Rick Rasansky

Imagine sitting in front of an audience, entertaining a litany of personal and professional questions. Then imagine you don’t know whose asking each question because the audience members are submitting them anonymously using a software product you created.

Great. Now you have an idea of what it was like to be seven-time entrepreneur Rick Rasansky last night as he jovially participated in an hour-long Q&A session at Venturef0rth that was scandalously entitled “7 Startups, 4 wives, 1 entrepreneur.”

Using his own realtime feedback application Yorn, an audience of about 40 people, many of them also entrepreneurs, anonymously shot questions at Rasansky as he perched on a director’s chair and awaited the moderation of the coworking space’s cofounder Jesse Kramer.

Rasansky answered questions ranging from how to choose engineers and advisers to how to balance a startup and a family. He also — sort of — answered questions about his handful of ex-wives.

Rasansky, who is currently married, likens his marital history to launching a startup.

“You might say that if you were to compare it to a startup. A startup goes through a lot of different stages and pivots a lot and ends up finding the right direction,” Rasansky said. “And I definitely did.”

Check out video of Rasansky explaining how pitching to potential investors is different in Philadelphia than it is in places like New York City or Silicon Valley.

Over the course of his career, Rasansky has started a variety of high-powered businesses that range in focus from food services to technology, including China Grill Management, Millennium Media Group, eCal, Intronics Corporation, Sapphire Mobile Systems, the Network Acquisition Company and, as of 2010, Yorn.

He is also known for his role in the acquisition of Wireless Philadelphia from Earthlink, though he expressed regret that since he sold the 4200-node WiFi network back to the City of Philadelphia, nothing had been done to deploy it.

Venturef0rth is the relatively new coworking space in Callowhill. Kramer and cofounder Elliot Menschik regularly hold events in the space that all tend to start off with free Philly brews and networking. This Q&A event was no exception.

To learn more about Venturef0rth’s event programming click here.

Mashable covers DreamIt graduate ElectNext, the OKCupid for political candidates (which recently hired a Code for America fellow):

The idea is simple: First, users are asked to pick three issues that are most important to them. Choices include immigration, abortion, foreign policy and nine other categories. Next, users have to answer at least 10 additional questions to find their political matches — the more questions answered, the more accurate the results.

MORE

Michael Maher, a Naval Lieutenant and corporate coworking aspirant, is focusing his entrepreneurial efforts elsewhere.

Maher, who has started a handful of small businesses, won the Greater Philadelphia Veterans Network‘s “Shark Tank” business pitch competition last week to add another to his name, as ABC 6 reported. Maher beat out a field of five veterans-turned-entrepreneurs pitching business ideas to a panel of five judges, according to a release.

Maher is also one of three cofounders of the forthcoming Rittenhouse coworking space, Benjamin’s Desk, as Technically Philly reported. Though planned for an April launch, the corporate-focused effort’s launch is pushed back to June.

The winning pitch was for Real Comps, a planned online site for realtors to post home sales as they happen. Maher netted a $5,000 cash prize as well as $20,000 in services to help jump start the business, which he plans to launch out of Benjamin’s Desk when it opens.

“The website and mobile application are being built as we speak,” said Benjamin’s Desk vice president, general counsel and his wife Jennifer Maher. “From that point, the focus will be on sales and marketing and then, hopefully, move into the VC stage once we have more things in order.”

Maher was able to accept the award without giving up equity stake in the startup, Jennifer says.

Turns out Penn’s fraternities don’t produce the stereotypical frat brother. At least 17 tech companies, mostly startups, in New York are either founded or led by Penn alumni, many of them former brothers in Penn’s various fraternities, according to ongoing coverage by Business Insider.

We have the companies from Business Insider’s list below, but it’s worth seeing the names, positions and frats they say they call home. So see their list here.

1. Vente Privee USA
2. IA Ventures
3. Tracks
4. TechStars NYC
5. Local Response
6. Coursekit, their departure from Penn was covered here
7. Lerer Ventures
8. PureWow.com
9. Spark Capital
10.  CEO of BrandShare (who also founded the Webby Awards and Internet Week)
11. NutShellMail founder (who is also GM of Social Media, Constant Contact)
12. Mindspark Interactive (IAC)
13. Founder of Goodsie.com and Flavors.me
14. New York Groupon
15. Trendabl
16. Invite Media, though Google-owned developer offices are still in Center City
17. Aol leadership

Unfortunately, no Penn women, sorority sisters or not, were included on this list. That will be something to keep an eye out for in the future.

PalmLing, Inhabi and Airtime will be three of the five companies to compete at Switch Philly 3, the startup demo event that’s part of Philly Tech Week.

All will be demoing new products or thorough upgrades to services.

They will be joined by the winners of Startup Weekend and Mobile Monday’s demo events to round out the five demo companies — giving the chance for an idea to go from creation to launch during the week.

The event, presented by Novotorium and Morgan Lewis, will feature First Round Capital Managing Partner Josh Kopelman, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and Robin Hood Ventures Executive Director Ellen Weber as judges to determine the winner of a prize pack to help “switch” the startup into the city’s next great success.

The tech demo event will feature five local startups all competing for a chance to win a prize pack that includes space at local incubators like Novotorium, meetings with investors around the city and pro-bono legal services. The goal is to “switch” a local venture into the city’s next great startup success story while having a great time.

Get your tickets here.

The companies — CloudMine, ElectNext, SnipSnap, Grassroots Unwired, Metalayer, Kwelia, and Spling — all participated in DreamIt Ventures’ Fall 2011 Philadelphia program and presented at Demo Day in December 2011. DreamIt hosted the showcase because a number of investors expressed interested in the December Demo Day, but were unable to attend, Kerry Rupp told Technically Philly.

All seven companies made company pitches, though, for some, the event was an opportunity to continue to pursue open rounds, while for others it was a networking opportunity to meet with potential investors and create relationships, Rupp said.

Some of the companies looking to fill open round include SnipSnap, which has $350,000 committed and was looking to raise $500,000, Grassroots Unwired, which is attempting to raise a $700,000 seed round, Cloudmine, which is raising $500,000 with $325,000 committed, Kwelia, which is raising $300,000, and ElectNext, which is raising $750,000 and is closing the rest of the round at the end of the month, Rupp confirmed.

The event came on the same day of news that the minority entrepreneurship program that DreamIt piloted in Philadelphia will be expanded to a year-long program called DreamIt Access.

ElectNext recently announced plans to provide a new “Act” section of the The Economist Group’s election app, Electionism, according to a press release, which will match Electionism users with closely aligned political candidate based on the issues most important to the user. Spling, who is not actively raising funding, is moving to New York City, as Technically Philly reported.

The showcase, held on the Mezzanine Level of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, was invite-only. Among the investment firms represented, Rupp told Technically Philly, were MAG Fund, DFJ Gotham, Nokia Growth Partners, Bain Capital, Lerer Ventures, Firstmark Capital and various angel investors.

Cloudmine, SnipSnap and ElectNext are the three companies currently at the Inquirer incubator.

Turns out, despite the focus on them in technology news, there are lots of questions about what exactly a ‘startup‘ is.

Any new business might use the word as an adjective, but we at Technically Philly think we need a philosophy for what exactly constitutes a technology startup when we categorize and cover their work in the Philadelphia region.

Here’s our definition. Tell us what we’re missing.

• Broadly, a startup is a new business that is testing plans for scalable revenue.

Though not always, a technology startup typically has these common traits:

• Fewer than 20 employees
• Younger than three years
• Seeking or have secured early-stage investment, especially angel and Series A.
• Looking at scale of a product, rather than growth of a service
• Led by initial founders who describe themselves as entrepreneurs
• Focusing on disrupting existing processes through greater efficiencies
• Often involves technology solutions to create efficiencies through product over service

Loffles.com boasts that it is the best way to enter sweepstakes online. And now the company is live.

The site — the name deriving from the combination of ‘lottery’ and ‘raffles’ — offers users access to an updated catalog of prizes from familiar brands. Users watch a promotional video, answer questions — to show they watched — and gain entry to a drawing for, say, a Best Buy gift card, a Netflix membership or an Xbox 360. Each entry also earns users ‘loffles,’ which can be redeemed for other prizes or used for additional contest entry tickets.

Technically Philly first told you about Loffles, which has regional roots, in October, when the company quietly sought $500,000 in funding, and received $162,000. First listing the company in Gladwyn, where co-founder Brandon Yoshimura grew up, the startup has more formally set up its headquarters in Providence, Rhode Island, near where Yoshimura, 22, and his fellow co-founders met at Brown University.

The team has six other members, including the following: co-founder Steve Boland, 22, from Lafayette Hill, a graduate of Germantown Academy and Penn State; Chief Technical Officer Daniel Johnson, 29; Chief Marketing Officer James Kwon, 27; Director of Sales Vincent Tumbleson, 20, a junior at Brown; team developer Jake Buob, 20, a student at Johnson and Wales University and social media director Ashley Farquharson, 21, a student at UMass Amherst.

Loffles, which is actually incorporated in that tax haven of Wilmington, Del., is represented by Center City law firm Morgan Lewis and local PR agency Zer0 to 5ive and another co-founder is from Lafayette Hill and attended Penn State University. Though primarily in Providence, Loffles does have a small administrative office at 16th and Wood street where the team will “set up periodically,” said Yoshimura, an alumnus of the Haverford School.

First place winner Alexandre Scialom smiled as he accepted his award plaque for his winning business plan, theCourseBook.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

theCourseBook, billed by its founder as “Yelp for adult education” won Thursday the two top prizes at the second annual Milken-Penn GSE Education Business Plan, netting San Francisco entrepreneur Alexandre Scialom a cool $50,000 $25,000.

Thursday’s event, held by the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, was a business plan competition that challenges young entrepreneurs to apply their innovative business ideas in educational formats.

Of the more than 200 entries that were submitted from around the world, nine finalists were invited to the event, which was held in Silverman Hall on the University of Pennsylvania main campus in University City.

The daylong competition began at 8 a.m., with each team giving presentations to the 10 judges and others in attendance on the specifics of their business models in areas such as scalability, distribution and business structure.

Two separate awards were given, one by the Milken Family Foundation of Santa Monica, Calif., and the other made five finalists eligible for the Startl Prize for Open Educational Resources from Hewlett-Packard. The Milken prize included a cash reward of $25,000 and $15,000 for the runner up, and Scialom doubled his gift for the Startl nod.

Judging, which lasted more than two hours, ended in a unanimous selection for Scialom winning both prizes for his educational resource database theCourseBook. Second place was awarded to a team from Troy, N.Y. for its syllabus management platform Intellidemia.

Phoenix Wang read her critique about a contestant's business plan.elopment.

“Basically you can search for what you want to learn, find interesting classes, events, books and online materials. All of it is aggregated in one place and we make it really easy to search it and make it useful for users,” Scialom said of the CourseBook.

Many judges said they were impressed by the ease of access that theCourseBook provides to users along with its potential for further development.

“We picked theCourseBook because it levels the playing field of content providers and provides an interesting distribution model. At the same time it’s a model that has a growth model that has the potential to become a big, real business,” said Phoenix Wang, the founder and managing director of Startl and representative from the Open Educational Resources prize.

Scialom is originally from France and currently runs theCourseBook with only one intern whom he pays out of his own pocket. The cash prize will go directly to expanding the staff and resources of theCourseBook with a little going towards celebration, he explained.

“Maybe I’ll have a beer tonight,” Scialom said with a laugh, “ but the rest will go to the business.”

NFTE announces winner

(Left to Right) Sylvia Watts McKinney, Executive Director of NFTE Philadelphia, with first place winner Bianca Nieves, and Doug Alexander, President at ICG and co-Chair of NFTE Philadelphia’s Advisory Board. Photo by Daniel Burke Photography.

NFTE Philadelphia also announced the winner of its Philadelphia Final Regional Business Plan Competition 2011. The group, which encourages entrepreneurship in high school students nationwide will send student Bianca Nieves to the White House thanks to her business Grandama’s Secret, a venture based on her grandmother’s Hispanic spice for meats.

According to Executive Director Sylvia Watts McKinney, other finalists included:

• Farwa Batool is a Junior at Samuel Fels High School.   Her business, Sheila’s Boutique, has both an ethnic and international flare: high-end Pakistani and Indian clothing purchased wholesale from Asia and sold retail in Philadelphia.  Farwa has plans to eventually have her own line of clothing manufactured in India and sold in large cities throughout the United States.
• Sasha Carrero is a Senior at Woodrow Wilson High School in Camden, NJ.  Sasha is enrolled in the Culinary Arts program at WWHS, and her business is A Taste of Cake.  Sasha plans to enroll in The Restaurant School at Walnut Hill College. Afterwards, she plans build up a chain of bakeries and restaurants.
• Darryl Howell is a Junior at World Communications Charter School.  Darryl’s business is MYCAR, a tutoring service for children from Kindergarten through Eighth Grade. Darryl has plans to attend college after graduation from high school.
• Viktor Vabishevich is a Junior at George Washington High School. Viktor is running his own lawn care and landscaping business called Vito Lawns.  Viktor plans to expand his business into a  commercial landscaping business that will pay his college tuition.

See the group’s Facebook page for photos and additional information.

Woodshop Films founder Marc Brodzik gives direction to Scrapple TV Sports co-anchor 'Hot Carl' during a recent shoot.

The following is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods Program, the capstone class for the Temple Journalism Department.

A man in a suit and white beard with a deep baritone began to read the news in front of a green screen.

Suddenly, the bright ring of a cell phone broke the silence in the otherwise quiet recording studio. Marc Brodzik, who was standing behind the camera, wearing a faded Tide detergent shirt, shorts and flip-flops, reached into his pocket and with a grin pulled out his phone and shut the ringer off.

“Phones off, bitches.”

It is with that humor and laid backed demeanor that things are run at Brodzik’s Woodshop Films, a local video production company that started its own internet channel, called Scrapple TV, three years ago.

“I call it unprocessed television,” said Brodzik of his programming, which is as brash and as unapologetic in its humor as Brodik himself. “Scrapple is more gritty and more real.”

Scrapple TV is shot from Brodzik’s former woodshop studio, hence the name Woodshop films, on Green and 5th streets in Northern Liberties. Brodzik described the operation as a “pirate TV station” that fits with a changing trend in video content production.

“All of a sudden now HD video is in the hands of the common man, so I’ve kind of turned my art studio into this television station,” Brodzik said.

As of now, Scrapple TV features a number of different original shows with a range of characters from the anchor of Scrapple News, AP Ticker to the co-anchor of Scrapple Sports, Slow-Pitch Mike.

One of Scrapple TV’s most popular shows is a music review show called Breakfast at Sulimay’s. The show features three senior citizen regulars at Sulimay’s Restaurant in Fishtown giving reviews of hip hop and rock music with often hilarious results.

“I thought it was garbage. I think they need to hire better technicians. It was a mindless muttering,” said one reviewer after listening to a song by mashup artist Girl Talk.

How Brodzik came up with the idea for Breakfast at Sulimays is a perfect example of the eccentric creative process that fuels Scrapple TV.

“I was sitting in a diner and hearing these three old people have this triangulation in the room and it was just really funny,” said Brodzik, “And I thought we should have them review bands, that would be f—— awesome.”

Frank Baker or 'AP Ticker' as he's known at Woodshop Films reads the headlines for Scrapple TV's news program Scrapple News.

Brodzik funds the entire operation himself through commercial work for pharmaceutical companies using his background in the visual arts, specifically painting and woodwork. Beyond computers, most of his equipment is bought new, and he is helped by friends, unpaid interns and volunteers. Fittingly, considering the opening graphic to each show is an animated pig singing “Someday we’ll get paid for this.”

“I take any money I make and dump it back into my company. It’s completely hand to mouth,” Brodzik said.

Two years ago Brodzik received a Pew Foundation grant for media arts, which funded him for a year, and he has plans to begin to monetize Scrapple TV’s programming.

“We’re just about ready to go to venture capitalists to be first-stage investors just for Philly,” Brodzik said.

Brodzik said his vision for Scrapple TV expanded far beyond the Delaware Valley.

“My plan is to have what I call hyperlocal cells. We’ll have a staff of writers in each city who will create local content and then they’ll also syndicate stuff, “ said Brodzik, who said he would like to model it after weekly newspapers like City Paper and Philadelphia Weekly.

Brodzik would also like to see any expansions follow his model and have shows that cover not just entire cities but specific areas such as what Kenzo News, which covers the Kengsington area, does for Scrapple TV.

Expansion for Scrapple TV doesn’t just mean geographically for Brodzik but also an expansion for its content as well.

“I’d like to do more editorial or investigative type pieces. I like the idea of partnering up with journalists and bloggers. Getting into bigger and more juicier stories,” Brodzik said.

Marc Brodzik, right, talked with some of his staff during shooting at Scrapple TVs studios.

Although Brodzik’s ambitions are great, his viewership has not always been been able to match it.

Scrapple TV’s programming has some shows that bring in several thousand viewers, with highs including several popular episodes of Breakfast at Sulimay’s near or above 100,000 views and nearly 70,000 views from episode six of the show Smut Cave. Many other Scrapple TV episodes receive a few hundred views on Youtube.

Brodzik said he thinks this is more of a result of how he has handled the launching of Scrapple TV than shortcomings in its content.

“It doesn’t really get tons of views because I didn’t focus on marketing, but now I’m getting more obsessed with that and getting my numbers out there,” Brodzik said. “I was really trying to master making daily content on a regular basis and trying to nail that down first. I feel like once I get that solid, I can worry about building up an audience as opposed to getting an audience and having them be disappointed.”

Still, Brodzik said he knows the risk of online television programming.

“Definitely, I’m the f—— captain, and this is my ship, but I’m the only one that is going to sink. You can jump off with the life raft. I’m the one that has to go down with the boat,” said Brodzik, adding with another wide grin, “I’m all about sharing the booty though.”

He’ll just have to get more people on board.

To find out more about Scrapple TV visit its website at scrapple.tv.

Watch a video interview with Brodzik below.