mychinoki.com gets businesses and consumers text messaging

Some time in between e-mail and Facebook, the viral social media of choice was text messaging.

But Matthew Balin seems to think the business of texting was never fully capitalized. In July, Balin launched mychinoki.com, a mobile platform that connects consumers and businesses for SMS updates.

It’s a chance for users to cherry pick what messages they want from what local businesses, which is why Balin chose a name he says is a Westernized translation to a Japanese phrase meaning ‘cherry picker.’

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PHILO makes TV more social, Penn grads drawn to other cities

The three founders of an application aiming to interject social media into TV watching got an education in Philadelphia but their addresses — and the buzz surrounding their startup — are in the familiar bi-coastal entertainment hubs.

As the web has buzzed for some time now, PHILO is a web and iPhone application that has its users ‘tune in’ to the TV programs they are watching in the same way Foursquare users ‘check in’ to physical locations, then pushing a conversation discussing shows in a “newsfeed-like conversation” as Mashable put it.

Like others before them, the three founders put time in at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in the 1990s but don’t call the region home. CEO David Levy, who also heads the Wharton Angel Network, and CTO Carter Page are in New York City, and Greg Goldman calls Los Angeles home.

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Comcast: Launching social networking site Turnerfish, a call to drop Hulu and More

DEFINITE READS

• Businessweek reports that in the coming weeks Comcast will unveil a beta version of a social networking service focused on allowing users to share their TV and Internet video watching. The service is currently called ‘Turnerfish.’
• Politico reports that 78 former government officials, including former congressmen, staffers and others, have been registered as Comcast lobbyists in the final quarter of 2009 and first quarter of 2010, in a blitz to push forward its move to purchase a majority stake in NBC Universal. H/T Philly Tech News

Below, we bet you can guess what three governors are leaning on approval of the Comcast-NBC deal, another round of Google-Comcast rivalry brewing and more.

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TNT: Chris Bartlett of the Gay History Wiki project

The site, at the moment, is awfully ugly.

“A Web site for dead people shouldn’t be too fancy,” says Chris Bartlett.

That proclamation was met with laughs from an engaged audience of 200 or more during his presentation at Ignite Philly 4 earlier this month, video of which can be seen below. But that five-minute presentation was a bridge from 20 years in a community, three years of research and the nearly half-century old Philadelphia gay community.

Bartlett, 43, is the founder of the Gay History Wiki, which aims to collect the life stories of at least 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who since 1981 have died following complications to their battles with AIDS/HIV and the friends and places who helped develop one of the country’s richest LGBT traditions since the 1960s.

The profiles are notably and purposefully varied, showing the lack of order the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s followed, Bartlett says, from a 31-year-old deli clerk at the Bellvue Stratford hotel to a fashion designer with growing clout to who just might be Kensington’s most famous drag queen and a driving force in driving Bartlett’s passion for the project.

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New features for industry social network i-Meet and PhindMe Mobile

Two high-profile, Web-based Philadelphia startups each announced more services to their products recently.

Center City-based, event-planning social network i-Meet.com announced today its partnership with PlannerNet, a service aimed at helping its nearly 10,000 member organizations to find, rate and contract for project-based labor.

That move follows a host of new add-ons to PhindMe Mobile, a mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising company based at Drexel University’s Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship, which came earlier this month, according to a company press release.

The new service offered by i-Meet, the brainchild of 17th and Oregon’s own John Pino, is said to identify professional meeting and event skills that are available worldwide, helping to match planner experience and projects for event organizers. It’s a move Pino hinted at during an interview with Technically Philly in May.

“In this challenging, economic environment, companies are becoming more inclined to staff their events on a project by project basis,” Pino says in a company press release. “By connecting our worldwide social network to PlannerNet, we’re… delivering qualified talent”

PhindMe’s new features are more varied, ranging from native smartphone applications to Twitter functionality.

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Friday Q&A: Catherine Cook of myYearbook.com

Earlier this month, New Hope-based myYearbook.com founder Catherine Cook was honored as the number one young entrepreneur in the country by paidContent, according to a press release.

Cook has been loved by media since she and brothers Dave and Geoff launched the high school-focused social media site in 2005 – when she was was barely old enough to drive – after deciding that traditional yearbooks weren’t making the cut in the age of new media.

The award was accepted with pride, we’re sure, but we wondered when one becomes a regular, old “entrepreneur.” After all, Cook isn’t sixteen anymore.

Could it be $10 million in sales and 9.8 million unique hits? Maybe being noticed as the third largest and only growing social media portal aside from Facebook would do the trick. Does a title even matter?

“I am 19, I do like having that added honor to it, but I feel like sometimes it’s glam’d up a little too much. When some people hear it they get some kind of skewed perception that you’re a millionaire and a big spender,” Cook told Technically Philly in a telephone interview.

“I drive a 1996 Mitsubishi Galant.”

We’d like to think that Cook might be considering an upgrade since the company recently decided to monetize its Lunch Money feature, a virtual currency with which users can purchase gifts for friends or donate to noble causes. One million fake dollars cost $9.99 real cash. Six months in, Lunch Money is making eight figures in sales, Cook tells us. Virtual gifts have become one-third of the company’s revenue.

We caught up with Cook to see what her and her brothers have been up to since launching the site almost four years ago, what’s happening with $13 million in venture funding raised last year, and whether the Cooks are rooting for the Phillies or the Yankees, after the jump.

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Friday Tech Links: Philly handling recession, First Round Capital frequents New York and more

First Round Capital's Josh Kopelman is interviewed by Sammantha Ettus and Gary Vaynerchuk of ObsessedTV

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. When it comes to ultimate economy metaphors, it’s time for car talk. Philadelphia is only experiencing a tank of bad gasoline, not a shot transmission, Inquirer Business Reporter Mike Armstrong said Wednesday. Of course, we only kid. It’s good news for Philly, which ranked 37th strongest of 100 major U.S. metros in a quarterly economic health report issued by the Brookings Institution. Hell, times ain’t rough for Delaware-based online advertiser eZanga. Fortune Magazine ranked it as one of the 15 fastest-growing marketing and advertising companies in the U.S., despite Internet advertising taking its first downturn since 2002 in the first quarter, reports Delaware Online. But do you know the problem with too much good news? Not enough drama. After the jump, how First Round Capital is ditching Philly for our lesser-neighbor up North, why social networking and work don’t mix, and gosh darnit, more proof that no one can fix that Philly budget deficit. Plus more goodies.
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Friday Q&A: John Pino, CEO of networking site i-Meet

John Pino loves launching companies and loves Philadelphia.

So where else would you expect him to launch what he says just might be the next big professional networking service?

In November, Pino founded and self-funded i-Meet.com, which utilizes social-networking features to connect like-minded people in their efforts to organize, plan and promote events. The South Philadelphia-native, who grew up near 17th and Oregon Avenue in St. Monica’s Parish, didn’t want his tech startup based anywhere else but Center City, which he says is on its way to being the next great corridor of innovation.

His “strong launch team” all learned the tech-business game in Philly.

“The impetus,” for the launch Pino says, was a “screaming need for a worldwide network in the meeting and event industry, and we decided we would make it happen. Especially when we figured out how to put a business overlay over the social aspects of the community.”

Now i-Meet has more than 7,000 members from 100 countries worldwide, Pino says, and, though he wouldn’t disclose specific revenue figures, the company has a real monetization strategy, including premium options.

We didn’t mention that we caught the social networker on Facebook, but he did mention how he’s going to make bank, why we don’t need another social network and that his parents were not part of organized crime.

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How social media took Asher Roth from Philly suburbs to hip hop stardom

It’s going to be that anthem you hear over and over again this summer, and the artist behind it happens to have grown up in Bucks County, a half hour Regional Rail ride into Center City.

Like a growing collection of young artists, Asher Roth, the artist behind “I Love College,” found his path to a major label album by way of MySpace. But it seems likely he’ll see more than Internet fame.

I helped profile Asher Roth on the cover of today’s Philadelphia Weekly, but during our interview last month, we also spoke about the role social media have had on launching his career.

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Montgomery County schools on Twitter, canvassing the masses

Now this is why I joined Twitter — prom updates.

The Perkiomen Valley School District in Collegeville, Pa. and the Jenkintown School District, both of which are in Montgomery County, are using the microblogging service.

They are spreading school news and information to the masses, or, well, 62 and 21 Twitter accounts, respectively. To be fair, though, neither of them suffer the following of users like Sexplatorium.

“Now, parents will know where to go to get the information they need,” said one of the followers, Mary Ellen Polaski, mother of a 10th grader. “You don’t have the time to go all over the [district] Web site, finding out what’s going on. This is one-stop shopping.”