Switch Philly: Stealth company named fourth presenting company

At Technically Philly we’ve written nearly 1,000 posts covering the technology community here in Philadelphia. If you paged through our archives, you would come across hundreds of local companies, each with something innovative to offer the city and the world.

However, in the rare circumstance that you do not have hours to look at TP’s back archives, let us help you take an easier, much more fun approach: Switch.

Switch is a brand new event from Technically Philly that will feature seven-minute demos from the most innovative and interesting companies in the Philadelphia region. At Switch, you’ll be able to see the Philadelphia-based companies that inspire and innovate in a little under an hour.

Continue reading on Phillymag.com to find out the fourth of five companies presenting at Switch. Read about the event here.

10 Twitter users every Philadelphian should follow

Some people count how many friends they have, and some people count the value of their friendships. On social media — and the web generally — we have the same kind of experience.

We can count just about everything online, and so it should surprise no one that as social media has boomed, so too have the comparisons between Facebook friend counts and Twitter followers.

But there’s so often a nuance that raw numbers can’t show.

It’s easy enough to track who are the most followed Twitter users in Philadelphia, but everyone is trying to figure out how those figures measure in influence — or ‘resonance.’ Suppose we want to see who are the biggest Philadelphia voices in the Twitter conversation — not spam accounts with big follower numbers, but those people who you should be following, whose opinions matter and are being heard.

Simply, what Philadelphia Twitter users matter most?

Find the rest on the Philly Post of Philadelphia magazine.

Tourism on your phone: How Philly is leading and why it matters

With tourism, it’s all about where you are. Exactly where you are.

In Philadelphia, the past month has seen a wash of mobile geo-location tourism applications launch in and around the Cradle of Liberty. Trends say those deals and the mobile tools they employ today will help to profoundly reconfigure how tourists experience this greene country towne in the future.

City tourism officials announced last week with great fanfare a mobile app that puts users onto competitive ‘treks,’ sending them throughout the city to find and explore and earn points for what they find and how they find it. Philadelphia is the first city to use the platform, developed with SCVNGR, a now Boston-based company rooted at Princeton and Drexel universities.

In May, a deal was announced that partnered Commonwealth booster agency visitPA with geo-location social media powerhouse Foursquare, offering users digital badges for checking in at locations across the state in one of three categories: dining, buying and museum-going. Visit Bucks County has also launched a Foursquare deal, and the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corp. is starting to play there too.

Then in early June, the Fairmount Park Art Association unveiled its multi-platform Museum without Walls, in which visitors to the Ben Franklin Parkway can dial a phone number and choose to hear professionally-produced, rich oral histories of the art and sculptures that line that famed promenade.

All are giving users choice.

Read more at Philly Mag’s Philly Post.

Philly Geeks: the scene that gives back

In February, venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and non-profit employees gathered at a coworking space in New York’s Tribecca neighborhood to chat ”Social Entrepreneurship:” businesses that focus as much on social good as the bottom line.

Halfway through the event, organized by Philadelphia’s Good Company Ventures, an audience member asked what city should serve as the center of this social entrepreneurship movement. A surprising number people immediately responded, “Philadelphia.”

It’s no secret that most large America cities are vying to be “The next Silicon Valley.” This typically means a focus on early stage technology and Internet startups, some of which—hopefully—become large employers drawing lots of young, highly educated taxpayers.

While Philly has no shortage of people clamoring for an effort to remake the city into a “Philicon Valley,” recent trends indicate that the city’s entrepreneurial community is busy carving out a different niche in the nation’s technology environment: startups focused on social good, not just the bottom line.

This isn’t an uphill battle, the city is home to some of the leaders in the field of Social Entrepreneurship. Here are some of the local players working to use technology and business to make Philadelphia—and the world—a better place:

Read more at Philly Post.

We need a Philly Tech Week

In an informal partnership with Philadelphia magazine’s new Philly Post daily news blog, Technically Philly will be offering our insight on Philadelphia technology to a broader audience of tech-interested individuals every Tuesday. As is true of so much of our effort, this is yet another opportunity to voice the triumphs and concerns of the community to a broader audience in the city and beyond.

Next week, the city’s bars, breweries and pubs will be center stage as the third annual Philly Beer Week kicks off. The event gives the city’s beer scene a chance to shine on a national spotlight, attracting outsiders to see the beer culture that has been growing rapidly in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile, the city’s technology scene is experiencing a similar revival. After being nonexistent for years, the city suddenly has a handful of events the blend culture and technology to help put Philadelphia in a broader national conversation about new startups, investment and innovative ideas.

The two “scenes” overlapped this week with the creation of the Philly Beer Week iPhone app by a group of volunteers. The application helps Philly Beer Week attendees easily find their next watering hole during the week-long festival and uses geolocation to tell you the event nearest to you. Technically Philly thinks, however, that the two burgeoning scenes have much in common and have a lot to learn from one another.

In fact we think techies should borrow liberally form our beer-drinking friends to help continue Philadelphia’s growing reputation as a tech town. Here’s what needs to happen:

Continue reading at The Philly Post.