Seed Philly: Center City nonprofit startup accelerator collecting business data, hosting first event

Chatter about the need for a post-incubation home for technology startups outside of the life sciences realm in Philadelphia has been a topic of conversation among investors and entrepreneurs since at least the late 1990s.

In the past year, the seriousness of those conversations has grown, with a handful of new initiatives launching in recent months focused on the concept of offering support to build largely fledgling consumer-facing efforts seeking investment.

The long-rumored startup accelerator Seed Philly is aiming to differentiate itself by placing mission over profit and featuring a heavy reliance on data, Technically Philly has learned.

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Startup Roundup: Where’s the talent?

Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup parses out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with a weekly email newsletter by clicking here and selecting the Startup Roundup button or follow Startup Roundup’sRSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

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Where’s the talent? The Inky’s Joe DiStefano asks a question we’ve been hearing a lot lately from the startup community: if you’re able to nab an investment or come up with a sensible solution to bootstrap, are there enough talented engineers in Philadelphia to keep the enterprise afloat? Monetate‘s CEO David Brussin says coders “are not looking for jobs, they have jobs.” First Round‘s Josh Kopelman calls it Philadelphia’s biggest challenge. And on that note: JoeD says Monetate hopes to grow from 50 to 100 employees a year from now.

All this is even after Monetate announced that RxShortages, a mobile application that helps customers find out if prescription medication is available locally, has won its $5,000 Open Source Prize. The contest was clearly an attempt to try to identify some of that talent. We’ll be following-up to see if any of those leads were solid.

It’s not helping that a report issued from the ISTE education technology conference currently at the Pennsylvania Convention Center says that a survey of 1,000 high school students, faculty and IT staff indicates that 39% don’t think that technology expectations are being met in the classroom.

Even if it’s a tough climb, all we ask is that you, dear founder, is that you don’t give up.

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