the third most decorated state with six company nominations; Philadelphia was helped out by two from Pittsburgh. California was by far the best represented state, with 15 companies, followed by Massachusetts with eight.

Collectively, the 2009 Inner City 100 grew at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent and an average rate of 324 percent between 2003 and 2007. More than 5,000 nominations for the 2009 list were received. The top 100 have employed nearly 17,000 people and created nearly 10,000 new jobs over the past five years.

See additional facts about the annual list here.

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.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

What are the start-up costs for a SPIN farm?

It depends on the scale. Startups run from $5,000 to $50,000 depending on what you already have. A delivery vehicle is one of the biggest expenses. Another is fencing, which can cost up to $18,000. If you’re farming in a site that’s a backyard, you can eliminate that investment. It depends on how resourceful you are. You can spend as much or as little as you want.

What’s different about SPIN than just buying a plot of land and sowing some seeds?

SPIN provides franchise-ready farming. We provide a business plan, a marketing plan and day-to-day work flow, so business drives agriculture rather than the other way around. Many people who go into farming don’t go into it with the right business framework, and it really works against them and really increases their chances of failure.

How has marketing this online helped the model?

Every day I see more and more first generation farmers�not from traditional farm families�download the guide as entry into the farming profession. There’s a Google group collaborating with contributors from New Zealand, Wisconsin, Sierra Leone, all over the world. They’re improving it and making innovations to it. It’s really combining the best of both worlds�technical agility and the environmental ethos coming together.

What is your vision?

We’re not visionaries, we’re practical people. Our role is to make people believe that they can do anything and being online allows us to do that because we can communicate with anyone and everywhere. I’ve heard the comment several times from spin farmers, ‘how did they farm before the Internet?’

Convince Technically Philly to give up our techie lives and start farming.

I don’t do that. Can the average person do SPIN farming? No. You need to have a calling, a real deep personal connection to farming and nature, and a willingness to work outside in all kinds of weather. You need good business sense, talent for growing and willingness to invest years in trial and error in figuring out how to build a business.

What’s next for SPIN?

We recommended that the city create a farm business park; eight to 10 acres where sub-acre farmers could setup next to each other and share infrastructure. We’re working with a city agency that is still very seriously interested and trying to carry on the Somerton Tanks project to its next phase.

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