12 iPhone apps by Philadelphians, for Philadelphians

Great news for all the iPhone-addicts out there: Philly’s ever-increasing number of techies has been up to more than just taking up all the seats at your favorite Wi-Fi café. They’ve been busy developing truly Philly-centric apps, from the genius (SETPA travel, local concert information and traffic reports) to the just-for-fun (zombie braining and saving kittens).

Some of these Philly finds may take a little digging through the app store, and with tens of thousands of apps to choose from, who has time for all that? Well, we do! Get those downloading fingers ready for these 12 awesome iPhone apps by Philadelphians, for Philadelphians.

Read the rest at Philly Post.

Disclosure: Trainboard, an app on the list is one of Technically Philly’s sponsors.

10 most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia (maybe)

Traffic estimates from Compete.com for Philly.com, NBCPhiladelphia.com and CBS3.com, likely three of the most trafficked websites in Philadelphia. Click to enlarge.

July marks the middle of the calendar year, quarterly reports and time to evaluate progress on yearly goals.

At the beginning of 2010, we looked at 10 competitors and their relative web traffic. With six months done, we wanted to make the first attempt at listing the most trafficked websites in Philadelphia, using monthly unique visitors as the metric of choice.

To make the comparison, we’ve used public traffic website Compete, but, by way of disclosure, we’ll always offer that any public web metrics are notoriously controversial. It’s also important to note that there is often a drag in such traffic estimates being pulled, so the surest figures are from the end of May.

So, consider this a comparative start and nothing more.

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Announcing our partnership with Philly.com

One of our missions here at Technically Philly is to be a mouthpiece for the technology community of the city – a way to provide wider exposure to some of the great things happening here.

We’ve referred sources to the New York Times and have seen features on companies that we covered shortly appear on CBS News, among other places. And, as often as we can, we try to write tech stories for the Citypaper and for the Metro.

With that in mind, we’re happy to announce a new content partnership with Philly.com. As part of the deal, Philly.com can post our content and we are able to post Philly.com content on Technically Philly.

TP already has content sharing agreements with Philadelphia Magazine and Start Philly.

If you’d like to partner with TP, exchanging content or otherwise, be sure to drop us a line.

Philly.com releases iPhone app, ranks third in app store

According to a press release, Philly.com has released its first iPhone app made by Verve Wireless.

The news app sells for $1.99 and is sponsored by long-time print advertiser TD Bank, something Philebrity got a kick out of.

The app is pretty standard fare for news applications theses days, acting as an optimized version of the mobile layout with seperate sections for news, sports, blogs and video. The app also allows users to read all of the day’s Inquirer and Daily News content, making the morning trip to the honor box a little less appealing.

Early reviews have been positive, and the app is third in the news app rankings.

We haven’t had much time to poke around, but as news nerds we dig the iPhone friendly story layout, videos and the ability to submit a story on the go.

However testing it in the Fairmount neighborhood, the app had some minor speed issues but all together it’s a solid start for Philly.com. Though we hope they can do more with the iPhone platform in the future (geolocation anyone?) However, as the future of the business is in question after this month’s auction, it will be tough to predict if the company will be able to dedicate future resources to mobile development.

Be sure to see our interview with Philly.com president Ryan Davis earlier this year.

Disclaimer: The members of Technically Philly have all freelanced or worked for the Daily News or Inquirer at one time or another and have a few friends there.

Philly.com sports portal possibly hit with malware attack

Visitors to Philly.com's sports section saw this malware warning in Safari this morning

Updated, 3:20 p.m.: According to a statement from Philly.com, the site has confirmed that a widget on the site contains code that is “not recognized by Google,” and was thus misinterpreted as malicious code. It hopes Google will remove the “malware” warning soon. “We do know that it was that code, we found the code that Google was flagging and it is a third-party widget on the site. We are working with that vendor to get that widget back up,” Editor and Vice President Wendy Warren said in an interview.

Philly.com‘s sports portal is appearing in Google search results and in browser notification systems as a site infected by potentially malicious malware, possibly caused by the site’s Flash-based advertisements.

Vice President and Editor Wendy Warren told Technically Philly that the organization is “responding very aggressively” to investigate the situation and that it is possible that code on the site might be being misinterpreted as malicious.

Warren said in a telephone interview this afternoon that there had been no reports that harmful software had been installed on user computers.

“We’re not sure if there was malicious code or not. Though we can’t rule it out yet, we’ve not found any evidence of it,” she says. “We’re going to check every piece of code that we haven’t written ourselves.”

Philly.com site administrators have disabled Flash-based advertisements and third-party widgets in the Sports section, where the malicious code has been found, Warren says. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly has conducted business with Warren and Philly.com]

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Links: Bentley Systems CEO talks unemployment, Daily News Pulitzer and More

The Inquirer’s Mike Armstrong reports on a speech given by Greg Bentley, the CEO of infrastructure software company Bentley Systems.

CNET reports that Philly.com is trying its hand at sports gambling for revenue generation.

The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that Drexel, Penn and Cheyney universities and Inovio Biomedical were awarded a $2.8 million Pennsylvania state grant to develop a DNA vaccine to treat hepatitis C.

After a more than 10-year dry spell, local journalists in the employ of a Philadelphia daily newspaper have won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize. See the bold Daily News ‘Tainted Justice’ series collected online.

Every Friday morning, we make sure you didn t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

Philly.com denies malware allegations

Philly.com is denying allegations that Philadelphia’s largest news portal is distributing malware that could potentially harm user computers.

“Philly.com takes seriously the online security of our users, and we go to great efforts to combat issues including malware,” according to a written statement issued to Technically Philly.

“We will continue to investigate all claims regarding Philly.com and stand by our pledge to provide our users with a safe and secure online experience.”

Earlier today, city blog Phillyist reported that one of its readers was issued a warning by an employer to stay off Philly.com because the site could contain malware.

Only one mention of the malware allegations appeared in a Twitter search, but it was posted before the Phillyist’s story and was not the blog’s original source. “Whatever you do, don’t go to Philly.com, it’s infected with Malware,” April Robinson wrote on her Twitter account a little after Noon.

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Friday Tech Links: Philly tax criticism, Webby awards and more

Read about what's going on here after the jump.

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Philadelphians are the highest taxed people in the United States. So says eminent Philadelphia Daily News legacy columnist John Baer.

That’s enough to crack any red-blooded American’s Liberty Bell.

In a column, Baer was railing against Mayor Nutter’s calls to Harrisburg for legislative authority to hike the city’s sales tax from seven to eight percent. The story actually has a good dialogue in the comments section, too — a rarity for Philly.com.

The topic came up elsewhere this week.

Joe Distefano, the Inquirer’s top bearded business columnist, wrote an absolute must read on Nutter’s stalling of and his administration’s subsequent rethinking of continuing the move to “eradicating”the city’s two-pronged business privilege tax.

By no account should you think this is strictly a Philly problem these days.

Fast Eddie Rendell said this past week that if he was forced to push for a hike in the state’s income tax, he would vie for it to return to its normal state three years later, according to reporting from foxy Inquirer state capital correspondent Angela “It’s Greek” Couloumbis.

After the jump, why ET is with a Philly cop above, why 600 people paid $500 to be in Delaware and more than five other itches you need scratched, including our best read story of the week.

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Shop Talk: Obama Girl’s Leah Kauffman on Phrequency.com redesign

Updated: 5:33 p.m. 6/10/09 with additional attribution

This is part of an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

On a Friday afternoon in early May, Leah Kauffman dons a t-shirt to show off her gang affiliation.

A pair of hands screenprinted on the bright red tee are positioned similarly to the Bloods street gang hand signal. Fingers on the right hand are contorted into the shape of the letters ‘b,’ ‘l’ and ‘o.’ The left hand is flipped upside-down, and the index finger curled, creating a hanging “g.”

‘Blog,’ it reads.

At first glance, it’s easy to miss. But it makes sense. Kauffman runs Philly.com’s Phrequency, a news portal that covers the movers, shakers and rattlers of Philly’s music community.

In April, Phrequency was redesigned with a more streamlined, blog-esque interface; dropping the clunky, genre focus that forced users to choose hip-hop or punk, R&B or jazz, for a content-oriented design that doesn’t split hairs on artists who span all of those.

It was a move that Kauffman had wanted to make for months.
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Comcast Roundup: E-mail monetization accusations, and More

Every Thursday morning, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup,

The ability to bookmark your Comcast.net e-mail account page has changed, gripes a reader, who tipped us to the problem, and it’s all for advertising.

(Send us your Philly tech and innovation tips, insight or story ideas!)

That reader says no longer can you bookmark your e-mail account page and browse directly there. Now bookmarks, old or new, send you to the Comcast.net homepage, forcing extra clicks to their “monetized articles & ads,” the reader says.

Sounds like conspiracy theory, a Comcast spokesman told Technically Philly.

Older bookmarks may need to be updated once more because of the final completion of a new Comcast.net e-mail iteration that began rollout last year, says Charlie Douglas, the director of communications for Comcast’s corporate online products.

“I don’t think it’s any different than Yahoo or almost any other e-mail service,” Douglas says. It should be noted that some, like Gmail, can have direct bookmarks.

Douglas was unaware of any push for increased click-rates on the Comcast.net homepage by e-mail users, which likely would be negligible for canceling those using bookmarks anyway.

A Philly.com executive jumps ship, Comcast ain’t the worst company in the country and four other Comcast stories you should read, after the jump.

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