Jack Groetzinger, formally of Scribnia, presents SeatGeek at TechCrunch 50. See the video at the end of the post.

Update: A reader points out that WizHive, started by DreamIt founder Mike Levinson, has Philly connections. Read about the company’s time at TechCrunch here.

If TechCrunch 50 can be a startup’s launching pad to millions (just ask Mint.com), why aren’t more local companies making the journey to the Valley?

One of the marque events of the Web 2.0 world, TechCrunch 50 (formally the TechCrunch 40) is essentially a business plan contest on steroids. For this year’s version, more than a thousand startups applied to be one of the 50 companies that present to judges for a chance to win $50,000 in startup funding and a whole lot of attention.

This year’s winner, RedBeacon, has already been announced, but that got us thinking: did any local companies make the trip West?

Among the 50 companies selected to present to judges, Technically Philly could only find one company with any sort of connection to our fair city: SeatGeek.

If SeetGeek doesn’t sound familiar to you, then maybe you know the founders’ last project, Scribnia. Launched at University City summer incubator program DreamIt Ventures and covered earlier this year by TP, Scribnia is a platform to rate writers on the Web and was sold before DreamIt even finished its Demo Day.

Scribnia founders, Jack Groetzinger and Russ D’Souza quickly got to work on their next project: SeatGeek, a price tracker for event tickets. While Groetzinger and D’Souza hail from Dartmouth, they earned their chops at the University City Science Center while participating in DreamIt and, in an interview with TP in June, considered setting up shop in Philadelphia.

“We’re here, and we really like it a lot,” D’Souza said. “There is definitely a chance we will be here in the long run.”

The team was dispersing from San Francisco for the conference and none were coming back our way just yet.

KNOW OF ANY OTHERS?

More than a hundred more startups were invited to the conference’s “DemoPit,” a room jammed with table where runners-up can demo their products to attendees. When combined with the 50 companies selected to present, we believe there has to more local connections than just SeatGeek.

Know of any? Drop us a comment below, or reach out through our contact form.

See SeatGeek’s presentation at TC50 below:

Pulling a fabric graphic printed by Larger Than Life Prints from a wall is easy and clean. The graphic has been removed without a tear. The wall remains unmarred, without a mark.

It’s a landlord’s dream.

The Old City-based company, founded by Kendall Schoenrock and business partner Carsten Petzold, provides the technology that allows users to submit their own high-resolution graphics and print them on one- to seven-foot fabric sheets that can easily be placed on a wall. Artists, too, are able to cash in on the action. By partnering with the site, they are able to price their works appropriately, and keep a portion of the sales after material and labor has been deducted by LTL.

Thought it may seem little like a technology startup, LTL is funded by Ben Franklin Technology Partners and has been active in Philadelphia’s and Silicon Valley’s technology communities.

Recently, the company announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Start SOMA to feature well-known artists organized by Start on one of LTL’s partner pages. The two companies have managed to nab art by Susan Kare, the graphic designer who created the original graphics and fonts for Macintosh computers, urban artist Justin Bua, Sugarluxe and a handful of other known artists.

Both have also launched a series of iPhone applications [iTunes link] featuring artist work as iPhone wallpaper graphics that can be quickly purchased as large wall prints from the LTL store.

The partnership was forged to supplement LTL’s already growing portfolio of wall prints, this time, with professional artwork.

“It’s high-profile, high quality content for our catalog, and we’ve taken that to the next level with a Start Mobile iPhone app,” Schoenrock says. “We’re attempting to enable consumers to buy high quality art from well-known, curated artists at an affordable price, printed on our unique removable material.”

Schoenrock says that sales have been “impressive,” though he declined to disclose specific figures. At least one artist, who offered a free wall graphic in a contest to their fans, received more than a thousand entries to win.

Last December, LTL Prints rolled out a more customizable upload tool, as Schoenrock explains below.

Start Mobile recently made headlines on TechCrunch when its iPhone app that contained Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama “Hope” poster art was rejected from Apple’s App Store. Surely, the TechCrunch press hasn’t hurt the company. LTL Prints, too, was featured on the popular technology site. The “pop” that LTL got from the feature was real, Schoenrock says.

“There’s a myth out there that TechCrunch readers don’t buy anything. I would say that’s not true in our case. [The TechCrunch push] was the perfect storm of a target audience that was really passionate about the things we were talking about.

Though Schoenrock says his company chose to send its product to the online publication free of charge, it was by no means a sponsored post. LTL has done business with TechCrunch in the past, when Michael Arrington & Co. purchased prints for one of their meetup events.

Schoenrock says that it is achieving its milestones with BFTP and has the new digs to prove it. LTL recently moved its production equipment out of a small Center City-based apartment to a larger 2,000 square foot facility in Old City.

Fortunately, it’s a small setup—the company owns a single 1440 dpi 6-color printer with eco-solvent inks that prints on a removable fabric. A laser-guided blade cuts the prints. It’s slick—in a demonstration with Technically Philly, Schoenrock showed how quickly and quietly the device can make and cut prints with efficiency and precision.

But how did a wall graphic printing company get hooked up with TechCrunch? And why does it have such strong roots in Philly’s technology community?

Perhaps it’s the company founders’ backgrounds.

Schoenrock graduated from Villanova in 2003 and joined ePrivacy Group, a consulting and anti-spam tech firm, members of which spun off to create TurnTide, a First Round Capital-funded investment based in Conshohocken that was acquired by Symantec in 2004, six months after inception, for $28 million in cash.

Schoenrock was an angel investor in TurnTide.

“It’s hard to articulate how amazing that experience was. I bought a little red sports car and went to Villanova for an MBA,” he says.

Wanting to get back into technology after graduating with his master’s, Schoenrock hooked up with Petzold, a German entrepreneur and founder of Spreadshirt, a global leader in custom apparel Web sites like Cafepress and Zazzle, who has grown the business to do sales in the low two-digit millions.

They decided on custom wall graphics, which wasn’t too off the Spreadshirt business model, but unique enough to stand alone.

A pivotal question remained: whether or not the company would launch in New York or Philadelphia. Schoenrock convinced Petzold to settle down in Philly, reminding him of his relationships in the angel investing community and Philly’s resources and workers.

“Philadelphia has been absolutely great,” Schoenrock says.

-30-

Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.

The entrepreneur turned venture capitalist, who made his name on the back of the $355 million sale of his creation Half.com to eBay in 2000, has been a bit of a big fish in an underdeveloped Philadelphia pond for some time now. But he doesn’t always take adulation so warmly.

Kopelman was reportedly put off by the label of the wealthiest self-made person in Philadelphia, author W. Randall Jones told the Inquirer. For his new book, the Richest Man in Town, Jones traveled to 100 U.S. cities to collect business wisdom from those atop the income brackets in their towns and found Kopelman to be our pick of the litter.

“He was very upset with me,” Jones told the Inqy.

While Kopelman may have disliked the thought of being placed above a host of the city’s billionaire’s boys club, it’s not the only big call he’s gotten this week.

As we tweeted, Silicon Valley blog TechCrunch called Kopelman’s West Conshohocken-based FirstRound Capital, which also has San Francisco offices, the fourth most networked venture capital firm in the country.

Here’s the science behind the rankings from TC:

Vijay Dondeti, a graduate student in bioinformatics, applied the analysis in the Hochberg paper to about 2,700 investors in CrunchBase who participated in over 3,300 startup funding rounds between 2006 and 2008. He scored each investor based on how well connected they are to other investors as well as how well-connected their co-investors are to other investors. “In summary,” says Dondeti, “to get a high score, you need to co-invest often with others that also co-invest often.” [Source]

It’s hard to overstate what that means for the region. With news that Ben Franklin Technology Partners is on the state budget chopping block, early stage funding becomes vital. FirstRound certainly invests heavily outside our region, but it’s still a serious international VC firm just a regional rail ride from Center City.

And that’s some attention that Kopelman will have to tolerate.

Philly-based Adography's new look

At your typical startup, the founders will often have to go through the trouble of hiring an outside public relations firm.  That is, unless you are computer developer Ben LeDonni, in which case you can just shout across the house to ask your wife.

Ben, along with his wife Kelly, a public relations representative, joined forces to work on Adography, a site that connects amateur photographers with companies looking for specific candid photos to be featured in advertising materials. A company might place a request for, say, a mother hitting her head on a van steering wheel. Photographers submit their photos, and advertisers can pay a fee to the photographer ranging from $20 to $100 with Adography taking a ten percent cut.

Thus far, the couple has bootstrapped the entire operation, and they are beginning to pick up some momentum. In February, the site was featured on TechCrunch and, subsequently, Digg. The site is growing with nearly 500 users and recently, the couple has been hard at work on a new redesign (pictured above) that will unroll a bunch of new features such as Flickr integration.

We sat down with Kelly and Ben to ask them how many users they have, what was it like getting featured on TechCrunch and how a boogey board spurred their entrepreneurial spirit.

Where did the idea for Adography come from?

Ben: It started as a picture I took that had clear branding in it. It was a picture of my sister-in-law and she was on a body board. This picture was her coming in on a wave and the board said “Morey Boogey” on the bottom, so clear and perfectly branded. I said “There has got to be a ton of people who have pictures like this,” and some companies would love if these pictures get used in their advertising, especially if it’s natural and not really staged.

How much could a photographer expect to make?

Ben:  Because we are just starting up, we dont really know the answer to that question. We know that agencies are willing to pay decent amounts of money for the right shot … We think of what it takes for, say, Coca-Cola to stage a photo shoot [versus buying stock photos]. We know we are at a price point between those two, we just don’t know how close it is to the photo shoot versus how close it is to the stock photography.

Kelly: Photos for as low as $20 have sold, and photos have sold all the way up to $100.

Adography's traffic in Feb. 2009 when it was linked by TechCrunch (click for full graph).

What was it like to be featured on TechCrunch?

Ben: It was very, very exciting. My reaction to being featured on TechCrunch was “we’ve succeeded,” because from day one I kept reading TechCrunch thinking: “somebody eventually is going to have this idea [of selling photos to businesses for ads], it’s just one of those ideas that makes you think ‘Why isn’t anyone doing this?’”

I was so excited that we had done it first, that we had gotten the idea out there … we started getting a lot press with that. A lot of photographers signed up, and some partnerships came up that we discussed, so it’s really been great.

Kelly: We got more traffic that day than we ever could dream. We also had a lot of comments that were a little harsh to take, even though they were very obviously needed. Friends and family will tell you how much they like it, but you need complete strangers to get that eye-opening [criticism], and it’s the reason we redesigned the site and changed our terms and conditions. Most of the comments where things we can work on and not critical of the overall idea.

What’s the future for Adography?

Ben: We would like to better position ourselves so that agencies and big brands, people that have products that are country-wide, could be using our service to get better photos for their advertising. The shift for us is trying to capture a bigger scale audience. In the future, it would be nice to have a steady stream of photographers that are coming in with branded photos without being requested … We also want to reach out to people engaged with a brand on Flickr or Facebook as well as other areas and tighten their engagement.

What makes you Technically Philly?

Ben: Besides being huge Eagles fans? We both live in Philly, we both went to school at Villanova, we set our roots and foundation in Philadelphia when we got married.

Kelly: We got married in Philadelphia, I’ve lived here my whole life. I know nothing but Philly. The city has so much talent to tap into, it makes it very easy for a startup to start here.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

Full Disclosure: Technically Philly met with Ledonni in her role as a PR rep for the Spark! event earlier this month.