10 Twitter users every Philadelphian should follow

Some people count how many friends they have, and some people count the value of their friendships. On social media — and the web generally — we have the same kind of experience.

We can count just about everything online, and so it should surprise no one that as social media has boomed, so too have the comparisons between Facebook friend counts and Twitter followers.

But there’s so often a nuance that raw numbers can’t show.

It’s easy enough to track who are the most followed Twitter users in Philadelphia, but everyone is trying to figure out how those figures measure in influence — or ‘resonance.’ Suppose we want to see who are the biggest Philadelphia voices in the Twitter conversation — not spam accounts with big follower numbers, but those people who you should be following, whose opinions matter and are being heard.

Simply, what Philadelphia Twitter users matter most?

Find the rest on the Philly Post of Philadelphia magazine.

Tourism on your phone: How Philly is leading and why it matters

With tourism, it’s all about where you are. Exactly where you are.

In Philadelphia, the past month has seen a wash of mobile geo-location tourism applications launch in and around the Cradle of Liberty. Trends say those deals and the mobile tools they employ today will help to profoundly reconfigure how tourists experience this greene country towne in the future.

City tourism officials announced last week with great fanfare a mobile app that puts users onto competitive ‘treks,’ sending them throughout the city to find and explore and earn points for what they find and how they find it. Philadelphia is the first city to use the platform, developed with SCVNGR, a now Boston-based company rooted at Princeton and Drexel universities.

In May, a deal was announced that partnered Commonwealth booster agency visitPA with geo-location social media powerhouse Foursquare, offering users digital badges for checking in at locations across the state in one of three categories: dining, buying and museum-going. Visit Bucks County has also launched a Foursquare deal, and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. is starting to play there too.

Then in early June, the Fairmount Park Art Association unveiled its multi-platform Museum without Walls, in which visitors to the Ben Franklin Parkway can dial a phone number and choose to hear professionally-produced, rich oral histories of the art and sculptures that line that famed promenade.

All are giving users choice.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

We need a Philly Tech Week

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine’s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Next week, the city’s bars, breweries and pubs will be center stage as the third annual Philly Beer Week kicks off. The event gives the city’s beer scene a chance to shine on a national spotlight, attracting outsiders to see the beer culture that has been growing rapidly in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, the city’s technology scene is experiencing a similar revival. After being nonexistent for years, the city suddenly has a handful of events the blend culture and technology to help put Philadelphia in a broader national conversation about new startups, investment and innovative ideas.

The two “scenes” overlapped this week with the creation of the Philly Beer Week iPhone app by a group of volunteers. The application helps Philly Beer Week attendees easily find their next watering hole during the week-long festival and uses geolocation to tell you the event nearest to you. Technically Philly thinks, however, that the two burgeoning scenes have much in common and have a lot to learn from one another.

In fact we think techies should borrow liberally form our beer-drinking friends to help continue Philadelphia’s growing reputation as a tech town. Here’s what needs to happen:

Continue reading at The Philly Post.

Economy League’s Steven Wray says entrepreneurs can save 2026

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine’s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Inside the pages of this magazine’s December 2008 issue, the 100 moments that most shaped this city were listed in careful detail.

No. 66 was Philadelphia’s 1976 celebration of the 200th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence — and the celebration’s failure to live up to expectations of what could have been a “splashy affair befitting its status as the nation’s birthplace.” Instead, that feature’s contributors dubbed it “a glorified community-theater production of The Music Man.”

Maybe that’s what has the Economy League of Greater Philadelphia and its Executive Director Steven Wray all hot and bothered.

Read the rest here.

Five city departments and agencies that could use a Web overhaul

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Read this post on Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

The use of technology to transform government has been growing municipal concern in city halls across the country.

Here, the City of Philadelphia has announced its intentions to release a service orientated 311 iPhone application, is applying for ultra highspeed broadband from Google and is in hot pursuit of a funded team of developers and technologists to make our every government transparency dream come true.

The overtures are there, even if the substance hasn’t yet hit the pavement.

As such, a question or three remains as to where the priorities of the newly centralized city division of technology should be. The Web has no limits — of space or time. So we’d think every department’s site should be an open and transparent list of expenditures and salaries, but there are specific goals each agency could reach — and those we wish they could.

Below, we share our hopes for Web openness and effectiveness at five agencies or departments Philadelphians often loathe.

Read more

There’s no place like Philadelphia for iPhone users

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Since launching three years ago, the iPhone has undeniably altered the mobile market.

The iconic device changed the way manufacturers design and price mobile phones. It introduced mobile data consumption to the masses. And it’s been a testament to Apple’s ability to capture and reshape markets, like it once did with the iPod portable music player and like it’s trying to do once again with the recent launch of the iPad tablet computer.

Yet in the wake of Apple’s success, the smart phone’s pivotal backbone, AT&T, the wireless network on which the device exclusively relies to deliver data, has been on the receiving end of much criticism for dropped calls and data dead-spots. In a report released in October, half of loyal iPhone enthusiasts surveyed said that they’d leave AT&T for another network if given the chance.

But as we’ve thought often and as a regional AT&T executive is quick to point out, much of the criticism is coming from San Francisco and New York, where tech media outlets thrive and where smart phone users are more prevalent, hence, the network’s more strained. So, what about here in Philadelphia?

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

A case for the Historical Society’s Philly Web portal

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Since she was a young woman studying at Rutgers University, 67-year-old Donna Meidt has traced her family ancestry by collecting stories from relatives, studying history books, and visiting the small mountain village of Gasperina in Italy, where her great-grandparents began raising their family more than a century ago.

The focus of her life’s work has been on her grandfather, Antonio Nicola Pisano, who lived in Philadelphia’s Queen Village neighborhood at the turn of the 20th century. Meidt remembers vividly the stories that Pisano shared with her about the life and family he left behind. “They were artists and they were poets,” he often said.

Pisano immigrated to America in 1911 at the age of 16, moving into a boarding house at Fifth and Catherine streets. The young man studied as a shoemaker’s apprentice at a factory in Center City. But his passion, too, was the arts.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

If we could design Philadelphia’s 311 iPhone App

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Yesterday it was revealed that the City of Philadelphia is developing an iPhone application for its 311 non-emergency call system that will allow users to submit requests for city services using an Apple smartphone.

As city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank told the Inquirer, users will be able to track and retrieve the same information they can from the city’s 311 telephone service. The mobile interface, though, will allow for more, like snapping a photograph of a pothole to request that it be filled. Frank hopes the application will launch next month as a bare-bones preview of what’s to come, before the “rocket-science stuff.”

Though Frank is vague about the future of the software, we’ve got some initial suggestions for what could be easily (and not-so-easily) implemented and advice for the city programmers tasked with developing it.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Division of Technology’s $120 million budget laid out to City Council

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Last Tuesday, city chief technology officer Allan Frank laid out the Division of Technology’s unprecedented six-year, $120 million budget in a hearing before City Council.

The sizable investment is a commitment to an executive order announced last July when Frank’s staff was more than tripled to 520 employees and plans were put in place to consolidate resources, improve technology infrastructure and streamline city services.

It is, in our opinion, absolutely necessary. As Frank told Council, according to the Daily News: “The world changed, but the city never changed.”

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Startup Leaders’ Blake Jennelle on Philly’s Fast Company feature

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine‘s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Silicon Valley is so last decade.

In January, business innovation magazine Fast Company ran a five-part series exploring emerging entrepreneurial technology hubs around the country. As the first cities in the series were published online, Boulder, Colorado and New York City, Blake Jennelle was pinging his network, wondering who’d been contacted by the magazine to represent Philly.

Jennelle, who keeps in close touch with hundreds of entrepreneurs in the region, is likely to have come across a lead. As far as he could tell, Philly was being counted out.

Let’s change that, he soon penned on his blog, a catalog of ruminations about Philadelphia startup scene, which boasts a healthy local following. How would you answer the question, he asked his readers, Why start a company in Philly?

For the full story, read on at Philadelphia magazine’s Philly Post.