YourMech.com: connecting car owners and mechanics for discounted repairs

The car repair business needs disruption, says a Drexel University alumnus, and he has the platform to do it.

YourMech.com, billed as ‘a car concierge service,’ connects car owners with vetted mechanics who handle minor repair jobs at up to a third cheaper than repair shops, says CEO Art Agrawal, a 2007 Drexel graduate now living in the Bay Area. The service is currently testing in Philadelphia, the first market for the early stage startup.

Users can get an instant quote and schedule an appointment online, where all the maintenance records are kept in the cloud, and a mobile mechanic can come to a person’s home or place of work for smaller jobs.

“Mechanics who work for repair shops make very little money, like $15 an hour on average. Consumers pay $60-$75 an hour to the repair shops,” says Agrawal, 28. “We are empowering these mechanics to work directly with the car owners and make twice as much money. Car owners can get an awesome and convenient service at [almost] 30 percent lower fees. Everyone wins.”

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Azavea grows, @PhilsBeerman gets beer, @geekadelphia judges and more Links

• Growth at Azavea, Stroll lands them on Inner City 100 list [Philly Inc: Inquirer]
• ComedySportz Hosting ComedyGeekz this Saturday… And We Will Judge Them Harshly [Geekadelphia]
• Beer vendor wants you to “tweet from your seat” at Phillies home games [NewsWorks] — Bill Watkins (@PhilsBeerman)
• Ditch the Litter Box, Scoop Up Sales [Wall Street Journal] — Yardley, Bucks County entrepreneur Rebecca Rescate ‘s CitiKitty company is a retailer of potty-training kits meant to teach cats to use a toiley in five weeks.
• Philadelphia To Become Second City to Host GameLoop, Local Game Developers Organize Their Own Unconference [Geekadelphia]

Penn’s new billionaires, @FakeAPStylebook from South Philly and more Links

DEFINITE READS

• Fake out: Twitter group writes the book on its grammar spoof [Inquirer] — South Philly resident RJ White is a contributor to the @FakeAPStylebook that is now publishing a book
• Study asks well-to-do Philadelphians how they’re investing [Philadelphia Business Journal]
• Penn’s new billionaires: FarmVille creator, Groupon backer [Inquirer] — Mark Pincus of Zynga and Russian investor Yuri Milner
• Philly’s Food in Jars a finalist in Saveur Magazine’s best food blog awards [Geekadelphia] Marisa McClellan

Below, see what Philly startup is moving into a church, big startup perks in Pittsburgh and more.

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Should Center City be a technology business hub?: other neighborhoods compete

Cristina Greysman from Document Depository Corporation explains some of the setbacks young entrepreneurs face in Center City.

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

For Paul R. Levy, the president and CEO of the Center City District, the transformation that area has experienced over the last 20 years has been a huge success story amid the backdrop of serious economic troubles. But not necessarily for the reasons you might think.

It’s the outdoor cafes. All 213 of them.

“To me, that is the ultimate vote of confidence in downtown. People think it’s clean and safe,” he said.

Currently holding 214,433 jobs and paying over $12 billion in salaries annually, Center City relies primarily on the health care and education industries for the bulk of its economic drawing power, Levy said.. While not an alarming statistic on the surface, one need look no further than Detroit to determine what happens to a city that puts all of its progress behind a limited number of industries.

“We cannot rely on health care and education as the primary means of support,” Levy said.

So how about a move to the tech industry? Well, that’s a little easier said than done.

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Ohanarama: BrainRewards launches public beta of new family game network

Ohana means ‘family’ in Hawaiian. Ohanarama is the new family game network from a mother, serial entrepreneur and her team.

Ohanarama, which recently launched public beta, is the signature platform from BrainRewards, a co-educational gaming startup co-founded by Jane Hoffer (@janehoffer), the mother of three and president of the Alliance of Women Entrepreneurs.

“The old story is that, yes, adults are flocking to social networks like Facebook,” says Hoffer. “In doing our initial prototyping, we found two really interesting things: that children under 13 are very interested in playing with family online and that there are 70 million grandparents, 50 percent of whom live more than 200 miles from grand kids and there’s no real interactive way for an extended family to play from a distance, other than maybe Skype.”

“So we said, ‘Let’s bridge that.’ The family is the original social network. It’s how kids socialize,” Hoffer says. “So we are taking the best of gaming and the best of social networking and bringing it to the fore to the multi-generational family online.”

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Colin Weir: “there’s no startup culture around video” in Philly

This is Exit Interview, a weekly interview series with someone who has left Philadelphia, perhaps for another country or region or even just out of city limits and often taking talent, business and jobs with them. If you or someone you know left Philly for whatever reason, we want to hear from you. Contact us.

In a few weeks, Colin Weir will be gone.

The Toms River, N.J. native video producer is leaving April 19 to work for TWiT.tv in Petaluma, Calif. A Rowan University alumnus, Weir, 25, is leaving a job as a video production specialist for a Center City hospital to chase dreams westward.

Though he wants to stay in Philly, he says there just isn’t a culture around video like Philly is developing in other creative fields. Below, Weir talks about how he sees Philly on his way to the airport.

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Does crowdfunding work for early stage growth companies?

This is a guest post by Christopher McDemus of MCD Law Partners a law firm specializing in startups and technology businesses, as part of our Guest Contributor Week. Want to have an op-ed or feature you’ve written to appear on TP, now or in the future? Drop us a line.

Disclosure: MCD Law Partners is a sponsor of Switch.

I guess crowdsourced funding or “crowdfunding” – as it seems to be known – has reached mainstream now that The Wall Street Journal (article), Knowledge@Wharton (article), TechCrunch (article) and The Economist (article) have all written articles on the topic.  The earliest article I found regarding crowdfunding was a Times article from 2008, so the concept is still relatively new.

By now, most people understand the concept of crowdsourcing and if you combine that concept with trying to raise money for something then you’ve got crowdfunding.  It’s a collaborative way to fund a project.  Given that the average amount crowdfunded appears to be somewhere between $2,000 and $10,000, I’d suggest that crowdfunding slides into the financing continuum somewhere around the “friends and family” level – generally the financing stage during which you are looking for smaller amounts of capital for market research or proof of concept.  Although $2,000 to $10,000 would still be small even by friend and family round standards.

Read more at VC Deal Lawyer

Municibid: the eBay for government surplus scores Philly, Boston contracts

Think of it like eBay for government surplus.

Headquarted in Pottstown and with offices at the Navy Yard, Municibid, the startup online auction platform built for governments to auction the tools, equipment, yes, even the infrastructure it no longer needs, has had two big wins in recent weeks: a year contract with the City of Philadelphia and a three-year deal with the City of Boston.

On the site, where only government agencies can sell but anyone can bid, typical items include vehicles, emergency equipment, heavy equipment, tools, furniture and commodity items like scrap metal, stone, wood and the like. Oh, and there was the one time when Municibid auctioned off that Montgomery County bridge.

Grabbing contracts from Philadelphia and Boston is a big leg up, even if founder Greg Berry isn’t getting a dime from the governments.

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TalkChalk: In education, “If you take the approach that Facebook is evil, you will lose,” says David Simnick

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

Social networking hasn’t hit education like it could, says David Simnick.

“The beauty of this idea is in its simplicity,” said Simnick, 23, a first-year social studies teacher at Young Scholars Charter School in North Philadelphia through the Teach for America program, in an interview with Technically Philly. “We want to unleash the potential of social media in the classroom.”

Simnick’s vision to maximize social media’s educational potential has come to be known as TalkChalk, an online education platform that debuted at Philly Startup Weekend late last month and is aimed at teachers and professors who want to reach their students where they already are. Namely, Facebook.

“If you take the approach that Facebook is evil, you will lose,” said Simnick, originally from Illinois. “So turn it into an educational tool that you can use.”

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Monetate’s David Brussin: Why you should launch a tech company in Philly

Writing for VentureBeat, David Brussin, CEO of Monetate in Conshohocken, lays it down:

“Contrary to conventional wisdom, Silicon Valley isn’t the only place to go when you get serious about building a new company in the technology space.

Sure, it’s  a great place to start this sort of business, but the case for moving your company there is not as strong as it used to be. I’ve stared, run and sold many companies far from the Valley – with my latest venture firmly based in Philadelphia. Here’s why I’ve avoided ground zero for many tech companies:“

H/T Alex U-A