Updated: Corrected numbers, general edits.

Of the many investment firms in Philadelphia, there is no one quite like Safeguard Scientifics.

In Internet years the company is ancient. Founded in 1953,  one of its early investments was Jerrold Electronics, a company that eventually saw its cable operations bought out by Ralph Roberts to become a little company named “Comcast.” Since then, the company has been a staple of the local investment community surviving the Web 1.0 days to emerge stronger than ever. Since 2006, Safeguard has invested $175 million.

While most firms receive money from private individuals with tight strings attached,  Safeguard is one of the small handful of firms to be publicly traded. Being publicly traded allows the company to be much more patient with its 17 partner companies, avoiding situations like the recent Zappos deal where the company’s investors forced it to sell to Amazon.

But Safeguard is most proud of what it calls its “operating platform”: a series of legal, administrative and operational services to help its investments quickly grow revenue.

We chatted with Kevin Kemmerer, EVP and managing director of Safeguard’s technology group about investing locally, the company’s much-respected “operating platform” and what entrepreneurs can do to get Safeguard’s attention.

What’s your role at Safeguard?

We hold 17 businesses. Ten of them are life sciences, seven are technology. I’m responsible for the existing technology portfolio and I’m also responsible for looking for new opportunities.

How do you find new companies?

We pursue three specific markets: healthcare IT, financial technology and Internet/new media. That last one tends to be a blend of ad based technology, next generation e-commerce etc.

If I were a company in those areas what would I do to get your attention?

We look to provide capital to entrepreneurs who have already gotten businesses off the ground and are looking to grow the business rapidly. What we bring to the table you don’t typically see from another source of capital. We tend to provide operating services that focus on scaling businesses. That’s everything from help on the PR side to our legal folks helping to our operations folks.

We look for companies that have some momentum and we see a great synergy between their needs and how we can help, not just with our capital, but with our operating platform.

So you guys are never the first money in?

We tend to be the first institutional investment. Though you’re seeing these seed stage investors around $500,000 to $1 million that are bigger than your traditional angel round, but smaller than your typical investment round that you would see in Silicon Valley or Boston.

But when you think about how to get a company from a couple million to $100 million in revenue, that’s when you start requiring capital to build infrastructure to build your business quickly. Those are the things that we are uniquely tuned to help build.

How does public money make Safeguard more flexible? I know in a lot of cases going public makes you less flexible and more beholden to quarterly earnings and shareholder demands.

Earnings is not the core focus of how people look at us. People are not looking for regular earnings, they are looking for big wins in our portfolio. If I’m a typical VC, I have a certain timeframe to deploy and return the capital I have. Whereas we have more flexibility, we might use the money for a slightly different purpose that the strict sets of criteria that other firms do.

How have you seen the technology community change in your six years with Safeguard?

Since I have been here we have seen a shift in priorities in the technology community. When I joined the firm, the community was transitioning from enterprise software to enterprise SaaS (software as a service).

Healthcare IT has emerged as a bigger category here in Philadelphia. The second thing is the movement of growth to consumer-focused internet companies. If you look at the business plans you see in Philadelphia, there’s a lot of healthcare IT, theres a moderate amount of financial technology – though we see more of that in New York – and we see an awful lot of B2C consumer web companies. That didn’t exist four or five years ago.

Any predictions for the city going forward?

I think the biggest thing is mobile as more than just a category. It’s not an afterthought or a separate category, it is the market. It’s effectively ubiquitous.

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.

Our region’s life sciences sector ranked first in the “current impact” category, and second overall (to Boston, bah), in a biotechnology industry study conducted by the Milken Institute, according to a report by the Philadelphia Business Journal’s John George, a proud graduate from Temple University-Ambler. As we earlier suggested, this is really one of the more impactful, meaningful and substantiated stupid lists Philadelphia has been put in during recent years.

That news preceded the announcement of one of the year’s largest life sciences venture capital deals happening here. University City’s Avid Radiopharmaceuticals scored a $34.5 million financing, led by a San Francisco VC firm, but assisted by a couple of local boys, BioAdvance, also a Penn neighbor, and Safeguard Scientifics of Wayne, as also reported by George of PBJ.

California tries to ban violent video games for kids, a (sorta) regional Web site management company makes a big aquisition and a lot of messed up Craigslist stories you should read — in addition to our most trafficked post of the week — after the jump.

More:

• “The Wild Thing” Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal reports that a collection of historic documents from the life of Commodore John Barry, the Revolutionary War hero who we say is father of the U.S. Navy and always dreamed of having a bridge near a Superfund site, is now available online at the Independence Seaport Museum or through Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, which digitized it. Those documents from as early as 1723 mean that that Angelfire site you made as a kid and can’t take down is no longer the oldest thing on the Internet.
• The Sacramento Bee reports that California legislators are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold their request for a statewide ban of violent video game sales to minors. It’s seen as a landmark case, even if, as the Christian Science Monitor reports, California’s ban may be a legal long shot.
• The Inquirer’s Joe Distefano reports that HostMySite.com, a business Web site manager based in Denver but depending on a 229-person service center in Newark, Del., has bought Louisville-based rival Hosting.com. It’s said to create a $50 million sales company and have featured major investing from former Philly firm Wachovia Capital Partners. Can we please lower business taxes in this city so The ‘Stefano and I don’t have to reach so much on these?
• The Associated Press reports that seven people in New York State were charged in running a 24-hour prostitution ring through Craigslist. That follows the enormous news that, as the Advocate, and many, many others, reported, Craigslist filed suit against the South Carolina attorney general in order to thwart his filing criminal charges against the classifieds Web site for “abetting” prostitution. This is all part of a slew of bad press for the Internet staple, including obsessive tabloid and cable news coverage of a Boston murder following a Craigslist relationship and, as reported by TV station KMHO, more recent news about a Seattle man who found a woman on the site who agreed to be killed during sex.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Google CEO Eric Schmidt weighs in on Philly’s tech future

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything if you spent the week preparing for your Memorial Day weekend plans, with Friday Tech Links.