The Apple Store front. Photo by Brownstoner.

Our good friends over at Brownstoner have provided an update on the status of Philadelphia’s Apple Store. Pictures on the real estate blog show the glass storefront being assembled at 1607 Walnut Street. Philly Chit Chat even has a video of the new storefront being lifted into place.

To refresh your memory, rumor of the Apple Store had been swirling for years until in November when the Metro reported that the store was finally coming to Rittenhouse Square. In December, the company officially put out the call for employees and the building has been under construction ever since, though it was picketed by union protestors.

No word yet on when the store will open.

Disclosure: Apple retailer Springboard Media is a longtime sponsor of Technically Philly.

According to the Philadelphia Metro, Philadelphia is finally going to get an Apple Store.

The store will be located at 1607 Walnut street which is a few doors down from the long-suspected location of 1619 Walnut. Earlier in the year, peices of 1619 crumbled to the street , and so we wonder if the decay led Apple to switch addresses.

The blog Talking Apple predicted the move down the block last month.

The store has not been officially announced, though the plans are set to be presented to the city’s Art Commission tomorrow. It is mandated in the city’s charter that all new architecture and buildings be presented to the Commission which likely means that Apple is looking to heavily renovate the space.

The architechture firm Bohlin Cywinski Jackson will likely design the new store. The firm’s Philadelphia office refused to offer any information when called for comment.

Even when the sun is shining and thoughts are drifting toward lounging at the Jersey shore, you aren’t afraid to grab a few drinks and stick to your meetup schedule.

Every event on our calendar this week is part of a monthly series, and most involve beer.

On Tuesday, grab a brew with Philly.rb at their pub night. We hear that they specifically hit on people using Ruby puns. And by “hear” we mean “hope.” The next day, IdeaBlob hosts BlobLive, its monthly open mic for entrepreneurs. Step on up and give an elevator pitch to complete strangers.

To close out the week, Philly Mapping and GIS host “Mappy Hour.” Talk cartography and get in on the group’s open source map project at a local watering hole.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.

Tuesday, July 21: Like they do every month, the Philly Ruby User Group will be grabbing some brews and talking Ruby, possibly on Rails. This week they set up shop at T.A. Flannery’s Saloon. While we’ve never been, being a Saloon, we assume that grown men can challenge other men to duels in the street outside. You know, like Hamilton. So bring your knowledge of databases and a revolver. On second thought, leave the revolver at home. 6:00 p.m. Rittenhouse. DETAILS. [view more events]

Wednesday, July 22: Bloblive is described by its creators as “open-mic night for entrepreneurs.” Attendees get a few minutes to stand up in front of attendees and give their best elevator pitch to the room typically eliciting advice and support from their peers. Bonus points if you can give your elevator pitch in the form of a short rap song. Bonus points from us anyway. 7:30 p.m. Art Museum Area. RSVP. [view more events]

Thursday, July 23: Philly Mapping and GIS has its monthly “Mappy Hour,” a social gathering for all those interesed in the group’s open source map project. The group is taking a break from mapping University City to kick back a few beers and welcome new members. Just don’t show up late claiming you “couldn’t find the place.” 6:30 p.m. Center City. RSVP. [view more events]

If you have an event that you think we should be listing, email us. We promise that no email falls in to the contact form netherworld.

Photo courtesy of a Philebrity.com reader

While Philly’s Apple community is served well by local retailers Springboard Media and Bundy, we often wonder what it takes to get some love from Steve Jobs and company.

After all, Philadelphia is the largest media market without an Apple Store, unless, of course you count the city’s suburban Apple outlets.

Well, the architecture gods may have exacted revenge on the computer company, Philebrity.com reports.

The rumored site of Apple’s Philadelphia location has suffered some sort of structural damage. Overnight, a piece of marble installation crumbled off the building and into the street, though no one was hurt, according to Philly.com.

Last year, AppleInsider speculated that Apple was eying the space at 1619 Walnut Street, formally the home of the Brasserie Perrier restaurant. PhiladelphiaWillDo’s DMac disputed the claim.

All has been quiet on the Philly Apple Store front, though the company continues to expand its number of retail locations nationwide. The company recently announced that it will be opening up a fourth store in the second best city on the East coast, ahem, New York.

According to public records, the space at 1619 Walnut is owned by “Walnut Street Retail Investments.”

Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, the firm responsible for designing some of the company’s New York locations, declined to comment about the possibility of a Philadelphia location when Technically Philly contacted their Philadelphia office late last week.

As part of the firm’s agreement with Apple,�it is prohibited from discussing any details of future locations and would not even confirm that Apple was considering Philadelphia.

At least two Ivy League kids graduated in 2006, took fat-salaried jobs at the same New York City equity firm and returned to Philadelphia to reach fame and fortune by mining data for the nation’s small businesses.

The story continues still.

Today is the public opening of RJMetrics, a business intelligence dashboard and brainchild of a pair of 25-year-olds with regional ties: Robert J. Moore and Jake Stein. They want to help small and medium-sized businesses that collect data about their customers better use that information to chart user behavior.

And like any good idea, it came to them while they should have been doing something else.

Back at that New York equity firm, they’d spend hundreds of hours hand perfecting data from a company’s database, deciding just what might be likely revenue projections and user-action based on available information. Their research was valuable, time-consuming and costly.

It’s been done that way for years, almost always in one of two ways, Moore says.

The real detailed work would be done by either an in-house database administrator paid a six-figure salary or a high-end business intelligence agent that has its own consultants to cobble it all together.

That personalized work is still valuable for larger, older and more established companies with multiple legacy databases. but many smaller, newer e-commerce companies driving less than $100 million a year in profits don’t have a cost-effective alternative — until RJMetrics, our Ivy League boys say.

They’ll focus their business on e-commerce and subscription-based clients. Their software, developed by Moore, segments a company’s customer set to find user behavior trends for things like likelihood of repeat visit or purchase, preferences and future actions. The company’s focus, Moore says, is any business with an e-commerce division, online subscriptions or any other business that collects user data, from social media sites to online newsletters. RJMetrics will be able to offered detailed assessments of trending user behaviors and likely preferences.

“This is valuable stuff at a far cheaper rate for people who really need it,” Moore says.

Watch their product demo below.

Last summer, Moore left the equity firm and began refining the software that could do those tasks more reliably and far faster. Stein followed suit in October — focusing on the user interface side of things. The team founded RJMetrics and began testing reliability and efficiency on the businesses of friends and known clients.

Turns out, the thing actually works, and they want to base their operations here, where it’s called a hoagie.

Moore grew up in Glassboro, N.J. and followed the local high school with four years at Princeton University. Though he spent two years in New York, his family and his high school sweetheart – to whom he is now engaged  - are decidedly Philly regional entities.

Stein grew up in North Jersey’s Morris County but got an education at the University of Pennsylvania. His girlfriend got a gig in Philly and has an affinity to the city.

Now, Moore is the primary programmer and Stein the primary hawker. Moore lives in Collingswood and Stein in Rittenhouse.

With those ties, cheap real estate, a certain uniqueness and a valuable urban hub, Philadelphia seemed like a simple choice.

“There were a lot of reasons pointing us this way. A lot of the best portfolio companies I’ve seen are not in Silicon Valley — they’re doing something special somewhere different,” Stein says.” We’d also like to play a significant role in the growing up of a tech scene, and we can do that here.”

“I like that.”

Updated 5/7/09 10:43 a.m.

The allure of Abraham Lincoln, graffitied brightly with wispy hair on a wall in Houston is startling.

The 16th president was born more than 200 years ago, but he continues to take new 21st century forms.

The Rosenbach Museum and Library has launched an Abraham Lincoln iPhone and iPod Touch application as part of its 21st-century Abe project, according to a press release from the half-century year-old historical organization in Rittenhouse.

The app is said to be the first by a Philadelphia cultural group.

The Bobble Abe app, which is available for free in the iTunes store, personifies old Abe as a bobble head that can be shook by users, along with humorous Lincoln aphorisms as recorded by Northern Liberties comedy theater company 1812 Productions, with actor Nathan Holt as the voice of Abe.

The app was developed by Laan Labs, a Philadelphia-based innovation company that helped sponsor Friday’s Indy Hall/Mashable event. The concept was envisioned by NoLibs marketing firm Lime Projects founder Laris Kreslins, who has his hands in many pots, including Move to Philly, which encourages people to relocate to our city.

“Basically it was just a matter of me justifying to the group… that our limited budget allotted to traditional advertising and online advertising would be better spent on an iPhone app and a Facebook Application,” Kreslins said of working with Rosenbach, Canary Promotion and Design and the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, which helped fund the project.

“Would people care more to interact with something that serves up information about an exhibit, or would they rather see a banner or a small print add? The results are not in, but I’m betting on the apps,” he said.

The 21st-century Abe project also includes a four-part mockumentary by 1812 Productions that is called “Abe Lincoln: Behind the Speeches.”

It’s all seen on an innovative Web site which includes the scholarly, like handwritten Lincoln documents and transcripts, and more entertaining, like songs, spoofs, artwork and, yes, photos of Lincoln graffiti from Houston.

Update: The Web site was designed by Night Kitchen Interactive, a design firm based in Society Hill near Headhouse Square.

They’ve aggregated some of the coolest Web Lincoln 2.0 out there, like video of a 1950s TV appearance by a man who as a young boy witnessed Lincoln’s assassination.

Interactive Web site or not, it’s the free “Bobble Abe” app that’s worth the stir.

Abe isn’t the first foray Kreslins has made into iPhone apps. Philadelphia’s premiere geek blog, Geekadelphia, wrote last month about Snoozebot, which serves as a snooze button in 5 or 10 minute increments. See that one in the iTunes store, too, if you’re interested.

They offer a path to happiness, for five bucks.

Based on research from a noted University of Pennsylvania psychologist and coordinated by a team of three telecommuters in various Philadelphia neighborhoods, Happier.com is on the forefront of positive psychology and research dissemination.

Last week, the site rolled out a Freemium-style revenue strategy to its 20,000 users — a $4.99 monthly subscriber charge for full access to the site..

“The best researchers get up everyday trying to figure out how to get a grant, write a paper, be seen to fund their work,” said Andrew Rosenthal, a co-founder. “We get up everyday building tools for people to use this research.”

Happier launched in mid-November 2008 with the help of more than 30 largely Radnor-based individuals and family trusts .  They are not investing through a formal group. Rosenthal’s fellow founder is Doug Hensch, a Philly native who now lives outside of Washington, D.C., serves as chief operating officer and handles the firm’s product development. The small staff also includes Robb McCall who works from his Northern Liberties home and serves as director of customer service. Director of technology development is Mike Eidlem, who works from his Pennsport home.

A free registration will get you trackable, validated assessments and a limited amount of research-based exercises. The paid membership offers access to a host of such exercises, aimed at finding just what keeps you down and how to get away from it, in addition to video, writing from field-based academics and other assessments designed to measure otherwise intangibles like optimism, personal strengths and, yes, happiness.

Below, watch a demonstration of Happier.com.

“You’ll get advice on what to start doing tonight and tomorrow. Within a week, you’ll notice a chance in thinking about what went well and why,” Rosenthal, 25, says. “You’re going to feel better.”

The touchstone of the project is Penn professor Dr. Martin Seligman, though Happier is independent of the university and pays consulting fees to Seligman. (Watch Seligman discuss the site’s benefits.)

His research, that has come to be known as positive psychology, is considered the scientific study of the virtues that enable individuals or communities to develop and thrive. The field of study, which has found an industry hub at Penn’s Positive Psychology Center, has three primary focuses: positive emotions, positive individual traits and positive institutions.

If it all seems a little mushy, that’s because it’s just so gosh darn young. Seligman, Rosenthal and the rest of the Happier crew are presenting at the first World Congress on Positive Psychology, to be held in Center City in June. It will be the first international confab on what makes some folks smile and others frown.

“People have been studying happiness from Buddas to the Llamas for thousands of years, but it was ten years ago when someone really sat down and said, ‘Let’s use the research we have and evaluate what actually works,’” says Rosenthal, who lives in Rittenhouse. “Everyone’s mother has a suggestion, but it was the first time there was rigorous study and design through replication to validate and verify. That started at Penn. That started in Philadelphia.”

But it’s certainly gone global. There are master’s degrees for positive psychology in the United Kingdom. The Australian government has begun funding research to help find how to keep their residents chummy, Rosenthal says. The Bhutan government evaluates its own gross national happiness.

“There is a deep academic history and access to the best researchers in the field here, so this is where we are going to be,” says Rosenthal, who moved here from Portland-Oregon in 2002. “The creative class is growing stronger everyday.”

Happier is more than a for-profit business, he says.

Though they maintain a strict privacy agreement, the Happier project does give the team great access to raw data that can further the field’s progress.

“We’re leading the way on this new methodology for dissemination of positive psychology tools,” says Rosenthal, who also serves as the young firm’s marketing director.

They’ve been promoting through pay-per-click AdWords in Gmail.

“So someone is writing to a friend about breaking up with her boyfriend and there is an ad for Happier.com, about solutions and help.” Rosenthal said. “We’ve gotten viral response to that. People are on Twitter talking about those ads… sending us more traffic.”

Rosenthal himself has worked in the academic field, implementing similar research at a school in Australia.

“There is a strong desire among a lot of people to find ways to be happier. The academic pace is not keeping up, and not everyone is interested in buying a book and often that isn’t enough anyway,” Rosenthal says. “Sometimes you need that help to get to where you can be. People want that tool. They want to see change on a computer screen. That online method is letting us effectively combine science and happiness.”

“It feels great to get tools out there that are helping people because, of course, there seems to be more distress and despair now than in recent memory,” he says.

Rosenthal also serves as president of the regional Penn alumni group and says he has seen an increase in the “conversation on innovation” in Philadelphia.

Upcoming features include text-message reminders for self-assessments, in addition to a continually growing list of exercises and tools that more specifically target individuals. There technology break-through, which isn’t quite ready for display, is a customized algorithm for each user, more accurately measuring causes, effects and being able to offer more customized advice for action and defense of a happier life.

“You don’t need a therapist to be happy. That’s the breakthrough,” Rosenthal said. “You can do it on your own, and we want to help.”

Below watch Dr. Seligman discuss Happier.com’s iPhone application.

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.