Michael Maher, a Naval Lieutenant and corporate coworking aspirant, is focusing his entrepreneurial efforts elsewhere.

Maher, who has started a handful of small businesses, won the Greater Philadelphia Veterans Network‘s “Shark Tank” business pitch competition last week to add another to his name, as ABC 6 reported. Maher beat out a field of five veterans-turned-entrepreneurs pitching business ideas to a panel of five judges, according to a release.

Maher is also one of three cofounders of the forthcoming Rittenhouse coworking space, Benjamin’s Desk, as Technically Philly reported. Though planned for an April launch, the corporate-focused effort’s launch is pushed back to June.

The winning pitch was for Real Comps, a planned online site for realtors to post home sales as they happen. Maher netted a $5,000 cash prize as well as $20,000 in services to help jump start the business, which he plans to launch out of Benjamin’s Desk when it opens.

“The website and mobile application are being built as we speak,” said Benjamin’s Desk vice president, general counsel and his wife Jennifer Maher. “From that point, the focus will be on sales and marketing and then, hopefully, move into the VC stage once we have more things in order.”

Maher was able to accept the award without giving up equity stake in the startup, Jennifer says.

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.

DEFINITE READS

• Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer puts a critical eye to the big-scale, $129 million energy innovation hub planned for the Philadelphia Navy Yard, as led by Penn State.
• The New York Times highlights how an 800-pound Benjamin Franklin butter statue has led to the next great biodiesel fuel craze, with the help of Center City-based BlackGold Biofuels.
• Keystone Edge profiles Center City-based design firm Bresslergroup and Lititz-based Woodstream and their collaboration around improving the mousetrap. Yup.

Below, find what Philly developer was listed as 15 nationally to follow on Twitter, robots at Pennsylvania Hospital and more.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• The Inquirer reports on the growing use of robots in surgery at Pennsylvania Hospital.
• The Inqy’s Mike Armstrong also reports that only six Philadelphia companies grew quickly enough to make Inc. magazines 500 list. Philly was listed by the magazine as just the ninth most successfully growing business metro area.
• Mashable ranks Jenn Lukas of Center City’s Happy Cog one of its 15 developer and hacker women worth following on Twitter. H/T Philly Tech News
• Science Cheerleader continues its playful series profiling really hot people with science, math and technology backgrounds by interviewing a San Francisco 49ers cheerleader and software engineer.
• All Facebook digests numbers, statistics and demographics of Facebook users in Philadelphia.
• As we reported, nearly a dozen locals are vying to present at South by Southwest, but the Philadelphia Business Journal and Geekadelphia give particular love to XIPWire.

GIVE A GLANCE

• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that SEPTA is trying again to get funding for smart transit payment cards.
• Joe DiStefano of the Inquirer reports that the Center City office vacancy rate has climbed to 15 percent, the worst since 2004. The Wall Street Journal echos the trend. [Paywall]
• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that AT&T Wireless has installed a new wireless antennae at the Phillies home ballpark.
• Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer report that economics consultancy Econsult and financial advisory firm Fairmount Capital Advisors are combining their practices.
• Philadelphia-based food canning blog Food in Jars gets spotlighted in the Los Angeles Times.
• Philly Tech News reports that Radnor business intelligence software provider Qlik Technologies has done well since going public.

The Viddler blog has a Q&A with wine and social media guru Gary Vaynerchuk

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

Every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription for our Comcast news updates.

DEFINITE READS

• Ars Technica reports that Sen. Al Franken, perhaps the most vocal critic of the NBC deal, again voiced his frustration with the proposed deal.
• Broadcasting & Cable reports that Comcast outlined its program access philosophy to regulators of its NBC deal. H/T Philly Tech News
• The Wall Street Journal reports on the last minute bombarding of the FCC by Comcast opponents regarding the NBC deal. [Paywall]

Below, is Hulu headed toward an IPO, a Philly product rollout and more.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• The Wall Street Journal says Comcast ownership of NBC won’t deter TV show ’30 Rock’ from poking fun at its parent company.
• The New York Times reports that Hulu could be ready for an IPO, news for a service that NBC owns nearly a third of.
• The Washington Post has a feature on ‘the FCC and the bandwidth wars.’
• The Comcast blog pledges its intention to offer Blackberry and other smart phone options for its mobile DVR controlling applications, which currently exist on iPhones and other Apple devices.
• Lightreading reports that Comcast is using hometown Philadelphia as one of the first markets for its switched digital video, an option to limit its broadband use.

GIVE A GLANCE

• The LA Times reports that former Walt Disney Co. CEO Michael Eisner and Comcast programming chief Jeff Shell are in the running to lead the Tribune Co. after bankruptcy.
• Trading Markets reports that Comcast was highlighted by Latina Style Magazine as one of the country’s 50 companies offering the most employment opportunities for Hispanics for the fourth consecutive year.
• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that Comcast has taken a lease on 43,000 square feet at the Bell Atlantic Tower on Arch Street near 17th Street.
• The Comcast blog has a video interview with Boston Globe technology columnist Hiawatha Bray.
• The Jersey Journal reports that some Comcast subscribers there will need new cable boxes for a digital upgrade.

When there is just too much Comcast news to follow, the Comcast Roundup will be there every Thursday morning at 8:30 a.m. EST

Comcast COO Stephen Burke is the new owner of the 8,120 square foot, brick rowhome that is blocks from Rittenhouse Square Park and has been heralded as becoming the most expensive such purchase in Philadelphia history.

Our friends at Brownstoner Philadelphia were the first to push out that the $5.85 million closing in May was marked as the city’s priciest. The 1817 Delancey Place property is listed as being owned by Stephen and Gretchen Burke, the COO’s wife, according to a 2009 Forbes profile. Another source confirmed on background that the new owners are the Comcast Burkes.

Burke has developed a reputation out of the proposed takeover of NBC Universal, as it has been asserted that Burke would help lead the uniting of the two companies and, as Reuters put it back in December, everybody loves Burke, even Warren Buffet.

In 2009, Burke’s total compensation package rang in at nearly $34 million, including a $2.3 million base salary, a $3 million bonus and $10 million in stock awards, according to Forbes.

In June, Burke’s boss, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts, made news by reportedly looking at Manhattan real estate. It’s nice to see Burke keeping it local.

Something about “rowhouser” didn’t sound right to Jonathan Butler.

So today, the founder of popular Brooklyn real estate, renovation and restaurant blog Brownstoner, launches a Philadelphia edition under the same brand. That expansion, Butler says, will dictate greatly the direction of the five-year-old site.

Launched in October 2004, Brownstoner is no small force, pulling roughly 200,000 unique visitors and 1.5 million page views a month, Butler says — see the always debated public traffic figures for the site from Quantcast and Compete — and it just so happens to not be the only blog born in New York to open up shop in Philadelphia this year.

Like Midtown Lunch, Brownstoner brings a brand name with a decidedly New York tone to a city not known for a healthy appreciation for its younger brother to the north. So, its expansion just might make for a hell of a conversation on authenticity and the future of growing hyperlocal news. And it all came about because one of the site’s contributors wanted to move.

“Gabby Warshawer, who has been writing for Brownstoner in Brooklyn for the past three years, recently fell in love with Philly and announced she was dying to move there,” Butler, 40, says. “I had been chewing on the idea of expanding to Philly for about a year, so the timing seemed right.”

Warshawer, with the help of four freelancers, will run the Philadelphia edition from her Center City apartment, the local bureau to Butler and his team of two part-time writers and interns. (Butler and Warshawer will also run a weekly column from Ken Finkel, the Temple University American studies professor and architecture writer.)

Brownstoner Founder Jonathan Butler. Courtesy of Butler

Housed on the stand-alone Philly.Brownstoner.com, the site will feature the same collection of pieces on development, real estate and renovation news as its New York counterpart. It will focus to start on neighborhoods in West and South Philadelphia, in addition to Fishtown and Northern Liberties to start — which doesn’t offer the same identifiable stretch of Philadelphia as Brooklyn is in New York — but likely find editorial overlap with the original site on stories related to larger regional or national real estate trends, Butler says.

“Also within a few months of launch, the forum, which has grown to be the largest online community for homeowners in New York, will also start sharing content on topics that are not geographically specific, such as how to remove paint from antique doorknobs,” he adds.

The Manhattan native with a Princeton degree and a New York University MBA quit his job on Wall Street to work full time on the site in February 2007 and now lives in a home in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Clinton Hill that he first launched the blog to write about.

But the former business journalist, venture capitalist and real estate investor says he approaches Philly architecture and communities with “reverence.”

Below, he talks to Technically Philly about his expansion plans, the Brownstone brand and more.

In past years, you’ve gotten the treatment from the New York Observer and New York Magazine. At the risk of redundancy, tell us a little bit about the Brownstoner creation story.

I started Brownstoner on a lark in the fall of 2004, while trapped at a desk job that was less than creatively fulfilling.

I had recently purchased my brownstone in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and was gearing up for a big renovation on a shoestring budget. I blogged that renovation while offering commentary on the real estate market and observations about a Brooklyn that was undergoing massive demographic changes and housing price escalation.

It was also the first local blog in New York to really embrace commenters and engage readers as sources. The blog now gets more traffic than the three local Brooklyn newspapers combined.

Below watch Butler talk about the renovation project that he first chronicled on his site.

Why expand to portions of Philadelphia and not elsewhere in New York?

“Brownstoner’s success thus far has had a lot to do with being based in a place where people feel a very strong connection to their community, both in terms of quality of life issues and its history. This sets the stage for a level of engagement and activism that is key to the success of any online hyperlocal effort. I feel like folks in Philly share a similar sense pride and investment in their communities and city and hope that brownstoner can play a role in bringing more exposure and transparency to both local issues and matters relating to real estate and development.

In a craigslist ad looking for bloggers, Brownstoner spotlighted the big pockets of West and South philadelphia, in addition to the neighborhoods of Northern Liberties and Fishtown. What is the draw of those parts of the city for your coverage?

Certainly much of what Brownstoner has chronicled in Brooklyn has been the changes that neighborhoods have gone through and the issue that these changes have raised. We’ll devote plenty of coverage to the more established areas in the center of the city, but a lot of the drama and fun is bound to come in neighborhoods where younger, creative people are putting down roots, renovating houses and starting businesses.

Give us some stories we might expect to see from the Philly edition.

There’s bound to be some overlap and cross-pollination with some of the topics already covered by PlanPhilly and the many blogs that cover the restaurant scene. We also will be seeking to engage directly with the civic organizations that are so crucial to the city’s community fabric.

On top of that, we will seek to bring the same level of transparency and discussion to the real estate market that we have in Brooklyn. We also hope to shine a light on preservation and development issues on a building-by-building level. It’s amazing how much ground a half dozen reporters with bicycles and cameras can cover and how effective the medium can be for getting public officials to pay attention to things they may have tried to sweep under the rug before.

What is the plan for revenue? Anything different here than in Brooklyn?

I’m not even going to think about revenue for the first few months. I just want to make sure the editorial is the best it can be — plus it’s not really worth it to try to monetize the site until it has a critical mass of readers. I’ve actually given away some free advertising in the beginning to some community groups and nonprofits whose missions I think are enhancing the city.

Are there other markets you see expanding to in the future? Where do you want Brownstoner to be in five years?

Really hard to say. Frankly, it depends a lot on how well received the blog is in Philly. Other obvious cities include D.C., Baltimore and Boston, but nothing’s even close to being in the works.

Did you consider different branding for a city that doesn’t really use the word ‘brownstone’?

I certainly thought about it and have heard from some people who don’t think the name is right for Philly, but I’ve spent five years building a brand and, while I certainly understand why ‘rowhouser’ or something along those lines would be more literally appropriate, the blog in Brooklyn, like many publication names — Plain Dealer, hello? — long ago transcended literalism.

Probably less than 10 percent of the content on the Brooklyn site deals with brownstones. It’s just a brand now. I’m operating under the assumption that good content will rule the day and that over time the name won’t be an issue. Of course, I could be wrong, but I think as people see the reverence with which we approach Philly’s architecture and communities, there won’t be a problem.

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

If you build a great product, your customers will be your best advertisers.

That’s something Kevin Kiene has learned. The founder of ezLandlord Forms, an online provider of property-management legal documents, remembers a time before that lesson was entirely his.

“In the beginning, we were marketing and advertising before we had a great product,” he said of his Web site, which will turn three this August. “We have a great product now.”

There were usability and design concerns and nowhere near the breadth of options the site now offers. But a lot can change in three years.

Last month, they launched a complete site redesign and are in the process of becoming a green certified business and doubling their staff. This month, they surpassed 300,000 members, many of whom are paying into its subscription model, pushing year-to-date sales by more than 225 percent. In September, HGTV’s Designing Spaces will be shooting a segment on the site to air at the year’s end.

“Business,” Kiene says, “is good.”

The company, which has office space in Cinnaminson, N.J., currently features seven employees who work from their homes across the country, including a Willow Grove-based Web developer and Kiene, 40, a native of Fox Chase in Northeast Philadelphia.

But Kiene, who now lives in Frankford, is proud to talk about the site’s national appeal, in addition to its growing traffic and how the idea for ezLandlord Forms came to him because he could never find a lease that would square away who was taking care of the damn lawn.

“It came out of a need, being a landlord for more than 15 years, knowing that I couldn’t always find a good lease agreement that could really protect me,” he said. “You’d call a friend who is a landlord, or you contact a real estate agent and say, ‘Hey do you have a lease? I need a lease.”

What lease documents he has bought were rarely up to date, Kiene says, and they rarely detailed responsibilities like cutting the grass, shoveling snow and switching batteries in smoke alarms. So he created his own basic lease and added or subtracted items and details as he saw fit.

That formed the core of what has become what Kiene says is the largest, most comprehensive property-management legal document resource on the planet.

It’s a subscription model: two weeks for $25 designed for one property; six months for $40 and one year for $76. It costs less than $10 per year to add an additional property. Membership gives users access to, as Kiene puts it, “the whole ball of wax.”

That includes the site’s robust Lease Builder Wizard, which puts users through a checklist of details to create a state-specific, tailor-made lease agreement, and its state assist features, guiding users through different laws, practices and expectations from state to state, including how large a security deposit, return-check fee and pet fees.

The site also has a network of real estate attorneys from each state, and just about every property-management document with a wide variety of details. Of course, the site’s staple products are its rental agreements.

“If you have to buy each form, is it really worth it?” Kiene says. “We give you a central source.”

Below, watch an animated tour of the company’s development, which cost a cool $20k, Kiene says

Kiene says he’s proud to be building this business in his native Philadelphia. (He says the above video was made by a Chicago-based firm, which plunked in the New York and Windy City references, much to our displeasure.)

It’s here where he found his real estate experience. At peak, he owned 10 rental properties in other parts of Northeast Philadelphia and “Kensington in the beginning,” he says. Now he says he’s filling a new role in a trade that became his career.

And Kiene isn’t done growing the site. He wants to develop a premier and secure resource for tenant credit checks and eviction history

“We want to build the best system,” he says.

That’s how your users will spread the word about the good work you do, he now says he knows. He continues to have the site’s usability tested, with the help of volunteers, and he keeps plunking down money that he says could score him the big suburban home some might dream of over a modest Frankford rowhome.

“Four years ago, this was just an idea. It took a year just to get the product together,” he says. “We have more to do, but there’s still nothing that comes close to what we offer. There’s nothing more important than that to me.”

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly�s tech scene, but aren�t necessarily technology focused. See others here.