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.

Jarvus partners (from left) Matt Monihan, Chris Alfano and John Fazio in either (a) their headquarters or (b) a brick bunker.

They dropped out of college — Fazio leaving the varsity soccer team for which he was recruited to play — and launched collaborative coworking space Devnuts, to harness the collective contacts and projects of the pair and their friends, as Technically Philly reported last month.

Now Fazio, 22, Alfano, 23, and new partner Matt Monihan, 23, are launching a new venture, Jarv.us, a brand to handle their information services and other larger builds.

“Devnuts was created as a means to bring freelancers together to work on bigger projects, a collaborative company built on contractors,” Fazio says. “As we got bigger and bigger projects and began putting employees on salary, we started pulling away from our original business core and began more of an information systems company. We were building software for businesses totally customized to their workflow.”

So, clients who need heavier development, like small business solutions and applications, are being handled by Jarv.us, a different business structure than Devnuts, though the Northern Liberties address and many of the faces are the same.

Of about 30 active clients to date, three are remaining with the Devnuts brand because they pay for their developers, and 27 will be clients of the Jarv.us brand because they pay for solutions.

More simply put, Fazio says, “Devnuts sells people and Jarvus sells software.”

It has something to do with branding.

Where the Devnuts crew is a good sell to those that need a variety of skill sets for smaller, more specific jobs, it’s not a brand Fazio thought was a strong sell to more serious clients: Jarv.us is that.

And, Fazio says, that wouldn’t have happened if he and Alfano didn’t team up with Monihan, who actually graduated from Drexel and came on as a partner in August.

“Once Matt came on board — he helped us get more disciplined, tighten up operations and workflow, offer more accountability to clients and out of the systems — we began to build the structure for the company of Jarv.us.”

The founding pair found Monihan, a 2005 graduate of Plymouth Whitemarsh High School, through a client and first met him at Honey’s Sit ‘N Eat in Northern Liberties.

“This is the team we want to have,” Fazio says.

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.

Now In its fifth year, Chariot Solutions has seen the conference grow from a small university-hosted conference of 50 people—comprised mostly of Chariot’s own employee speakers—to an international conference of high-level software development discussion. [Full Disclosure: Chariot is a long-time sponsor of Technically Philly]

“Conceptually, we’d like it to be a free conference,” but the increasing size and cost of organizing the conference has led to the conference’s $375 ticket fee, Chariot co-founder Michael Rappaport told Technically Philly in between sessions. None of the presenters are paid, organizers say.

The trending topic this year, says Rappaport, was mobile app development. Though there was a track dedicated specifically to the topic, discussion around mobile was peppered throughout other tracks and presentations.

Dozens of attendees were showing-off their new iPads and when one presenter asked how many in the room were using an iPhone, nearly all those present raised their hands. “Last year, mobile didn’t even have a presence,” Rappaport says. New frameworks, like Groovy, Grails and Ruby on Rails were also dominant.

The conference is certainly not for the average technology user. Most of the sessions were high-level breakdowns of development-specific topics and the processes, catered for business IT teams.

Speakers mingled with attendees throughout hotel conference grounds and there was generally a friendly atmosphere that also suggested that folks might have attended several conferences past with one another. In talking with about a dozen attendees—many from the region—most were pleased with what the conference had to offer.

Several sponsors showed off in the conference’s registration area, like Gigabit City, the local community and city government push to bring Google fiber to Philadelphia.

Attending the conference? Let us know what you thought of this year’s conference. Did it meet expectations?

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.

Both products were born and raised in IndyHall, and one is a product of software incubator IndyHall Labs. As sweet a deal as it may seem for consumers, maybe the developers are the ones most hyped about the opportunity.

“It’s a massive vote of confidence for the quality of apps that Labs is producing,” IndyHall co-founder and Labs co-organizer Alex Hillman said in a telephone interview.

Still, that $470 is coming out of someone’s pocket, right?

As members of the two development teams (which borrow members from one another) passed a phone around the co-working facility answering questions – and as downloads skyrocketed on the bundle’s sales ticker – Multiplex’s Co-Lead Developer David Martorana hesitated on answering how his team can afford to offer such a deep discount.

“It is a promotional opportunity to get a large audience through an established institution,” he said after a long pause. “It all pans out as a great promotional opportunity for us. We all agreed to do it because we believe in the longevity of IndyHall Labs.”

A Twitter search for the promotion reveals 25 pages of conversation concerning the discount after 13 hours of being available. Since noon, 2,000 bundles sold.

Jason Allum, who leads development on RipIt and co-leads alongside Martorana on Multiplex said that though the decision to include the products in the bundle was mulled over, it was worth the risk.

“We’ve been getting crushed. [MacUpdate] did 25,000 units last year. It’s safe to say we’re going to blow that out this year,” he said.

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.

The Philly election data is a sample of what KIF can do — showing off the heavy software for potential buyers. The U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention is using KIF to analyze juvenile delinquency data, and Temple University’s Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project has crunched its own collected social data that was formerly stuck on paper only.

Some of Avencia’s clients keep their data in-house, but others use KIF to put their data into the world, Fretz says.

KIF provides many options for interpreting the data, from visualizing election results on a map which enables users to detect spatial patterns in candidate performance, to using a table or viewed as statistical summaries and compared through ranked lists of results.

Avencia says the tool’s Philly election sample has its own host of values, from lessening the burden on election commissioners to helping grassroot political organizations and campaigns.

The company’s DecisionTree geographic planning and prioritization software has also been used to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing by using data.

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.

Back at that New York equity firm, they’d spend hundreds of hours hand perfecting data from a company’s database, deciding just what might be likely revenue projections and user-action based on available information. Their research was valuable, time-consuming and costly.

It’s been done that way for years, almost always in one of two ways, Moore says.

The real detailed work would be done by either an in-house database administrator paid a six-figure salary or a high-end business intelligence agent that has its own consultants to cobble it all together.

That personalized work is still valuable for larger, older and more established companies with multiple legacy databases. but many smaller, newer e-commerce companies driving less than $100 million a year in profits don’t have a cost-effective alternative — until RJMetrics, our Ivy League boys say.

They’ll focus their business on e-commerce and subscription-based clients. Their software, developed by Moore, segments a company’s customer set to find user behavior trends for things like likelihood of repeat visit or purchase, preferences and future actions. The company’s focus, Moore says, is any business with an e-commerce division, online subscriptions or any other business that collects user data, from social media sites to online newsletters. RJMetrics will be able to offered detailed assessments of trending user behaviors and likely preferences.

“This is valuable stuff at a far cheaper rate for people who really need it,” Moore says.

Watch their product demo below.

Last summer, Moore left the equity firm and began refining the software that could do those tasks more reliably and far faster. Stein followed suit in October — focusing on the user interface side of things. The team founded RJMetrics and began testing reliability and efficiency on the businesses of friends and known clients.

Turns out, the thing actually works, and they want to base their operations here, where it’s called a hoagie.

Moore grew up in Glassboro, N.J. and followed the local high school with four years at Princeton University. Though he spent two years in New York, his family and his high school sweetheart – to whom he is now engaged  - are decidedly Philly regional entities.

Stein grew up in North Jersey’s Morris County but got an education at the University of Pennsylvania. His girlfriend got a gig in Philly and has an affinity to the city.

Now, Moore is the primary programmer and Stein the primary hawker. Moore lives in Collingswood and Stein in Rittenhouse.

With those ties, cheap real estate, a certain uniqueness and a valuable urban hub, Philadelphia seemed like a simple choice.

“There were a lot of reasons pointing us this way. A lot of the best portfolio companies I’ve seen are not in Silicon Valley — they’re doing something special somewhere different,” Stein says.” We’d also like to play a significant role in the growing up of a tech scene, and we can do that here.”

“I like that.”

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.

Cicero can be used to generate district maps that show how an address fits into the political geography of the country and more than 100 cities nationwide. Read up on why they’re using the API platform.

The most recent upgrades to the Web service and database include faster map generation, new foreign countries, non-legislative boundaries like school districts and watersheds and the inclusion of several new city council districts from places as profoundly interesting as Orlando, Florida; Tulsa, Okla.; Berkeley, Calif., and, yes, high rolling Atlantic City.

These additions coincide with a loss of local legislative information nationwide, Philadelphia most certainly included. In February, we editorialized on the need for a Web-based local government database after the shuttering of Hallwatch.org. We’ve also seen a complete halt in the once exploding Harrisburg-based state government reform movement.

No one has found that purest use for the Cicero API but not for lack of interest. Avencia boasts that many established organizations and agencies are already using the API, a number of which are regionally based.

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance created a plugin to its advocacy software to immediately know which of their supporters are constituents of what legislator. When they want their voice heard, they can mobilize a targeted group of voters and make sure those representatives hear it.

But Avencia and their Cicero API are hardly local only.

On last election day, Nov. 4 2008, Avencia says the Oregonian used the API to let their readers match their address to live vote counts for important political races in the legislative districts relevant to their address.

It was local and geographically relevant.

Now that’s news.