Open call for events and sponsors for Philly Tech Week 2012 presented by AT&T

It’s that time again, Philadelphia.

Technically Philly has officially launched the open calendar of events for Philly Tech Week 2012 at PhillyTechWeek.com.

Events will take place Monday, April 23 through Saturday, April 28, 2012 with a kick-off weekend taking place April 20 through 22. We’re excited to launch the calendar with dozens of collaborative partners already onboard, and we’re eagerly anticipating the events that will come from Philly’s great tech community.

Philly Tech Week 2012 is presented by AT&T, the debut title sponsor, and is organized by Technically Philly. The annual week of events is intended to grow the impact of this innovative region through programming focused on technology, collaboration and improving Philadelphia. This year’s theme: “Making a better Philadelphia through technology.”

“AT&T is proud to be the first title sponsor of Philly Tech Week. We’re always looking ahead and we know our customers are too. They want to be amazed by ‘what’s next.’ It’s our job to support events and organizations that promote innovation and creativity in technology,” said Tiffany Baehman, vice president and general manager, AT&T, greater Philadelphia. “We recognize all that the Philly tech community has to offer and we are excited to see what the week brings.”

Technically Philly turned to Jarvus Innovations to develop PhillyTechWeek.com after the web development firm created the inaugural Philly Tech Week website and mobile application in 2011. The firm works with organizations like Consumer Reports, Philadelphia Eagles, The Roots and TEDxPhilly.

We’re launching with 23 events on the calendar, and several anchor events are confirmed thus far for Philly Tech Week 2012, including:

• A daily lunchtime speaker series at WHYY will take place again this year
• The week will be kicked-off by Startup Weekend, the entrepreneur bootcamp, followed by a block party hosted by globally-known coworking community Independents Hall
• Philly Tech Week’s Signature Event, a gala cocktail party, will gather hundreds of leaders in Philadelphia’s technology community
• The second annual Philly Robotics Expo will be held at Drexel University
• OpenAccessPhilly will provide lightning presentations on public-private partnerships
• Five Philly startups will compete for a prize pack at demo event Switch Philly
• The fourth annual BarCamp News Innovation, an annual, one-day unconference on journalism innovation, and the Open Gov Hackathon will be held at Temple University

To learn how to get involved with Philly Tech Week, read more after the jump.

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Philly Geek Awards: Geekadelphia to honor geek, technology communities Aug. 19 at Academy of Natural Sciences

The team behind Geekadelphia, the playful geek culture blog, has announced the first ever Philly Geek Awards to take place Friday, Aug. 19 at the Academy of Natural Sciences.

Free tickets, with a suggested donation of $5, are now available, as co-founder and lead organizer Eric Smith announced last week.

“A black-tie, red carpet event, we’re taking this ‘jawn’ seriously. Think of it as the local Daytime Emmy of the Webby Awards. Presenters will take to the Academy of Natural Sciences’ stage to talk about the nominees, open up an envelope to announce the winner, all that good stuff.  Expect beautiful trophies/plaques,  a fantastic pre-awards cocktail hour  thanks to National Mechanics and DrinkPhilly, and lots of laughs.”

[Full Disclosure: Geekadelphia has nominated Philly Tech Week and work we've done with the National Constitution Center; we can only assume to throw pie at us.]

Philadelphia Geek Awards
Friday, August 19th, 2011
www.phillygeekawards.com

Academy of Natural Sciences
1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA 19103
(215) 299-1009 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting (215) 299-1009 end_of_the_skype_highlighting
www.ansp.org

Philly Tech Week 2012 will be April 23-28, 2012, last week of April

Yo Philadelphia technology community,

Remember the first ever Philly Tech Week, which featured 65 events across industry and organization throughout the city the last week of April? Well, that happened with just a couple months notice. What would we be able to do with a full year?

Here’s the opportunity.

Philly Tech Week 2012, an open calendar of events celebrating technology and innovation across the region, will be happening April 23-28, 2012, the last week of April 2012.

Your calls to action:

• Dream up the coolest events, biggest announcements and boldest ways to show off that Philadelphia has one of the world’s most vibrant technology and innovation communities. Tell us how to bring Philly Tech Week to a new level.
• Think about how your business, organization, group or, yes, you can help support this week and the humble technology news site that puts it together. (A revised sponsorship one-pager will find the light of day later this summer).
• Be prepared for more growth because — we know this is going to shock you — the technology community here is growing and can have as big an impact as you can make yourself.

Keep doing wonderful things to make Philadelphia better and follow @PhillyTechWeek and @TechnicallyPHL for additional updates.

PhillyTreeMap.org: crowdsourced census of Philadelphia’s tree canopy

Map rendering of some 180,000 cataloged trees in Philadelphia, via PhillyTreeMap.org.

Philadelphia is crowdsourcing a census of its trees, and, yes, would you mind helping?

Unveiled on Arbor Day during Philly Tech Week, PhillyTreeMap.org is a wiki-inspired web application that allows users who register free to collaborate with the project partners — City of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, and the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission – to map,  inventory and preserve the Philadelphia urban forest. The project was built by local mapping company Azavea.

Nearly 180,000 are already cataloged, though the species and other core details are missing.With guidance from the site, users can ascertain species type, estimate trunk diameter and height and fill in other specifics that will help the coalition of groups to better ascertain what is lacking and what is working in Philadelphia foliage.

PhillyTreeMap is meant to help Parks & Rec with its 30 percent tree canopy goal outlined in Greenworks Philadelphia by engaging residents around tree planting and stewardship, Azavea Project Manager Deb Boyer said during the Green Tech Showcase unveiling. Currently Philadelphia has an average of roughly 20 percent canopy across the city, though some parts have fuller coverage and other parts have far less.

Funding has not yet supported a mobile interface, which would allow users to more easily update entries while at the tree, Boyer said, but the browser experience is a user friendly one. Team members will offer some project oversight in case of false information, but the hope is for Philadelphians to help with this cause, she added.

According to a press release [PDF]: “Azavea built PhillyTreeMap using open source code contributed by the Urban Forest Map project in San Francisco and plans to collaborate with the group on future urban forestry projects.  The development of PhillyTreeMap was supported by a Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture.”

Girl Geek Dinner: Philadelphia chapter kicks off during Philly Tech Week

Girl Geek Dinner Philadelphia chapter kickoff during Philly Tech Week.

More than 30 self-proclaimed “geek” women met up at Triumph Brewing Company in Old City on Tuesday, April 26 to kick off Philadelphia’s Girl Geek Dinner chapter during the first ever Philly Tech Week.

The event started at 6:30 p.m. with the opportunity for attendees to network and enjoy drinks from the cash bar. At 7, chapter organizer Tristin Hightower welcomed the group and gave a brief introduction to the overarching organization, explaining why she started the chapter and her goals for it.

Maggie Avener of the Prometheus Radio Project spoke about demystifying technical topics to make them accessible to less geeky audiences, emphasizing techniques borrowed from popular education. She covered tips on audience-appropriate advertising for beginner technical trainings, assessing and acknowledging what participants already know, designing trainings that reach people with varying learning styles and pushing people beyond their comfort zones while maintaining a feeling of safety. Click to see slides from Maggie’s presentation here [PDF].

Hightower closed out the speaking portion of the evening by thanking everyone for attending and answering questions about where the group could go from there. Attendees ate dinner and mingled until about 9pm.

Pictures from the event can be found on Flickr and Facebook.

Up next for Girl Geek Dinners Philadelphia will be a May Happy Hour welcoming to all. To stay connected with upcoming events or activities, follow @GGDPHL on Twitter, like them on Facebook or join the GGD PHL
announcement mailing list. Visit www.ggdphl.com for more information.

New $20 million Drexel University endowment to build businesses around biomedical research

Portion of less invasive breast cancer screening technology that is similar to what has been developed in part because of an existing Drexel University-Coulter Foundation partnership. A new $20 million endowment between the two is meant to bolster businesses around biomedical research.

Another announcement that came during Philly Tech Week featured funding for an initiative that would better integrate business plans and biomedical research.

Drexel University was awarded $10 million by the Wallace H. Coulter Foundation to endow the Coulter Translational Research Partnership program. The University matched the Coulter Foundation’s grant creating a $20 million endowment to bring life saving solutions to clinical practice by moving promising biomedical discoveries to commercialization… The new endowment will help Drexel enable the Philadelphia region to become a national hotbed of medical device development and build a global network of collaboration between academia and business.

This endowment is an extension of an existing Coulter-Drexel relationship, featuring projects that “have produced more than 40 full patent applications, three issued patents and one copyright registration,” including a wound monitor and a breast cancer screening device.

At the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal addressed the obstacle this program is meant to combat.

“Across the country we’ve seen a disruption in the innovation pipeline post-World War II,” she said. “We’ve gone from a time when there was a close connect between the technology and those who would develop it for market to now when innovation has moved back to the universities, without much of a market function, and we’ve seen big companies reduce their R&D.”

During the event, Coulter Project Director followed by Davood Tashayyod highlighted his work:

“This is an opportunity to create jobs and innovation that can go around the world but start here in Philadelphia,” he said.

Open Government Philadelphia: an initiative and policy paper from Councilman Bill Green

Councilman Bill Green publicly unveils his Open Government Initiative, during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network on Wednesday, April 27. He is flanked by RoseAnn Rosenthal and Greg Osberg. Photo by Yusuf Muhammad/Phrequency.com

After a failed bid for a paperless government initiative last year, Councilman Bill Green has redoubled the proposal into a broader 10-point Open Government policy paper, largely calling on technology and the community here.

Green’s announcement of the proposal came during the Philly Tech Week One Great Idea event from the Philadelphia Media Network, though he has continued hitting the talking point recently, a week before the City Council Democratic primary.

“We could become the first paperless and most open city government in the country,” Green said at the event. “We have the opportunity to leapfrog everyone else in five years if we start now.”

In the 17-page document, Green makes 10 recommendations, most of which he proposes to move forward himself with related legislation, though the local technology community is heavily sourced and credited. Download the full paper here [PDF].

Green says between $150-$200 million can be saved in the paperless government move alone, something Sacramento was most recently trumpeting.

Below, find his 10 recommendations and what they could mean for the future of Philadelphia governance, in addition to a related presentation his office shared.

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OPA Data Liberator: the hackathon project that fills in where city property records leave off [VIDEO]

Hackathon team OPA Data Liberator

Coders and journalists need to hang out more. It’s becoming something of a mission here at Technically Philly.

On Saturday, at the Open Gov Hackathon presented by Tropo, as a part of the third annual BarCamp NewsInnovation, former Inquirer City Hall reporter and current freelancer Patrick Kerkstra walked into the TV Studio at Temple University’s Annenberg Hall.

In the chilly, cement-floored room, Kerkstra presented a simple problem to a handful of developers there early for the hackathon. On the website of the city’s Office of Property Assessment (the reconstituted Board of Revision of Taxes), the search function is limited to specific address and doesn’t extend to names.

So, say, a small-time property developer wanted neighborhood approval for a zoning variance at a newly purchased property. Until Kerkstra inspired a pack of hackers, there was no easy, online way for concerned neighbors to find out other properties that property developer owned.

Now there is. Visit the OPA Data Liberator.

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Mural Guide application finds, details Philly’s ample outdoor art, built with OpenDataPhilly

An iPhone rendering of the Philly Mural Guide, which can be visited on any smart phone or web browser. Click to visit.

OpenDataPhilly.org was unveiled with a roar last Monday as part of Philly Tech Week. But while a catalog of regional data, APIs and applications is a treasure trove to some, it’s a brick wall to many others.

Data, thou art inscrutable.

As a better example of why releasing data is important, two Code for America fellows with help from a third developed and launched the Philadelphia Mural Guide app. Aaron Ogle and John Mertens, with Mjumbe Poe, used the MuralFarm collection of locations, images and other information on the city’s expansive outdoor art, to develop the project. The app received enough attention that Web 2.0 star Tim O’Reilly tweeted its grandeur.

“It’s a web-based application that can be viewed from a mobile device or desktop browser,” says Jeff Friedman, recently named Mayor Nutter’s Manager of Civic Innovation and Participation, noting it also shares details and images of included pieces. “It will locate your position on a map and your proximity to mural artwork in Philadelphia.”

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‘Great Ideas’ for fixing cycle of investment and entrepreneurship in Philadelphia

One Great Idea panel members from left: University City Science Center CEO Steve Tang, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal, City Councilman Bill Green and moderator Philadelphia Media Network CEO Greg Osberg, April 27, 2011 as part of Philly Tech Week. Photos by Yusuf Muhammad/Phrequency.com

How to break a cycle of investment and entrepreneurship leaving the region proved a central theme of the One Great Idea panel discussion and forum held by the Philadelphia Media Network as part of Philly Tech Week.

Hosted Wednesday night in the historic Inquirer building on North Broad Street,  the panel was moderated by Greg Osberg, the new CEO of PMN and publisher of the Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com. It was the first event based on the network’s One Great Idea series, which asks leading Philadelphians for a single, actionable idea for making the region stronger.

Focused on the role of technology and entrepreneurship, the forum kicked off with a panel discussion between Stephen Tang, President and CEO of the University Science Center, Ben Franklin Technology Partners President RoseAnn Rosenthal and City Councilman Bill Green and closed with each presenting their own One Great Idea for the city.

Below, find those ideas and more from the discussion, attended by more 60 and capped by a reception on the building’s 12th floor deck.

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