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.’

Consumers sign up for and log into mychinoki.com (that’s my chi-no-ki), sharing their zip code, gender, birth year and mobile carrier. Then they choose what partner companies they’d like to hear from — including local launch partners like esteemed Old City micro brewery Triumph Brew, Northern Liberties burger favorite PYT or Center City nutrition education and services group MANNA.

See more participating companies here.

“The response from Philadelphia businesses has been astounding,”  Balin, 35, said. “In this current economic climate, there still exists cost effective ways for continuing to market to the public.”

Enrolled businesses, who can track how many participants have signed up for their alerts, can use pre-plan promotion and alert tools and target their messages to specific demographics, but only to those consumers who have opted in.

Users can, of course, drop the service and stop all messages at any time.

Businesses pay a $79 one-time set up fee and $79 a month plus a $0.06 text messaging fee. Consumers can join for free.

Balin, who works from his Old City home, conceived of his platform in June 2008, after growing tired of signing up for alerts for promotional discounts and starting to receive others he didn’t want.

mychinoki.com doesn’t allow businesses to sell or share consumer information, ensuring that users only receive messages from the companies they selected. In return, businesses would have a database of interested consumers ready to act on promotions.

The startup is not currently seeking outside investment. Balin says the company hopes to continue to add local Philadelphia businesses before expanding to other cities in 2011.

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.

Penn and its Wharton school are major draws for top tier talent across the country, but a handful of the most celebrated recent startups from their alumni continue the march away from Philadelphia — and the region.

• In May, Google acquired mobile ad network AdMob, a startup of major note from Wharton man Omar Hamoui who had relocated to Silicon Valley.
• Last month, Google also bought display advertising dashboard provider Invite Media, which has Wharton educations on its staff and had Center City headquarters and deep roots in Philadelphia but has shifted much of its presence to New York.
• Gregg Spiridellis, the founder of digital studio JibJab, which built a national reputation on a 2004 presidential parody video.

Like the rest, PHILO is hankering for a big splash into a sexy market.

Its free iPhone app and options to show trending conversations on TV and blossom a central hub for social watching has caught the gaze of bloggers, the New York Times, LA Times, the Wall Street Journal and investment community alike.

The group did pay homage to Philadelphia with a ‘Freedom’ badge that can be unlocked for watching a certain, secretive combination of Philly-related programming, as Geekadelphia reported.

But, of course, the dollars and networking of the startup don’t seem to extend much further into Philadelphia than that.

If you make it out to South Philadelphia’s rapidly redeveloping East Passyunk corridor, Pennsylvania’s tourism board wants to give you  a badge.

Last month, visitPA announced a partnership with location-based social networking juggernaut Foursquare, offering three badges for users who check in at various locations across the Commonwealth.

Visit East Passyunk and a couple others from a list of two dozen stops shops and commercial venues in Pennsylvania and earn the PA Retail Polka badge. Hit up Nat Mechanics on your way to the PA Shooflyer or the Mutter Museum in your quest for the PA 4 Score and 7.

“We have attempted to use our marketing as an effort to effectively interact with people and social media certainly allows for a more intimate conversation than traditional media,” says Richard Bonds, the director of social media for Tourism, Film and Economic Development for visitPA. “There will always be something new and we are not stopping with just Facebook and Twitter and the other currently established social media but will always be looking for that next ‘thing.’”

Bonds tells Technically Philly that it’s another in a step of the Commonwealth’s tourism agency innovating on the web.

“Five years ago we were one of the first destinations to incorporate blogs into our website and have been committed to incorporating user content into everything we do. We [have] developed our own blog site comprised entirely of guest bloggers – so they are authentic voices of folks who love PA,” Bonds says. “We have been at the forefront in utilizing the web whether in the social media environment or the expansion of our website.”

Bonds also pointed to visitPA leading a texting Punxsutawney Phil Groundhog Day campaign for which more than 30,000 folks signed up. Last year, the agency debuted a web series of four episodes called Peter Arthur, which chronicled a road trip in search of love.

The partnership was long in coming. Foursquare has been announcing agreements with organizations and media brands at a remarkable pace, but there’s work to be had. visitPA first entered talks in December. It wasn’t until May 25 that the program launched, says Annie Heckenberger, who handled the deal in her role with Center City branding agency Red Tettemer.

Unique to this partnership is the use of QR codes. Six locations have a poster with a unique QR code that directly checks users in to that venue and unlocks related tips. In Philadelphia, such posters are at Old City’s Nat Mechanics — framed near the front door — PYT in Northern Liberties and The Independence Visitors Center.

Also unlike many partnerships in which Foursquare designs the badges, Heckenberger says, in this case Red Tettemer designed the logos.

If the point is engagement and to remind people in unique ways of the resources that visitPA exists to extol, the Foursquare deal too seems to be working. Bonds says visitPA has some 3,800 Foursquare friends to whom they’ve doled out more than 600 digital badges. It returns to the power that social media has for business and engagement, creating recall among users driven to points of interest, a large part of the organization’s mission.

“We are in a tough environment with our marketing budgets being drastically reduced so in one sense our web campaigns and social media channels are more important than ever,” Bonds says. “They have become of necessity our primary voice.”

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Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

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.

MIGHT BE OF INTEREST

• The Associated Press reports that the governors of Pennsylvania, New York and California are lobbying for regulatory passage for the Comcast-NBC deal, saying “the significant benefits associated with the creation of this new joint venture far outweigh any potential harms.”
• The AP also reports that Sen. Herb Kohl, D-Wisc., a “key” member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has called to require Comcast to divest NBC Universal’s stake in online video site Hulu.com, among other conditions, if the acquisition were to be allowed by regulators. It’s a move out of concern that the deal could give Comcast too much power in Web video.

GIVE A GLANCE

• The Inquirer’s Joey DiStefano writes on analysis that suggests the newly announced Google TV product designed to make TV viewing more like web browsing is serious competition to Comcast.
• Peter Kafka from All Things Digital reports that Google is eying Invite Media, a demand-side, advertising-technology startup founded by a Penn grad and partially funded by First Round Capital and Comcast Interactive Capital, as PTN adds.

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

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.

In June 1992, Dominic Bash, a “flamboyant, fiery and fierce” native of the embattled riverward neighborhood and graduate of its Northeast Catholic High School, led the city’s Lesbian and Gay Pride Parade, according to the Inquirer, “strutting from Rittenhouse Square to Penn’s Landing in a purple-and-pink sequined leotard and a lavender feathered boa.”

Dominic Bash and Chris Bartlett in the background in June 1992 on Penn's Landing.

Somewhere behind him trailed a skinny activist in his mid-20s, wearing a T-shirt and bushy brown hair. That was Bartlett, of course, pictured then at right with Bash, by then a well-known South Street hairdresser, on Penn’s Landing a lifetime ago.

“He was tortured in his neighborhood, but Dominic fought back in ways that were still humanitarian. When a neighborhood bully would pick on him, Dominic would beat up the kid’s bike with a broom,” Bartlett says, returning to a tale touched upon during his Ignite presentation. “The lesson from that is the way to confront hatred is not to beat up on people but the institutions and culture that create those kinds of people.”

“He was really a gay guy. He really had AIDSs. He was really Catholic, and he celebrated all of that with no shame,” Bartlett says. “So when he was really angry at the Catholic Church for being dismissive of gays, Dominic would go to the Cathedral [Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul] on the Parkway and wait for Cardinal Bevilacqua to give him condoms and talk to him about sex education.”

“These are the kinds of stories that we just can’t lose,” Bartlett says. But, he adds, since he first started developing the idea in 2005, he is fast reaching the limitations of his knowledge, experience and time.

So he has taken to finding help. Below watch his Ignite presentation.

HOW THE SITE DEVELOPED

Bartlett watched what Stephen Speilberg did with his Shoah Project, capturing memories and stories from those who experienced the Holocaust.

It was about capturing those memories for the future.

In 2005, Bartlett hit the streets and spent the next two years collecting the name of every Philadelphia gay man who died after being diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. He went through records at the Rectory of St. Luke and the Epiphany, the church at 330 S. 13th Street that, under the leadership of Rev. Roger Broadley, took on the burden of the AIDS stigma.

“They buried the people no one else would bury,” Bartlett says. “They were responsible for shepherding 100s of gay men through a dying process that had dignity. That’s all lost if we don’t record this.”

By 2007, Bartlett began compiling what he found on wikispaces, the free portal that would allow anyone to add their own memories or other names that Bartlett missed.

Bartlett spoke to community groups, from social clubs to religious services to softball leagues, searched obituaries and the AIDS quilt memorial for Philadelphia ties, trying to create a comprehensive list of deaths.� Bartlett has yet to explore the city’s voluminous and cumbersome archives. He has also collected stories to include on people’s pages, but too many remain barren of the humanizing he wants to embody this project.

“Learning about our dead people is incredibly important because they’ve done everything we’re doing now, just maybe in a different version,” he says. “If we ignore that, a lot of learning is lost.”

It’s functionally outdated, but that doesn’t mean power can’t rise from the top. Bartlett insisted on listing all the names he found on a single page. Scroll through knowing most are the names of people and lives lost and relationships fractured, a great many lost in a time of fear and uncertainty among gay communities in the 1980s.

THE SITE’S FUTURE

He still finds that people discover the site from a search engine result of a friend’s name, but too many, Bartlett fears, are turned off from adding to the wiki because “the site simply isn’t intuitive.” Five to 10 percent of users add or attempt to add to the site, he says.

So he’s looking for partners in developing the platform and incorporating a variety of valuable tool, including a way to streamline the addition process, beautifying the site and increasing the site’s contents. Bartlett says foundation support could help that growth. He has already received $7,500 from the Calamus Foundation to support the development of the wiki and its use as a community organizing tool.

“American culture has become almost ruthlessly individually focused at the expense of community,” he says. “We could use some sense of community.”

By the mid-1990s, a crush of new drugs effectively calmed the rate of AIDS-related casualties in this country, Bartlett says, so most LGBT community members who weren’t already in their 20s by then might likely have missed the pain of losing so many friends to such a scary and, at the time misunderstood, plague.

He wants to take the site national, and then perhaps international, using Philadelphia as a pilot. Bartlett says he wants to make sure these stories and what AIDS meant to the American gay community in the 1980s an early 1990s are not lost, perhaps the site can have a mentorship program partnering young gay men with those who survived the scare.

“The AIDS quilt started in San Francisco and grew because of its simplicity and power,” Bartlett says. “If the architecture of this site could mirror that, why wouldn’t this take off?”

HOW BARTLETT GOT HERE

Born in Chestnut Hill Hospital but raised in Cheltenham, Bartlett was destined for a professorship, undergraduate at Brown University to study the classics of Latin and Greek and graduate work at Oxford, but he returned home to Philadelphia in 1991 and something happened.

“I just had this call to activism,” he says. He started running around with Philadelphia’s LGBT social movement, trying to increase the delivery and education of condoms in schools, fighting down AIDS-drug prices and lobbying the dispersal of clean needles to drug users.

“I found then that a regular commitment to homework and hell raising can really make an impact,” says Bartlett, who now lives in the Garden Court section of West Philadelphia. He spent a decade with the Safeguards Project, including a stint as executive director before leaving in 2001. Since then he serves a consultant for governments, companies and other groups interested in developing leadership corps of gay and lesbian leaders.

“I’ve learned that I don’t have to wait around for anyone to say ‘this is a good idea,” he says. “I’m excited about Philly because I believe so many people have a vision for this city and how our own visions can support Philadelphia, and none of us are waiting for anyone.”

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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.

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.

The service will be able to publish a client’s mobile Web site as a native app for the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android operating systems, a release from CEO Chuck Sacco read. Now a company’s existing blog or any other RSS feed can be easily integrated for mobile users. PhindMe additionally boasted the addition of Twitter-powered mobile pages, featuring custom Twitter feeds and remote mobile page editing. The site also announced it would now accept international payments.

If an interview we had with Sacco from April is any indication, these new features aren’t what are on his mind.

“Our future is less about cool new features and more about ensuring we have the most efficient ways to distribute our products,” Sacco told us. “Hopefully you�ll see some new distribution deals for us where we get our products into the hands of some big players and become known as the new standard for the mobile web.”

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.

Interview edited for length and clarity.

Since launching the site, you and Dave have both graduated from high school. What have you guys been up to?

I go to Georgetown University and Dave goes to University of Colorado at Boulder.

And you guys still run the business? How does that affect college life?

My R.A. has been completely annoyed at me. He kept writing notes on my room’s whiteboard, yelling at me because I’m never around. I go home every single weekend to check in at the office and do some things here. My professors are incredibly lenient. I had four mid-terms re-scheduled because I would be speaking at a conference or couldn’t make it for another reason.

After $13 million in Series B funding last year, where has the money been invested?

We’ve really been using funding to expand our office. This has allowed us to drastically expand our marketing department. Before, we didn’t even have a marketing department. We’re also hiring developers and developing new features.

And you have about 60 employees based in New Hope? How’d you end up there?

Most of us are based in New Hope, but we also have an office in New York. We thought New Hope was cuter and less expensive than Princeton and it was close enough to drive to after school from Sullivan, New Jersey, [our home town].

Last year HitWise said you were the third largest and fastest growing social networking site. In February, Hitwise said that myYearbook’s growth had slowed and Tagged.com took some of myYearbook’s market share. To what do you attribute the slow-down?

We have a variety of different ways to pull members. A major one was the MySpace ecosystem, so naturally [when they experienced a slow-down in members], we did too. We’re launching a few new features that will completely change that pattern. Though growth has slowed in terms of new members, cohort analysis has gotten stronger. Our members are very engaged.

Your Story page talks about connecting everyone: high school students, college students, employers, everyone. Is that a move you’re still hoping to make, or will you continue to target high school students?

We do attract all ages, but we skew very heavily to the teenage demo. We also want to appeal to different groups of people as much as possible. There’s no reason that someone from college can’t come, so we want to make the site grow with them.

Do you ever get sick of being called a young entrepreneur?

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. We’re just incredibly busy. We have absolutely no social life. Running a site this big, you honestly can’t. I don’t mind the title, but when some people hear it they get some kind of skewed perception that you’re a millionaire and a big spender. I drive a 1996 Mitsubishi Galant.

We’re wondering about that Yankees hat that Dave has on in your About page’do you guys identify more with New York than Philly?

Sorry Philadelphia, we grew up in North New Jersey, so we’ve always been more about New York City. Last year, we had everyone in the office come to a Phillies game. It was exciting. The Yankees have been sucking recently.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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. In order of importance for your ease.

• Seems like First Round Capital is spendin’ a little too much time in the Big Apple lately. Last week, founder Josh Kopelman did a breezy interview on Obsessed with Samantha Ettus, a Web show created with North Jersey’s wine connoisseur and marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk. Wednesday, First Round announced that it was launching a startup mentoring program in the New York region, reports Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal. Ouch. Don’t drink the Kool-aid, Josh, it’s probably a Pinot.
• Employers are stressing about workers who talk smack about their companies on social networks, McClatchy Newspapers reports. We’re down with firing food service workers who posted YouTube videos sneezing on pizza, or amazingly enough, bathing in a stainless steel restaurant sink, but we’d be damned to say we haven’t complained about co-workers on Facebook. Maybe city employee Latrice Bryant, who took heat last fall for calling Fox 29 racist for reporting that she allegedly used company time for personal business, should take note. She’s recently been criticized for several postings on her Facebook account: “Would you sell your soul to the devil for 90k?” she wrote as her status, before deleting the message. Bryant earned $90,000 from the City of Philadelphia last year, the Daily News reports.
• A taxi driver that hit a woman riding a bicycle in South Philadelphia and sped off seemingly doesn’t have a chance of getting away with it. The cabbie musta forgot that every taxi is fitted with a GPS device that inspectors at Philadelphia Parking Authority are tracking, MyFoxPhilly reports.
• No one can balance that damned Philly budget. Of 3,000 users that participated in the Economy League’s Philadelphia Budget Challenge that we reported on in April, nearly 60 percent ended up with a deficit.
• Remember MaBell? No? Hit up your Encyclopedia Britannica (or Google, for you new heads). Well, even if you’ve forgotten, PhillyOfficeRetail.com hasn’t. The developers are collecting old-school call centers, including an 84,000 square-foot former Verizon Corp. building at 7200 Chestnut St., and others, reports PhillyDeals’ Joseph DiStefano. To think: someday someone will be collecting antiquated startup offices that moved up and onward.
• Newspapers ain’t doing all that bad. Malvern’s AnySource Media, which we covered in our Friday Q&A in April, has struck a deal with The Associated Press for the content provider to distribute a 24-hour on-demand news platform on the TV box, according to a press release. Oh wait. That’s actually no good for newspapers.
• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Ten Philadelphia tech organizations that should have Wikipedia entries but don’t.

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything with Friday Tech Links.

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.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

1. How are you going to make money?
   Our revenues are generated in three ways: media offerings, lead generation fees and white label sites for those that want it. [We also have a] marketplace approach, connecting buyers and sellers in our space.
2. Why do we need another social network?
   We don’t, at least not in the traditional sense. i-Meet is an industry-specific social network. It’s actually a professional and social network for people who plan meetings and events.
3. Why should people go to and use i-Meet?
   If you have any connection whatsoever to planning meetings or events, even a supplier that delivers products or services in this segment, you can connect, collaborate and communicate with a growing number of like-minded people. Networking, business opportunities, lead generation, career and work opportunities — all are at i-Meet, and it’s focused on this industry.
4. Give us two South Philly stereotypes: one you fill and one you don’t.
   Growing up, you just made sure you were part of the culture, you know, hanging on corners. It identified you and made you part of something special — I can identify with that one. A stereotype that I don’t fit — my parents were not part of the Mafia.
5. What’s the latest? What is coming soon? What should we look for?
   The latest: rolling out our proprietary RFI Engine, allowing planners to connect with, meet, and request information from 80,000 suppliers around the world. Coming soon: more robust group and communication tools, enhanced searching and targeting tools. Look for: our skills marketplace, where planners and organizations can contract for project work within our growing network of qualified individuals.
6. What is the earliest lesson in business you learned and still use?
   My very first boss was fanatical about dealing with client problems immediately: facing people, looking them in the eye and doing whatever you could to make things right. Don’t wait, and never ignore problems. He never passed off critical comments as insignificant. That is something I have always valued, and try to stay true to it today.
7. Why is i-Meet Technically Philly?
   I like this city and have had great success here. The labor base is strong, great educational institutions and easy access to the rest of the world. I was born and raised in South Philly, and there is nothing like this city. I’ve started other businesses here, and grew others to national prominence — I want to ride that!
8. Have you seen the Philly tech scene grow?
   Yes, I have. I started a company called StarCite in 1999, which has become the world leader in on-demand meeting and event services, and it’s here in Philly. It’s a good place for start-ups, with a strong community and venture help is available.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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.

Roth just might be the first genuine star to have not only been discovered via a social network but also stapled his career prospects to social media.

He is regularly pushing next Monday’s release of his debut album “Under the Bread Aisle,” to his 20,000 followers on Twitter. He’s on the basics like Facebook and Flickr.

And, of course, you can follow his growth on YouTube.

Watch him rhyming before his record deal. There was the time he first met fellow SRC label mate Akon last May. He drove around with Cee-Lo of Gnarls Barkley, who makes an appearance on Asher’s album, and had dinner with Ludacris in July. When his first mainstream media came on Late Night with Carson Daly in November.

“The street is the street… but that’s changing,” says Steve Rifkind, the founder of SRC, the label Asher is on, a division of Universal. “It’s also wherever the college street is, and, also, the street’s on the Internet now.”

But, for Roth, it started with MySpace.

“It was everything. I was promoting without promoting. I wasn’t going to open mic nights telling people to go to my MySpace… I didn’t have to,” says Roth, a native of Morrisville and graduate of Pennsbury High School. “I didn’t realize the power that MySpace is now.”

In fall 2006, Atlanta-based manager Scooter Braun received a MySpace friend request from Roth.

�I took one look, saw a white boy in a hoodie, and I said �What the fuck?�� Braun says. The music was good enough, Braun says, but he liked Asher�s rhymes. �He wasn�t comfortable in his own skin. I was interested, but not sold.�

At that point, Roth had 112 MySpace friends and just 64 Facebook fans. Now those numbers are more than 65,000 and nearly 33,000 respectively.

“I think at the end of the day, all these resources on the Internet, you might meet someone, you know, on Twitter. All of these have value because at the end of the day, it only takes that one phone call,” Braun says. “Whether that person finds you on MySpace or YouTube or Twitter or wherever, they end up finding you. Take advantage of all those resources because it only takes that one eyeball of the millions that are online.”

Braun called a number listed on Roth’s MySpace profile and, weeks later, they met in Atlanta. Weeks after that, a deal was inked and the next great social media star was born, but Braun takes issue with Roth being called a MySpace star. If anything, he says, Roth should be called a blog star.

�The way Asher has broke in, no one has done it before. No one has broken in on the blogs and gone gold in five weeks,� Braun says. “The distribution line in my marketing plan was the blog. Nah rights, the 2DopeBoyz, the illRoots, the SOHHs, even the one time he was on Perez Hilton. The blogs are where people are turning for their information. They are the mixtapes and the magazines combined. And they�re really a distribution tool.”

Now, he’s showing up everywhere, from MTV to the Wall Street Journal.

“It would be foolish not to really use the Internet now. That’s where everybody is,” Roth says. “The CD that’s about to drop is huge for the blogs. If this album is extremely successful, it’s going to show that the power is back with the people.”

“You don’t have to go to the radio anymore.”

Below, watch Asher talk to Grind.TV about how the Internet helped give him the megaphone he has today.

And on those ties to Philadelphia? Well, he has them whether he knows it or not, as you can see from a nice rhyme he gave BET’s Rap City with Center City in the background.