Tourism on your phone: How Philly is leading and why it matters

With tourism, it’s all about where you are. Exactly where you are.

In Philadelphia, the past month has seen a wash of mobile geo-location tourism applications launch in and around the Cradle of Liberty. Trends say those deals and the mobile tools they employ today will help to profoundly reconfigure how tourists experience this greene country towne in the future.

City tourism officials announced last week with great fanfare a mobile app that puts users onto competitive ‘treks,’ sending them throughout the city to find and explore and earn points for what they find and how they find it. Philadelphia is the first city to use the platform, developed with SCVNGR, a now Boston-based company rooted at Princeton and Drexel universities.

In May, a deal was announced that partnered Commonwealth booster agency visitPA with geo-location social media powerhouse Foursquare, offering users digital badges for checking in at locations across the state in one of three categories: dining, buying and museum-going. Visit Bucks County has also launched a Foursquare deal, and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. is starting to play there too.

Then in early June, the Fairmount Park Art Association unveiled its multi-platform Museum without Walls, in which visitors to the Ben Franklin Parkway can dial a phone number and choose to hear professionally-produced, rich oral histories of the art and sculptures that line that famed promenade.

All are giving users choice.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Google purchases Invite Media

According to All Things Digital, Google has acquired Center City-based Invite Media for a price tag “in the $70 million range.”

Invite Media, backed by First Round Capital and Comcast Interactive Ventures, acts as a central real-time dashboard for buying web display ads. It’s likely that Google will use Invite’s technology to help further streamline its advertising business, which accounts for nearly all of its revenues.

The company was founded by Penn grads Nat Turner, Zachary Weinberg and Scott Becker and also has offices in the 67th Ward.

This isn’t the first time Google has shown love to the 215, the company also invested in DreamIt vet SCVNGR last year. Google also has been on a bit of an acquisition binge this year, snapping up seven companies since April.

Edit: More details on All Things Digital and on Silicon Alley Insider.

VC Roundup: Angel Venture Fair and Drexel’s new incubator

Welcome to the VC Round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line.

DEFINITE READS

The Inky reports on the 12th-annual Angel Venture Fair, held at the Union League last week. The event is described as “speed dating for entrepreneurs” where 125 companies pitched 150 angel investors.

Drexel University will be creating an incubator in Bristol, according to the PBJ. The incubator will inhabit a building formally owned by Rohm and Haas Co. If you remember, Drexel also has an incubator in Camden in addition to the Baiada Center on campus.

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VC Roundup: 2009 slightly less depressing than 2008, Google invests in DreamIt grad

Welcome to our brand new weekly round-up, where we’ll parse through venture capital news related to Philadelphia-based private equity firms and the companies they fund. Subscribe to the roundup as an email newsletter. If you have any VC-related news to pass along to us, please drop us a line or corner us at our next meetup.

DEFINITE READS

The National Venture Capital Association has published its yearly “exit poll” tracking VC-funded company exits. IPOs were higher in 2009 in year-over-year numbers, but M&A activity declined slightly. Both metrics are still lower than pre-recession numbers.

Boston-based DreamIt Ventures grad SCVNGR has just received $4 million from Google Ventures. The company, makers of location-based gaming platforms, is profitable with over $1 million in revenue in its first year.

After the jump, the passing of a local VC leader and the firm that is touring New York City incubator spaces as if it were on a pub crawl.

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