Not because this is the month we celebrate the birthplace of our nation (Ed.: In the birthplace of our nation) or because we get to travel to the Jersey Shore. No, because we’re amped for the second quarter regional venture capital numbers.

If you recall, last quarter was abysmal for the region and the rest of the country as VC investment slowed to a near halt. Some declared a sort of VC armageddon.

This quarter, the national numbers went the only direction they could have: up.

In the aggregate, the national venture capital outlook only received a modest bump in the second quarter with some regions growing faster than others. But no region saw growth like Philadelphia.

According to PBJ, the surge was anchored by a few very large deals. Roughly $108 million of the $161 million can be credited to three deals. One deal was responsible for $50 million.

We got a small glimpse of the general direction of the local VC scene a month ago when First Round capital was reported to be the newly crowned champ of early-stage seed investing.

According to PricewaterhouseCoopers (.xls link), Q2 was much more generous to Philly startups than to the rest of the country. In the first quarter, the region saw roughly $31 million invested, while the second quarter netted $161 million. The increase of over 500 percent is the largest among the 19 regions the report tracks and ranks us 13th in total dollars invested.

Silicon Valley and the 67th ward both saw decreases in dollars invested.

If you discount Sacramento’s jump from two deals in Q1 to four in Q2, Philadelphia also was the region that saw the largest increase in total deals completed. In Q1 Philly had 13 deals, compared to 22 this quarter. Philadelphia ranks 12th in total number of deals, but again, first in growth.

More detailed numbers are expected August 3rd.

A few glasses of Cabernet later, someone scribbled “evolve” on a cocktail napkin that now hangs framed in the company’s lobby.

Evolve burst on to the scene in 2007, raising an unheard of $15.4 million in financing from private entities. According to Pricewaterhouse Coopers, it was the largest information technology investment in Philadelphia since 2001.

The company, which has over 50 employees on its payroll, has lived up to that original brainstorming session. It now offers a one stop shop for business communications such as hosted applications and telephony. Now, small-to-medium businesses can avoid spreading their resources over a handful of small companies.

“You can get a patchwork quilt of five or six different vendors …[but] if you come to Evolve IP you have that single point of contact,” said Bill Jefferis, the company’s Vice President of Marketing & Business Development. “The secret sauce is integrating them all together, writing easy to use user interfaces, having a support center of people and scaling to make the price point compelling and attractive.”

Because of its everything-under-one-roof philosophy, Evolve IP has been growing steadily. Currently, the company offers business communications services to 200 businesses with over 9,000 users and it has its eyes on expansion. After the jump, find out how Evolve makes sure it provides uninterrupted service to customers and how the homegrown company plans to take over the rest of the East coast’s IP needs.

Bill Jefferis

The company has two active/active data centers, one at 401 North Broad Street, and another at its headquarters in Wayne. The Philly data center is also conveniently cohabited by some of the vendors that Evolve IP offers, including Cisco, IBM, Aastra and Broadsoft. The duel data center setup allows the company to have a backup in case something like the zombie apocalypse should happen.

“If, for some reason, the 401 North. Broad street platform was to go down, we have an automatic fail over to the platform [in Wayne],” said Jefferis. Although, so far, that hasn’t been necessary. Even if it did, the company has support people on staff around the clock.

The reliability, as well has the ability to offer numerous services under one roof, has the company planning to expand outside of its current footprint, which Jefferis loosely describes as a “60-mile radius” outside of Wayne.

“After we saturate this region, we will build out,” he said being careful to note that were the company to expand and outsource, it would be abandon its core principles. Soon, Evolve IP plans on opening sales offices up and down the East coast, although that doesn’t mean that it will be packing up anytime soon.

“We have been using the term ‘Silicon Valley of the East’ — that never quite happened, obviously — but there are quite a few high tech companies out of these suburbs,” said the West Chester-native. If Evolve IP’s growth continues, Philly would have a major player in the IP services field located in our backyard, something that Jefferis is fine with.

Just don’t ask him to actually drive into the city.

“I’m a West Chester born-and-bred guy … I just know how to put things in my GPS and get there,” he said with a laugh.

Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

Last week, along with the usual oh-my-God-I’m going-to-be-homeless economics news came word that venture capital funding has plunged 50 percent in year over year first quarter numbers.

The numbers, courtesy of a PricewaterhouseCoopers Money Tree report, had a few people mulling the end of venture capital as we know it. But Technically Philly isn’t as concerned with Silicon Valley as we are with local numbers. Has the the local venture capital market fallen off a cliff, as national numbers indicate?

Join us as we whip out some charts, talk to a few people much smarter than we are and assess the situation. After the jump, find out what is affecting our local VC market and why one investor says business has never been better.

When it comes to venture capital investment, the Philadelphia area saw its numbers fall in lock step with the rest of the country. Compared to the same time period last year, total deals have fallen 57 percent and total amount allocated has fallen 60 percent. Nationally, those numbers are 55 percent and 62 percent, respectively. It is worth noting that the regional numbers are for companies in the Philadelphia area that have received cash, and not the numbers from Philadelphia-based investment firms.

While total investments are down, the most troubling sign out of Philly is the amount of startups that have received funding. PricewaterhouseCoopers local audit partner Al Piscopo thinks that the most important barometer of the local VC market is the amount of new ventures being funded, which in Q1′s case came to a grand total of …. one.

“There was only one investment in a startup, and that was to a software company called OSS-1701, located in Wilmington,” he said. A bad economy tends to affect startup funding more than other kinds of funding. Investment firms have recognized that the exit markets such as IPOs and acquisitions have slowed, so VCs are more apt to fund existing ventures at a more conservative pace to aid them in weathering the bad economy — or at least fund startups with awful names.

From the outside, Philly would seem impervious to the quarterly ups and down of the overall national economy as our main industry is seemingly recession-proof biotechnology. However, numbers have even dipped in that sector as the industry is currently not only suffering from a bad economy, but a regime change in Washington has many VC’s keeping their money close to the vest as they develop a wait-and-see attitude.

“Its fair to say that VC firms are being more selective in the investments that they are making,” said Piscopo. “This quarter was pretty bad, I would hope the numbers don’t go lower than [they did] this quarter. I would hope that this is the bottom.” Piscopo said he anticipates next quarter will still be lower than 2008, but he believes we have seen the bottom.

Seed Funding Strong

Of course there are two sides to every story. While the venture market is finding its bottom, the area’s only early stage accelerator program is looking to grow.

Steve Barsh of the early IT incubator DreamIt Ventures, argues that the panic over the current numbers is overblown, especially in regards to early seed funding. It’s not the first time the Philadelphia region has only had one startup investment in a quarter before. In fact, it’s happened 11 times before.

“They say ‘Oh it’s the worst in 12 years!’ But not in early stage IT,” said Barsh. To be fair, early stage IT and DreamIt are just one small slice of the overall pie. Locally, however they are as early stage as early stage can get and the best barometer of Pennsylvania dollars going to mostly local companies for early stage funding. DreamIt has seen applications for their incubator program double, and the group has funded the same amount of companies this year as it did last year: 11, 5 of whom are local.

“What we’re seeing is: things are great. We’re still building companies, their costs have come down, their time has come down, and their barriers have come down,” said Barsh. While it may not seem like a big difference, angel investment, which DreamIt specializes in, isn’t accurately reflected in the MoneyTree report that tracks investment by larger Venture Capital firms with funds at their disposal.

According to Barsh’s metrics, national early stage IT investments in Q1 2008 amounted to 55 deals for $196 million. Q1 2009 amounted to 34 deals for $138 million. While the numbers have dipped, it is no reason to panic says Barsh.

“We’re very enthusiastic,” he says. “For DreamIt, business has never been better.”

Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.