Junebug online dating site hunts users to test their game-changing algorithms

Online dating sites ought to have nearer the success rate as a search engine, says John Myles White.

“When you compare the people that big dating sites suggest to you with the pages that Google gives you in response to a search, the difference is staggering,” says Myles White, a Ph.D candidate in Princeton’s psychology department.

John Myles White

Last week, Myles, 28, and partner Jim Keller, 29, the founder and CEO of Willow Grove-based web development and strategy company Context, announced the launch of Junebug, what they call their answer to “the lack of innovation in online dating.”

The duo is entering the crowded online dating scene because they say their competition isn’t leveraging contemporary statistical techniques to their fullest extent. Now all they need are the users and data to prove it.

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Shop Talk: Bradley Ericson and 3SecondReceipts

Bradley Ericson

Like a lot of Drexel undergrads, Bradley Ericson likes to take trips for the South Street Special.

“You wrap a piece of Lorenzo’s pizza around a Jim’s steak and see which one of your friends can finish first,” the Drexel sophomore says. “It’s the simple things that keep you young.”

Of course, what has made Ericson one of the better known teenagers in University City was his being named College Entrepreneur of the Year by Entrepreneur’s magazine. So, though Ericson “never in a million years” imagined himself attending Drexel, you’d be right to guess he now approves of the path he’s taken.

Ericson is the CEO and co-founder of 3SecondReceipts, a startup incubated at Drexel, a startup that is testing a point-of-sale system for digital receipts to save vendors on paper and ink.

The company’s beginnings started October 2008 back at Drexel and, like the South Street Special, involves pizza. As a freshman, Ericson and his college buddies would head out to a university dining hall for pizza, using their student ID cards in the closed system.

Everyone waited for a receipt, and then everyone immediately threw them out.

“I just wanted my pizza faster, but I also realized all this paper was being thrown out for these small transactions that are pretty immaterial to us,” Ericson says now. “There had to be a better way.”

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Links: Skip tax breaks for high-tech companies, Princeton laser research and More

DEFINITE READS

• The AP reports on a study that suggests Pennsylvania should skip tax breaks for high-tech companies.
• The Silicon Alley Insider has an essay on the Boston tech startup scene.

After the jump, the region’s 30-year-old computer society hosts Far McKon, Prince lasers and local Tablet news.

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News Inkubator: a pitch for creating the future of localized news in Philadelphia

Funny thing is that like many of you whom we cover, Technically Philly is a startup.

We launched this great experiment in online targeted news in February. Despite being very pleased with our growth — 15,000 page views last month, more than 800 RSS subscribers and something of a reputation for original reporting, not too bad considering our work here is only part-time — we’ve continually had to focus on developing sustainability through revenue, like many of you, and not simply pushing to better connect with our editorial product.

Others in the news and community reporting realm in Philadelphia are having the same problem, most not even discussing the possibility of creating that profitable sustainability.

So, early last month, we introduced News Inkubator, a business services hub and collaborative newsroom for niche news sites in Philadelphia.

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Shop Talk: Interphase Systems CEO John Biglin on Ready-IT BioPharma

A year ago, John Biglin, the CEO of Interphase Systems, was talking to the CFO of an emerging Center City pharmaceutical company.

The CFO, intent on keeping in order the financial house of his blue-chip invested life sciences startup, had a problem.

“Is it normal that sometimes you don’t get e-mails, or e-mails take a couple days to arrive or when you do get them, they come in triplicate?” Biglin remembers the CFO asking.

John Biglin

“Our IT has been cobbled together by an employee or by his nephew or uncle,” Biglin recalls the CFO and others in his position saying. “Someone just shows up in a truck and sets stuff up in our office. If the FDA came in here and we say we can’t produce this lab data or that, we are out of business.”

The CFO talked about multiple versions of contracts lost, emergency Best Buy trips for whatever hardware is on sale and documents that are never seen again.

That conversation last January set into motion the long-discussed plans for Interphase, which does 60 percent of its business in the life sciences, to develop a turn-key, managed IT platform targeted for small and medium-sized emerging pharmaceutical and biomedical companies that need top-level security, guaranteed disaster recovery, FDA compliance and flexibility. Biglin says that Ready-IT BioPharma, which launched late last month, just might be the only system of its kind.

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Links: State budget cuts mean less for startups, Penn president gets national bioethics nod and More

DEFINITE READS

• The Pittsburgh Business Journal reports that the Pennsylvania budget cuts mean less money for startups. H/T Philly Tech News
• The Green Skeptic and the Inquirer’s Mike Armstrong give their takes on Founders Factory from Philly Startup Leaders. See our review here.
• Dude from Philly Eco City wants to try a DIY car share and wants help.
• NJBIZ reports on a Camden startup focusing on cyber threats like flash mobs. H/T PTN

After the jump, CoTweet gets big name clients, Viddler video of Jay Adelson and Kevin Rose and more.

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Shop Talk: Devon Segel CEO of Dining Info and GoBYO.com

This is something of a family business.

In 2005, serial entrepreneur Joseph Segel, a 1951 Wharton graduate who made a name for himself launching the Franklin Mint and the multibillion dollar home-shopping behemoth QVC, decided Philadelphia needed a database for its restaurants.

He started with his own personal Excel spreadsheets, detailing restaurant information, offerings and accomodations, but he wanted to expand it online.

So he turned to his 29-year-old, more tech-savvy granddaughter, Devon Segel, for help. She was busy building people-search databases for the American Red Cross with Comcast and Google during the melee of Hurricane Katrina, so occasional help and direction was all she could give.

He launched in spring 2006 an early incarnation of his idea, not just reviews or food writing but a comprehensive collection of information backed by deep data sets about the Philadelphia dining scene, which, of course, has a lot to do with BYO-style neighborhood restaurants.

But Joseph, now 78, wanted Devon to bring her design and development background to what he aimed to be another in a more-than-two-dozen-long list of business ventures.

“He and I have always had a great relationship. He’s a very serious and focused businessman. I am a young woman whom he tries to groom into a serious and focused businesswoman,” says Devon, now CEO of Voorhees, N.J.-based Dining Info LLC, which operates GoBYO.com and DiningInfo.com with plans of launching more. “He calls himself my ‘part-time adviser.’”

It wasn’t until 2007 that she took the job with pop pop, who splits his time between Bryn Mawr on the Main Line and Florida. Now, three years after first launching, their sites use a database that has some 100 data fields on 52,000 restaurants, including 17,000 BYOs, from 10 metro areas and growing.

Devon is sitting on a four-tiered revenue model, the funding to get there and, with a blurb mention due for the August issue of O Magazine, buzz surrounding a new look and focus.

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Report: Philly had nation’s largest increase in VC investment in Q2

We at Technically Philly love July.

Not because this is the month we celebrate the birthplace of our nation (Ed.: In the birthplace of our nation) or because we get to travel to the Jersey Shore. No, because we’re amped for the second quarter regional venture capital numbers.

If you recall, last quarter was abysmal for the region and the rest of the country as VC investment slowed to a near halt. Some declared a sort of VC armageddon.

This quarter, the national numbers went the only direction they could have: up.

In the aggregate, the national venture capital outlook only received a modest bump in the second quarter with some regions growing faster than others. But no region saw growth like Philadelphia.

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Technically Not Tech: Kendra Gaeta and KidsZillions on branding and allowance saving

Kendra Gaeta is facing branding issues with her allowance service for kids but remains bullish on the idea. Here she presents her concept at Ignite Philly 3 on May 3, 2009 in Fishtown's Johnny Brenda's.

Updated 3:02 7/20/09 for copyright clarification

It’s KidsZillions now and legal vagaries may force that to change once more, but that doesn’t make Kendra Gaeta any less passionate about the mission.

You may have seen her present at Ignite Philly 3 in Johnny Brenda’s on May 3 (where we declared her to have given the best performance), but the allowance chore management savings site for kids that Gaeta described was then called KidsMoney.

During her presentation, she briefly alluded to the possible name change then and made the move not long after, respectfully forfeiting the brand to a juvenile financial management author with a similar mission.

Her team is now dubbed KidsZillions, but some legal advice has left them feeling compelled to make another jump.

An e-commerce company called GiftZillions owns their similar trademark, and while it doesn’t appear to have anything near the same education mission as KidsZillions, Gaeta is getting more advice that branding may be a problem there, too. (Her company is tweeting at the far less distinctive @KidProject)

“I’ve been told we could have enough of an e-commerce edge that users would see us as a kids versions of GiftZillions,” she says. “It stings a bit, that we [could] have the copyright for a name we really like and yet are told we shouldn’t do anything with it.

“But I know building the project is more important.” So that’s what she’s doing.

While the name debate continues and their Web site’s interactivity features remain in development, the company, which is part of the second class of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures, this week launched the Allowance Project, a video blog that will feature interviews of a broad, diverse cross-section of people explaining their savings and spending habits as children.

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Friday Tech Links: Startup double takes, Solar industry coming to town and More

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.

We found some redundancy in technology startup news this week.

Remember back in April, we introduced you to Stealth Rowing, which was constructing indoor training equipment for crew teams? Remember how you thought that was a novel idea and then forgot about it because no sensible person gets up at four a.m. to splash in the Schuylkill?

Well, maybe it wasn’t all that novel an idea.

As Inquirer business columnist Mike Armstrong reported late last month, two Philadelphia University graduates are rolling out the Benson rower, a piece of machinery that, yup, simulates rowing on open water. This city is silly with those silly narrow boats.

That isn’t it.

Callowhill-based Avencia has released two data-heavy, online mapping displays in recent weeks: on legislative data and election data. Well, there are other wonks in town. Mikey Armstrong, of Philadelphia Business Today fame, again introduced us to a player in startup bizarro world.

Center City-based neighborhood revitalization group the Reinvestment Fund has won some praise of late for its PolicyMap.com, a freemium-model display that maps block-by-block statistics on things like household incomes, foreclosures and employment.

The more the merrier, I suppose.

After the jump, Geekadelphia talks horror films, sex addicted principals on MySpace, the solar world comes to Philly and four other regional tech stories you need to read, including our most trafficked story of the week.

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