Jarvus: dev firm co-founded by 22-year-old Drexel dropout, former hacker, whiz kid

Northern Liberties information services development company Jarvus partners (from left) John Fazio, Matt Monihan, Chris Alfano outside their headquarters on Third Street north of Poplar

Updated: 10/13/10 @ 12:50 p.m. with high school details

John Fazio sometimes avoids his personal biography — “it’s a bit too colorful,” he says.

While teenagers, Fazio worked with Chris Alfano at competitive video-gaming center CyberZone in the Neshaminy Mall. They got to know each other and, during their first year at Drexel in 2006, raised $120,000 in private funding to build upon the CyberZone concept. But, they needed more capital than they could raise in six months to meet their bigger vision for a team-oriented video gaming center — not unlike Howie’s Game Shack in California and Arizona.

So, instead, the pair decided they’d quit school and make the money themselves.

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Mobile, frameworks, focus of 2010 Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise

More than 100 folks packed the room for the "Refactoring legacy applications for SOA using Spring Technologies" session led by Oleg Zhurakousky.

On Thursday, about 450 software developers, IT managers and business executives from around the world ventured to Old City for Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise, a locally-organized, two-day conference for high-level enterprise software development discussion.

Patrons packed the Society Hill Sheraton’s outdoor patio, breaking from sessions—comprised of mobile, frameworks, agile development, management, infrastructure and languages tracks—talking and fielding phone calls beneath the stunning pink blossoms of Cherry trees. The hotel offered more space than last year’s conference, held in Conshohocken.

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Two IndyHall software projects featured in MacUpdate bundle

Does anyone get a little nostalgic when it comes to bundled software?

In the 90s it meant getting 25,000 games packed onto a CD or a complete reference library from researchers you never heard of: Mayo Clinique? Not so much.

But last night at midnight when MacUpdate announced its $49.99 Mac OS X spring promo bundle, it meant being able to grab licenses for two local Macintosh development projects along with nine other professional applications on the cheap.

Like, a $470 discount.

Included in the package, alongside well-known apps like Parallels Desktop 4 and Tech Tool Pro 5, is Old City’s own Multiplex and RipIt applications. By themselves, the companion DVD applications cost $53.

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Software development firm Avencia releases Philly election data

The primary election for a host of local candidates is being held Tuesday — from district attorney to city controller, municipal judges and others.

On the heels of releasing a new version of a subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API, Callowhill geographic analysis and software development firm Avencia released yesterday a free Web-based tool to search and map Philadelphia’s election results from 1992 to 2008 (click at bottom right to proceed anonymously for preview).

The application runs on Avencia’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework, which enables users to visualize, interpret, and map large data sets. The “Philadelphia Election Results, 1992-2008″ application, the data set includes more than four million records, like the results of elections held in Philly for all state and national offices for those 16 years, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices, both at the precinct and the ward levels.

“This is a very important data set, one that doesn’t exist anywhere out there, so we’d like to expand it, by adding years further in the past and continuing to update it,” says spokeswoman Abby Fretz.

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RJMetrics mining business database information

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.

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Callowhill software developer Avencia releases legislative data API

Showing Philly's gerrymandered 5th councilmanic district

Updated: 3:51 5/7/09

Here’s a completely uncontroversial statement: the sloppy, meandering legislative districts that are used to keep incumbents in power are an embarrassment to our Republic.

Don’t worry, though, technology is going to solve that, too.

A cool, new version of a free subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API has been released by Avencia, a geographic analysis and software development firm based in the Poplar Callowhill neighborhood west of Northern Liberties.

The new version of CiceroLive, a free sample of the data and mapping tool Cicero API, which pools relevant information about political representatives at all government levels, including the district boundaries for 100 major U.S. cities, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, comes before another likely round of redistricting in 2010, with new Census data arriving then.

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