They’re going to incubate profitable good works.

That’s much the angle of GoodCompany Ventures, which opened its Philadelphia Naval Yard Business Center offices with a ribbon-cutting ceremony highlighted by appearances from Mayor Michael Nutter and Chuck Lacy, a former president of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, yesterday.

All the startups they take in will be for-profit and looking to make a difference or two.

Yesterday, the incubator was also welcoming its inaugural 2009 class of “social entrepreneurs,” including the following: Cyrus-XP, which focuses on advancing the management and delivery of healthcare; CalendarFly, a single source scheduling solution for families (for a test drive, use “student” for username and password), and VolunteerBIG.com, a philanthropic social network that was gunning for grant money earlier this year.

GoodCompany aims to provide guidance and support to those for-profit startups that want to tackle large, unmet social needs. Like others, the incubator will offer those accepted training, mentoring, administrative and other pro-bono services. The new effort is co-founded by Resources for Human Development, a social finance firm and Murex Investments, an equity fund backed by leading financial institutions — both of which are based (barely) in Tioga — in addition to other business support.

At yesterday’s event, Lacy, the former Ben & Jerry’s president who is now president of the Vermont-based social capital firm Barred Rock Fund, addressed the attendees, as did Stephen Goodman, a partner at law firm Morgan Lewis, according to a press release from the incubator.

GoodCompany is sponsored by the Philadelphia Industrial Development Corporation, the Center City love child of the city and the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce that promotes economic developing in town, Trellist Marketing, the Wilmington, Del. Web marketer and the Wharton School of Business.

In photo, from left to right: Jack Huston, CEO of VIP Wireless; Aaron Horne, Philadelphia Inspector of Northwest Detectives; Mike Patterson, Philadelphia Eagles; Michael McCloskey, Philadelphia Chief of Police and Edward Williams, COO of VIP Wireless

Boost Mobile opened its first exclusive retail store in Philadelphia on Friday, with all the pageantry of city police middle management and Eagles defensive tackle Mike “PhatPat” Patterson.

The opening came a day after a deadline Boost imposed on itself to correct lingering problems with a delay in its text messaging delivery.

The delays were blamed on the company’s more than three quarters of a million new prepaid customers in the quarter, which beat analyst expectations, according to Sprint’s first quarter financial results.

Boost has led an advertising blitz on the city.

The store near-ish to the Logan neighborhood of North Philadelphia at Broad and Olney is another step in a battle for low-income cell phone users  between Boost, Metro PCS and Cricket, which entered the Philadelphia market in March. Philadelphia is the most populated region with those three largest prepaid mobile carriers.

At Friday’s store opening, Eagles player Patterson, who is still breathing hard after that 98-yard fumble recovery against the 49ers in 2006, presented on behalf of Boost a $10,000 check to the Philadelphia Police Department, benefiting the John Pawlowski Family Memorial Trust Fund.

In February, Pawlowski, who was 25, was shot and killed at the Broad and Olney intersection.

The retail store was developed in partnership with Boost’s national distributor VIP Wireless. The store will sell the company’s complete product line-up, phone accessory items and other merchandise.

There are at least 19 Cricket Wireless-owned stores in Philadelphia, according to regional company spokesman Jeffrey Bodzewski. There are at least 20 Metro PCS locations.

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.

Back at that New York equity firm, they’d spend hundreds of hours hand perfecting data from a company’s database, deciding just what might be likely revenue projections and user-action based on available information. Their research was valuable, time-consuming and costly.

It’s been done that way for years, almost always in one of two ways, Moore says.

The real detailed work would be done by either an in-house database administrator paid a six-figure salary or a high-end business intelligence agent that has its own consultants to cobble it all together.

That personalized work is still valuable for larger, older and more established companies with multiple legacy databases. but many smaller, newer e-commerce companies driving less than $100 million a year in profits don’t have a cost-effective alternative — until RJMetrics, our Ivy League boys say.

They’ll focus their business on e-commerce and subscription-based clients. Their software, developed by Moore, segments a company’s customer set to find user behavior trends for things like likelihood of repeat visit or purchase, preferences and future actions. The company’s focus, Moore says, is any business with an e-commerce division, online subscriptions or any other business that collects user data, from social media sites to online newsletters. RJMetrics will be able to offered detailed assessments of trending user behaviors and likely preferences.

“This is valuable stuff at a far cheaper rate for people who really need it,” Moore says.

Watch their product demo below.

Last summer, Moore left the equity firm and began refining the software that could do those tasks more reliably and far faster. Stein followed suit in October — focusing on the user interface side of things. The team founded RJMetrics and began testing reliability and efficiency on the businesses of friends and known clients.

Turns out, the thing actually works, and they want to base their operations here, where it’s called a hoagie.

Moore grew up in Glassboro, N.J. and followed the local high school with four years at Princeton University. Though he spent two years in New York, his family and his high school sweetheart — to whom he is now engaged — are decidedly Philly regional entities.

Stein grew up in North Jersey’s Morris County but got an education at the University of Pennsylvania. His girlfriend got a gig in Philly and has an affinity to the city.

Now, Moore is the primary programmer and Stein the primary hawker. Moore lives in Collingswood and Stein in Rittenhouse.

With those ties, cheap real estate, a certain uniqueness and a valuable urban hub, Philadelphia seemed like a simple choice.

“There were a lot of reasons pointing us this way. A lot of the best portfolio companies I’ve seen are not in Silicon Valley — they’re doing something special somewhere different,” Stein says.” We’d also like to play a significant role in the growing up of a tech scene, and we can do that here.”

“I like that.”

Updated: 3/11/09 at 10:18 p.m.

Your choices for cell phone carrier are about to get busier.

According to a company press release, Cricket Communications has entered the scrum to provide cheap mobile phone plans to Philadelphians, joining a growing battle between Boost Mobile, Metro PCS and others. [Full Disclosure: I have a Boost Mobile plan]

Update: Philadelphia is currently the largest market in the country with the three largest prepaid mobile companies, a Boost spokesman said.

“In our current economic landscape, it’s more important than ever for wireless carriers to show that they respect people’s wallets while ultimately providing value,” said Andy Cook, area general manager for Cricket in Philadelphia. “With the launch of Cricket wireless phone and Internet services in Philadelphia, consumers now have a wireless carrier that understands their financial needs and concerns without sacrificing great service and features.”

Cricket is hosting a week’s full of events to promote its market entry — see more here.

The company, a subsidiary of San Diego-based Leap Wireless International, plans to open 20 retail store locations in the Delaware Valley, including 12 stores in Philadelphia. The rest reach out into the suburbs, and from South Jersey to Wilmington, Del. [Full Disclosure: Sean Blanda loves Delaware].

Yesterday, Cricket held opening ceremonies at a new location at 2900 N. Broad Street, near the Allegheny West neighborhood of North Philadelphia – not exactly the “Center City” location it boasted in its press release. The ceremony featured performances by aerialists and acrobats and the presentation of a $20,000 check to Sister Mary Scullion and Project H.O.M.E.

In addition to unlimited mobile phone services, Cricket is also offering Cricket Broadband, giving customers unlimited high-speed Internet access at home or around town anywhere in Cricket’s coverage areas on their desktop or laptop computers. Cricket Broadband service is just $35 per month for customers who also have Cricket’s low-cost unlimited voice plans, and $40 per month as a stand-alone service. …

Cricket’s coverage area expands from Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs, across South Jersey to Atlantic City and down to Wilmington in Northern Delaware. Cricket rate plans also include unlimited use is all Cricket markets across the U.S., including Pittsburgh and Chicago, as well as Premium Extended Coverage, which allows unlimited use in an even broader area stretching from New York and Boston to California and from Wisconsin to Texas. [Source]

Hat tip to the Business Journal.