Wharton’s Kembrel.com launches first private retail sales store on Facebook

Last week, as students at Temple University began their first week of classes, across town, Cherif Habib and Stephan Jacobs were putting finishing touches on the official launch of a six-month project before they, too, hit the books.

Sure, the two second-year Wharton MBA students might have planned the launch before they became brain-deep in business studies, but it’s more likely perfect timing for Kembrel.com, their online retail store aimed at the college student apparel market.

Kembrel sells clothing, shoes and accessories for men and women. It’s recently moved into the gadget market, too, offering add-ons for iPhones. Since a soft-launch in April, Kembrel has racked up 20,000 registered users through word of mouth marketing efforts. It’s also began promoting a “pop-up” shops at local universities where the team sets up a small merchandise shop and explains the site to students.

Founded in April, the company had early success during Wharton’s Business Plan Competition, and Kembrel received the $3,000 People’s Choice Award, as we reported in May.

Their success hasn’t been by chance— the pair both had a background as software engineers and with entrepreneurial backgrounds.

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Event highlights for the week of July 27 – August 2, 2009

It’s true, folks. Media is no longer the empire it once was.

That’s why we’re psyched to see Saturday’s all-day DIY Days, featuring an impressive list of innovative speakers ranging from writers to filmmakers to musicians to game developers, all there to try to figure out the future. Represented organizations include Wired, Weathervane Music, P’unk Ave, Philly.com’s Phrequency and more. Hell, even the Blair Witch Project made it on the list.

Our guess, which is hardly a guess? All are secret techheads. Gadget geeks. Media monsters. Which is why you should be there. You’re thinking: this must cost like a million bucks, right? Two Grants? A Benji?

What’s that? It’s free? Gosh it’s good to do it yourself.

Another hot development? Looks like a group of gamers is getting together to explore the possibility of bringing a LAN Party biz to the city. The complaint is that there’s plenty of LAN locales in the ‘burbs, but nothing that you can bike or walk to (unless you’ve got Schwarzenegger legs). As always, we’re psyched to see some more developments in Philadelphia’s gaming community, including this one from Philadelphia LAN Party.

For the Web developers, Philadelphia Drupal Camp is sold out, but waiting for last minute cancellations. And maybe you know somebody, wink wink. If you can’t make it in, you can always sharpen up on the basics with HTML for Beginners.

A few other events and plenty of links to our comprehensive events calendar, after the jump.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.

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Friday Q&A: Steve Welch, candidate for Congress

Steve Welch’s business card could be three times the size of a normal person’s.

The Penn State grad founded the Mitos Group, a biotech company that grew to over 40 employees before it was sold to a Fortune 500 company when Welch was 29. Welch then co-founded DreamIt ventures, an early-stage incubator based in the University City Science Center. And, most recently he just fathered his second child.

But 32-year-old Welch, the new-father-entrepreneur-angel investor, is looking to add another job title to his resume: congressman.

Earlier this month, he launched his candidacy for the 7th congressional district of Pennsylvania with a video on his Web site.

Welch will become the Republican challenger to Democratic representative Joe Sestak. Sestak ultimately may not be his opponent, as he is said to be considering a showdown for the Democratic Senate seat against newly-minted Democrat Arlen Specter.

If elected, he would be the second youngest congressman, behind 28-year-old Aaron Schock (R- Minn.).

True to his past, Welch sees small business as the way out of the recession for the country and for Philadelphia. Welch says the level of spending and government impact on the free market is one of the primary reasons he is running. When we spoke, his second child was still on the way, and the thought that he would be born into debt was a motivation to act.

For the past year, Welch was an Eisenhower Fellow, which allowed him to travel the world taking notes on the best tactics for encouraging small business development.

“In my heart of hearts, I love seeing a need in the marketplace and rushing to fill that need. It’s the greatest rush in the world,” says Welch.

One plan he is fond of, he said, was the tactic of the government matching local early stage investments. That way, firms can decide what is the best investment, and the government can increase the flow of early stage capital with little to no additional labor or bureaucracy.

“We want the best in the world to land in Philadelphia,” he says, “that’s the greatest way to ensure long term success in this region.”

We chatted with Welch about small business in Philadelphia, and the effect of organizations like DreamIt and Ben Franklin Technology Partners.

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Drexel boasts tech, with smart grid system and incubator entrants

The City Six school with the computer science cred boasted its tech influence from two different places in big ways in recent weeks.

Drexel University is planning on deploying a smart grid system that will provide real-time measurements of location-specific energy outputs across its 65-acre campus in University City, as reported by inTech yesterday. The real-time pricing technology, which will come from Conshohocken-based Viridity Energy, will give Drexel the wherewithal to purchase power at low-demand times of the day and sell excess power back to the general power grid for profit.

That bit of news followed an announcement from the school’s LeBow College of Business that three new startups were welcomed into its Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship business incubator, all with a touch of technology. The three new entrants are Ranter, a social-networking tool that allows users to text groups; Konnect.me, a business-to-business Web portal and Stabiliz Orthopaedics, which is developing bone fasteners with bio-absorbable materials, as first reported by Mike Armstrong of the Inquirer.

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Events highlights for the week of June 29 – July 5, 2009

When there’s only a handful of events in the region, it makes this job easy. But the truth is, we prefer a challenge.

Unfortunately, there’s only a few events scattered on Tuesday and Wednesday this week. But hey, this way, you have practically no excuse to miss any.

On Tuesday, the Philly Ruby enthusiasts of Philly.rb bring back their popular Hack Night, where you sit in comfy chairs, plop your laptop next to your latte, and get cracking on yours and others project hurdles.

SEO Grail meets Tuesday with a talk from Web development company Goldstein Media LLC’s Seth Goldstein to discuss, what else? How to massage the Google.

The following day, DreamIt Ventures will show race film “Truth in 24.” The film has all you could ask for in a race film: action, adventure, drama and not a single sign of Vin Diesel. Oh yeah, and NFL Films Director of Project Management Alan M. Brown will be there to discuss how it all went down.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Events highlights for the week of June 22 – June 28, 2009

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking, “I wish I could design a map using Twitter that was a good user experience and utilized Google Book Search.”

Well Technically Philly reader, you’re in luck! Our fair city has a diverse slate of events this week that will make your strange hypothetical dream a reality in no time.

Get started after work on Tuesday and join the pun-loving OpenStreetMap enthusiasts over at the Prohibition Tap Room for “Mappy Hour.” Although, you shouldn’t have too much to drink, as it is awfully hard to chart the trails in Fairmount Park when you can’t walk straight.

PhillyCHI (which is not a box score for the upcoming Phillies-Cubs series) is getting together Wednesday to listen to Kyle Soucy, their former chair, talk usability testing. This is the first time in weeks that the group has held an event in city limits, so you best take El out to University City if you have been meaning to catch PhillyCHI in action.

On Thursday, you can either continue the usability theme with the UX Book Club meeting over at P’unk Ave, or you can head to Center City for the June Philly Tweetup.

Round out the week on Friday as University City continues its Google obsession with a meeting about how Google Books and Google Scholar affect librarians. Librarians, whatever you decide, please leave the card catalog alone. That thing is awesome.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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Google Street View tricycle spotted on UPenn campus

Image courtesy of CNet UK

At first glance, it seems that the Google Street View team is either trying to save the environment or dying to shed some pounds.

On Wednesday, a clearly-marked Google Street View tricycle was spotted heading East on Locust Walk through the University of Pennsylvania campus on the pedestrian bridge that crosses 38th street, according to reader Nick Sillik, a freelance Web and mobile developer.

“The group of college girls in front of me definitely recognized what it was and started dancing for it,” he wrote Technically Philly in an e-mail.

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Penn: Top IT workplace bringing tech-learning to Nicaragua

Photo of Optimus Prime prowling Penn's campus from SlashFilm.com, as linked at bottom.

Technology lovers at the University of Pennsylvania had at least two points of pride this week, a ranking and an act of good works.

Computerworld released its annual 100 Best Places to Work in IT list, naming Philadelphia’s Ivy League school No. 4, ranking it the best for benefits and second for diversity.

It comes near a university announcement that researchers from the school’s Graduate School of Education plan to introduce laptop computers and a technology-based curriculum to students and teachers in a rural community school for the children of coffee-farm workers in Nicaragua, beginning in July.

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Shop Talk: Scribnia out of private alpha, releases my Scribes

A screenshot of Scribnia's my Scribes feature, to be released tomorrow.

The Web runs on opinion.

We Digg, Stumble, rate and recommend everything from books to blogs and, if Scribnia gets its way, you will be able to add writers to the list.

Scribnia is a University City-based Web site that allows readers to rate and recommend authors, writers and bloggers on a one to ten scale. Users can leave comments and rank authors in categories based on their writing topic. For example, a political writer can be rated as more liberal or conservative, or a tech writer can be rated on a scale of whether they write more for the general public or for tech experts.

“Readers are actually starting not to just read one-off articles on sites like Digg, but [they are] finding authors that they care about and want to come back and read,” said co-founder Russell D’Souza.

The result is a growing database of content creators that can provide users with recommendations based on previous rankings. Rate, say, baseball writer Peter Gammons high and you may be recommended other baseball writers that Peter Gammons fans rated highly. Tomorrow, the site will roll out my Scribes, an RSS reader within Scribnia that will provide author recommendations based upon the feed items the users read.

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University City Science Center welcomes three new companies

University City incubator and research park the Science Center includes a series of facilities hugging the Market Street corridor between 34th and 38th streets. Photo courtesy of the Science Center.

Europe’s largest organization for advancing chemical sciences has landed.

The Royal Society of Chemistry, which has a worldwide network of members and an international publishing business, needed to set up an East Coast base to continue its expansion.

So, RSC and two other organizations, including a second foreign group making their first U.S. home in Philadelphia, have moved into the University City Science Center, the historic nonprofit� incubator and research park, according to a press release from the center [PDF].

With RSC, GADORE Center USA, an outpost of a German collaborative focused on renewable energy, is the newest participant in the center’s Global Soft landing program, which aims to help international companies develop a presence in the region’s life sciences and information technology markets. The program is housed at 3711 Market Street.

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