The competitive real estate and built environment news community of Philadelphia has a new player.

Curbed.com, the New York City based blog network, which also has regional versions in nine other markets, today launches Philly.Curbed.com. The local site will be edited by Liz Spikol, the former Philadelphia Weekly columnist and editor of the now defunct Hispanic tech magazine Tek Lado.

“Curbed marries an obsession with real estate and neighborhoods with wit and entertainment,” said Spikol. “It’s fun.”

The site was launched in Manhattan in May 2004 by writer and sometimes entrepreneur Lockhart Steele, who has since built a small empire of focused niche sites beyond the Curbed network, which also has local versions in Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and the Hamptons.

The display advertising model will be tested, following the path of the short-lived Philadelphia expansion of Brooklyn-based real estate blog Brownstoner. Since then, the niche has been attacked locally by Naked Philly and Plan Philly’s Eyes on the Street, in addition to historically-focused Hidden City and others.

[Full Disclosure: PlanPhilly has retained Technically Media, this news site's parent company, for web strategy work in the past.]

It’s a place that Spikol says Curbed can distinguish itself with her local leadership, noting her “thorough knowledge of the city and its quirks.”

“People should come to the site if they have a sense of humor and if the following things make their hearts pound faster: castles in Mt. Airy; Frank Furness; confusing neighborhood renamings; community forum threads; mysterious new construction; urban ruins; street art; the fate of the Reading Viaduct; historical architecture; catchment issues; remarkable houses and apartments; hideous interior design; economic development; urban planning; sexy floorplans; Ed Bacon’s interest in skateboarding—and so much more,” Spikol wrote Technically Philly in an email. “I look forward to Philly readers helping us define the site.”

Below, watch Curbed.com founder Lockhart Steel talk real estate blogging.

Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney commercial litigation attorney Frank Taney hosts open office hours for young tech businesses in the region.

Since starting to host free, monthly open office hours in June, Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney attorney Francis X. Taney has met with nearly two dozen entrepreneurs he never knew before.

“Some become paying clients, some I never see again, but almost everyone walks away with some knowledge they needed, which is really the point,” said the Center City commercial litigation lawyer better known on Twitter as @ScaryLawyer. “The bigger, the stronger the pie in Philadelphia, the better it is for all of us.”

(Which is a good perspective, as Technically Philly is hosting another startup advice open hours on Jan. 19, albeit more focused on investment than potential litigation.)

Taney’s effort started at the Corzo Center at the University of the Arts by answering questions from students who were mostly starting industrial crafts and other creative arts businesses. Now it’s grown into part lead generation and part giving back, he says, helping startups the fourth Wednesday of each month. The next opportunity will be Jan. 25 from 6-8pm.

“I’m typically very useful to people who are trying to figure out the legal bases they have to cover in launching a business, whether that relates to entity selection and formation, contractual and IP issues or other related issues,” said Taney, noting he has walked through actual disputes with young businesses.

One advantage of sitting with so many startups, says the South Jersey native and Cherry Hill resident, is that he’s been able to get a good sense of where the broad entrepreneurial community is headed in Philadelphia.

“You’ve always tended to see less of a bubble here, and that’s still the case” he said. “Nobody’s chasing the sizzle. They’re building businesses.”

Working on a decade with Buchanan Ingersoll and 17 years in and around Center City, Taney, who earned a Penn law degree after doing his undergrad at Drew University, says he sees a lot of incremental ideas –”not a lot of projects that are trying to cure cancer.”

Still, two decades of technology business growth — with a bubble burst in the middle — has created a community that Taney says most entrepreneurs he talks to have some interest in helping to build.

For entrepreneurial-minded Twitter users in Philadelphia, he is a familiar sight as @ScaryLawyer. How’d he choose that name when he joined in 2008 on the recommendation of fellow PANMA board members?

“I chose the name because I’ve often felt that some people are uneasy around me because I’m a lawyer; so it was an ironic response to that,” he said. “Little did I know at the time the various interesting people I’d connect with through that platform.”

Considering Taney has clients like Passyunk Square web design firm P’unk Ave and Headhouse Square e-commerce development shop Sumo Heavy Industries, while working around big corporate clients of the medium sized Pittsburgh-based law firm, his perspective has some value.

If Taney was in charge, he says that to continue to grow the perception and impact of the Philadelphia tech scene, he would focus on ‘the multiplier effect’ — the power of proximity to attract and retain talent.

“Startups in New York are taxed like crazy but they’re growing that community in a big way,” he said, noting that national press attention there can help. “The Nutter administration is a big improvement, I think, but we need to keep focusing on how density and perception of success brings more of it.”

It’s not that Philadelphia is without strong ideas that could fuel big business growth, he says.

“The ideas behind [startup accelerator] DreamIt NYC companies are no different or better than those at DreamIt Philly. There is just the feeling of more money there,” Taney said. “Or more specifically, the investment community here has different interests on the whole.”

Is it an education problem?

“No one is entitled to tell investors that they should be investing in a different area, but it can help to continue to introduce people with money in the western suburbs to the real businesses being built in Philadelphia today,” he said.

“With a train ride, you have access to the federal government in D.C. and the consumer-focused money in New York, but I see people building something different here,” he said. “Can they keep it special as it grows?”

How the City of Philadelphia spends $3.5 billion annually should be better visualized online, we say.

The state-empowered Philadelphia Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority (PICA), which is chaired by investor and former mayoral candidate Sam Katz, released in November a citizen’s guide to the City of Philadelphia General Fund that was full of visualizations — all buried in a PDF.

While we shared the document a few weeks ago, after seeing it on PhillyDeals, it seems that it all passed with too little fanfare. While we at Technically Philly would love to work with PICA to develop a friendlier, more interactive web version of this project, we thought we’d start by sharing our 10 favorite of the many charts and graphs detailing where the city government gets its money and how it’s spent.

In addition to the one above, see our 10 favorites below.

Also see the original PDF here or here (Technically Philly strongly recommends you give the document a look for additional explanation for much of the information below).

REVENUES

Distribution of Fiscal Year 2012 General Fund Revenues

Distribution of Fiscal Year 2012 General Fund TAX Revenues

EMPLOYMENT

How many city employees

Percentage change in city employment by agency

EXPENDITURES

Percent of budget distributed by function

Percent of budget distributed by agency

Comparing the 10 largest U.S. cities by expenditures

TAXES

Tax revenue and rate

Comparing 10 large U.S. cities by state and local tax burden

Comparing 10 large U.S. cities by percentage of tax revenues

2011 has been an outstanding year for RJMetrics.  We’ve tripled our headcount, creating eight new high-tech jobs in Philadelphia and filling our Center City office to capacity.  We’re proud to have done this profitably and without the use of any outside capital.

Today, we signed a new lease that will significantly expand our office space in The Philadelphia Building at 13th and Walnut.  This was not a decision that Jake or I took lightly.  2011 brought with it a number of strategic opportunities, including offers that would have involved moving our company to New York or Silicon Valley.

We turned down those offers and we’re doubling-down on Philadelphia.  Not because it is the path of least resistance, but because it is the right path.  We believe that Philadelphia is the best possible home for our start-up.  Here are five reasons why…

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It works like this: visit the website, upload a document version of your resume and let the service’s robust algorithm review it, evaluating word choice, layout, experience and more. No registration required: it’s sleek and just might offer you the kind of advice you’re seeking during your job hunt.

No direct competition in the instant resume grading for consumers exists to date, though LiveCareer is due to launch a competing product, Weinberg, 26, said, and products like LinkedIn, Klout and Grader.com are near enough to keep Rezscore growing.

Those growth plans include introducing industry specific algorithms, noting that a resume for a professor’s gig might need to look different than that for a graphic designer.

Still, Weinberg and fellow co-founder and CEO Gerrit Hall say they already have a rarity among online startups: a service that can actually help its users.

From L to R: CEO Gerrit Hall, COO Sean Weinberg and summer intern Nick Mazzetti

Rezscore launched at the end of 2010 with an early Lifehacker review, fully launching January 2011.

Hall and Weinberg had worked together on a smaller project before and hit it off.

“We both noticed very clear trends in what worked on resumes that seemed to be agnostic to region, experience level, industry and job title. There’s a way people market themselves that is successful across all boundaries,” Weinberg said. “So we set out to science it.”

The pair built a backend system where recruiters, HR people and hiring managers could go in and rate resumes on over a dozen different metrics, fine tuning the questions they asked all along.

“After a few months of harassing everyone we knew to grade resumes and then compiling the data, we discovered very clear trend lines that for the most part — although not entirely — backed up our assumptions about resume quality,” Weinberg said. “Then we built an algorithm to mimic our human reviewers thought processes in aggregate.”

They had a prototype by August 2010, tweaking before their launch late that year.

The startup is already bringing in some revenue, by way of resume editing and writing using data not included in its algorithm, affiliate links and some cost per application jobs matching, in addition to licensing its technology.

Rezscore is based in the Northern Liberties headquarters of the Adapt Technical Group, though CEO Hall lives in Brooklyn and Weinberg is in Cherry Hill.

For now, the service has only been funded by a friends and family round. The pair discuss other investment possibilities but nothing has fit quite yet, Weinberg said.

Weinberg has the resume background. He was a recruiter right out of college, launched a professional resume writing service in early 2009 before starting law school at Rutgers-Camden that fall. In early summer 2010, he started working on Rezscore and is currently on leave from law school to pursue the venture.

Weinberg, who was born in St. Louis but grew up in Manhattan and attended Yeshiva University for undergrad.

Gerrit, 29, has the startup chops. He worked at Spoken Hub and Sonic Boom Games and was a co-founder of Groupable. He is a regular contributor to the startup advice site Bootstrapper, hosts the “Vital Topics” panel of the Road2Shambala podcast and spearheaded the 2log competitive blogging platform. The native of Seattle has dual degrees in physics and religion from Swarthmore.

So why does the startup have roots in Philadelphia?

“Initially it was just because I was in law school in the region. I was working from home in Cherry Hill but going out to a lot of the Philly events,” said Weinberg, noting that Rezscore was included in the first Open Angel Forum here and demoed at the Philly Tech Meetup. “We thought that actually having a physical presence here would make a difference towards us having a conceptual home in the community. I love how open the Philly tech community is while still being a relatively small/ tight knit group.”

TheDrinkNation.com will launch “in the next two to three weeks if all goes well”, beginning the national expansion plans of DrinkPhilly.com, says founder Adam Schmidt.

“That will serve as a nation-wide content site and parent site for all the cities we are in. The nationwide content will be aimed at being general enough that anyone could enjoy it and will help populate the content to the local city sites and those local sites will also have freelancers contributing local content. So the city sites will have a combination of local and nationwide content, as well as all the happy hour data like what we have for Philly,” Schmidt, 29, tells Technically Philly. “I think it will be a pretty new type of media model in this industry.”

The online bar guide and nightlife news site launched in 2009 as an expansion on Schmidt’s Excel spreadsheet of Philadelphia Happy Hours. Technically Philly has spotted splash pages for DrinkDC, DrinkBaltimore and DrinkNYC.

“We’re looking at launching DrinkBaltimore and DrinkDC in early-mid October. No firm dates yet as we are still working to organize the launch parties. DrinkNYC is a ways away yet, probably in the spring or later,” he said.

In May, Schmidt announced the site’s launch to the Jersey Shore. New DrinkPhilly Editor Danya Henninger, who replaced outgoing edit lead Justin Giza, will lead the DrinkNation editorial operation, she told Technically Philly.

This is Exit Interview, an occasional interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

At the Philly Geek Awards last month, the Geekadelphia crew behind the event included an ‘In Memoriam’ segment.

Pictures of a dozen former members of Philadelphia’s technology community who had moved in the past year, many of them Exit Interview alumni, were shown on the large projector screen, set to ‘It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday’ from Boyz II Men. The bit was funny and well received.

In the audience was Justin Giza, then editor of DrinkPhilly.com, which was founded in 2009 by Adam Schmidt and Technically Philly profiled in June. At next year’s Geek Awards, Giza could be on that ‘In Memoriam’ screen.

Just a week after the Geek Awards, Giza announced his plans to move with his girlfriend to the 67th ward, like others before him (Giza has been replaced by Zagat writer Danya Henninger). It’s not without love for Philadelphia. He’s still staying involved with the site — handling some audio work for videos — but, following some car trouble, the pair made it to their new digs in Jersey City, with an eye to the skyline just east.

Giza, 26, is originally from West Haven, Conn. and moved to Center City in 2007 after Drew University, chasing a big city life, “and got pretty cozy there,” focusing on his interest in sound work.

“I did day shifts at coffee shops — 3rd Wave all the way — and spent the evenings doing sound design or working as a board operator for various theatre companies,” Giza said. “My education was… for theatre with a music minor. Naturally, becoming the editor for a website about drinking was the next logical step.”

His time in Philly was adored on almost all fronts, yet something drew him away. Below, Giza, a nerd rapper by love,  talks to Technically Philly about music drawing him away and the burgers calling him back.

What are the primary reasons you left Philadelphia?

I love Philly so much, but I like to travel and explore. My original plan was just a year in Philly, but that turned into four!

Beyond the editing and drinking gig, I’m a musician and my girlfriend is an actress. Markets for both of those fields are strong in Philadelphia, but we wanted to try a different environment for a while.

Was there anything that could have been done to keep you in Philly?

I think a lot of factors fought to keep us there – the food, the bar scene, our amazing jobs and our awesome friends. We came very close to staying at least another year. Ultimately, if someone hooked me up with a citywide discount on burgers, I’d probably move back and eat until I was sick. I miss Philly’s burgers.

Do you think you would return to Philadelphia under appropriate circumstances?

Absolutely.

Is Philadelphia going in the right or wrong direction?

If we’re talking in terms of technology and new companies and such, very much the right direction.

Philly companies really seem to have the right idea when it comes to networking and building relationships. It’s great to see dozens of small companies find ways to band together and use their numbers to achieve what they want.

The Drink Philly office was right next to Cipher Prime, and I was always shocked at how much networking overlap we had. Considering we were two completely different companies with differing goals and products, it was nice to still find ways to team up and get stuff done.

Anything specific you would do if you were suddenly put in charge of the city?

Find a way to make Old City less bro-y on the weekends. I honestly don’t think anyone who actually lives in the city appreciates it, and walking there can be moderately terrifying after hours.

When someone you meet from outside the region asks about Philadelphia and its tech community, what do you tell them?

Generally speaking, I try to stress that Philadelphia has a great sense of camaraderie. The Philly Geek Awards proved this. The companies and start-ups in Philadelphia may not always be the largest, but they know how to team up, high five everyone in the room and make some waves.

What is the perception you most often find of Philadelphia?

Most often, it’s the stereotypical one. I think every city earns a stereotype of some sort — ours just happens to involve delicious meat and cheese on a roll. I am proud to report that I’m receiving more and more comments about Philadelphia’s beer crowd. That’s a good feeling.

What’s the latest you’re up to?

Right now, I’m focusing hard on my music. In my other life, I’m a nerdcore hip-hop artist who goes by Zilla Persona. In a nutshell, I try to make awesome music with NES sounds and various beepy noises. I rap about video games and Star Wars instead of about how much money I have. I’m in the middle of a rolling EP release called Unfair Advantage. It’s a sci-fi space opera presented in a hip-hop format. Yes, it’s every bit as odd as it sounds, and my mother is very proud of me.

Besides working on that, I’m just doing freelance audio and such.

Read more and download the report here. The Business Insider graded the report here.

From Trulia, a neat infographic based on the company’s own metric comparing rent and bought properties. Play with the interactive map here.

The map shows Philadelphia to be the most affordable place to buy a home among the country’s five largest cities, though Phoenix, San Antonio and Dallas were ranked as cheaper to buy among other big cities. [That big red circle shows that New York City is 'very much more affordable to rent,' when compared with buying.]

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

Andy Mroczkowski tells an important story without meaning to do so.

“Honestly I’m not that critical of Philly,” says Mroczkowski, 31, who moved mobile educational game development startup MindSnacks. “I just had an opportunity for adventure, and we thought the Bay Area was the best place for our company.”

A theme in the Exit Interview series has been a lack of competitive advantage for business in Philadelphia. Today is the last in the weekly series, though we’ll always seek perspective from those who leave — and those who come. In a fitting close, Mroczkowski notes that he’s actually rather fond of Philadelphia, he and his team felt that to give themselves the best shot at success, they planned to migrate westward.

Mroczkowski, a South Jersey native and Drexel alumnus left in January. The founder of local Mac programming group CocoaHeads, he had worked for the Neat Company and freelanced out of Indy Hall.

Last week, TechCrunch reported that MindSnacks, a DreamIT ventures startup that now has five full-time staff, raised $1.2 million in funding on the West Coast. So far, the plan is working.

What are the primary reasons you and your business left Philadelphia?

Andy Mroczkowski

For MindSnacks, Philadelphia was temporary home. We wanted to give this company the best possible chance of succeeding, which meant we wanted to be in the very best environment for building a startup. The Bay Area was an obvious choice.

Personally, leaving Philly was not easy for me. However, I really try to keep pushing and challenging myself, and I felt it was time to leave my comfort zone and go for something new and exciting.

Was there a specific event or moment that you realized you had to/wanted to leave?

I was given an “I’m not angry. I’m from Philly” t-shirt and felt that I needed to move away to get the most use out of it.

Seriously, it simply would have been a lot more difficult to raise capital, build a team and grow a company like MindSnacks in Philadelphia. If it were a different business with different goals it may have been a different story.

Was there anything that could have been done differently to keep you?

I left because of a very specific, unique opportunity that came at the right time. I don’t think there was much that could have kept me, except maybe a solid gold house and a rocket car.

Do you think you would return to Philadelphia under appropriate circumstances?

Definitely. Philly is full of great people with a lot of talent. I would love to call it home again.
It’s hard to say what the appropriate circumstances would be since I just left, but I’m sure I’ll be back when the time is right.

When someone you meet from outside the region asks about Philadelphia and its tech community, what do you tell them?

I say that there is a growing, tight-knit, talented tech community. The startup scene exists, but it’s small and seems to have lost some momentum. However, I think the game development community is really picking up. I think it’s a great place for a small company or independent developer.

It is hard to see why you’d move a hot tech company to Philly though, especially with New York City so close. The environment just isn’t there yet.

What is the perception you most often find of Philadelphia?

Cheesesteaks, Rocky, and throwing snowballs at Santa.

I’m only kind-of kidding. Even though the tech scene has been really growing the last few years, Philly is still not on most people’s radar. They don’t see it as a place you would choose for a company unless you already had roots there.

What’s the latest you’re up to that we can plug or look forward toward?

There will be some big stuff from MindSnacks coming soon.

Also, I [was] on the Startup Bus from San Francisco to Austin for SXSW.