Philadelphia to apply for Google’s experimental ultra-high speed broadband

It wasn’t at a press conference or inside the Inquirer editorial boardroom. The city’s announcement to join the rush for Google’s ultra-high speed fiber broadband came during a few minutes of a presentation, backed by dense slides at a technology community event inside a rock venue.

“Let’s light this joint up,” city Chief Technology Officer Allan Frank said, throwing his hands in the air and walking off stage at the fifth Ignite Philly, seemingly surprised by the cheers and laughs the slide earned.

The announcement at Johnny Brenda’s last night, a bar filled with mostly 20 and 30-somethings, came 10 months after Frank first unveiled his $100 million city technology investment vision to Refresh Philly, another young, hip, technology community event staple. Technically Philly urged continued involvement by the community and Frank and, in many ways, that’s continued.

The decision marks something of a marriage between likely the city’s two most prominent officials whom have hands in the region’s technology community: the son of a former mayor and, as City Councilman Bill Green put it last night, “the baddest ass CTO of any city, Allan Frank.”

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Friday Q & A: Mark Loschiavo, Executive Director of the Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship at Drexel University

Mark Loschiavo, Executive Director of the Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship at Drexel University, believes the region’s universities are key to heightening the city’s profile when it comes to entrepreneurship.

“Part of our mission is to not only drive entrepreneurship, but entrepreneurial thinking,” he says.

Since 2001, The Baida Center has been a business incubator in Drexel’s Lebow School of Business that houses eight to ten companies on average, mostly winners of the school’s incubator competition. The center is also a big reason the school was named one of the top three entrepreneurship programs for graduate students in the country (three spots ahead of, ahem, Temple University).

Technically Philly sat down with the man behind the scenes: Executive Director and Senior Executive in Residence Mark P. Loschiavo and asked him how the incubator works and why, like the rest of us, Loschiavo has trouble pronouncing “Baiada.”

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DreamIt Ventures Demo Day 2009: our awards

A crowd of more than 200 in the Independence Visitor Center ballroom for the second Dream It Ventures Demo Day.

Demo Day marked the end of the second session of DreamIT Ventures, with the box score showing growth: one company sold, several pledging to retain ties to Philadelphia and six already moving on user acquisition.

A collegial crowd of 200 — t-shirt adorned developers, business casual 20- and 30-somethings and a crush of lawyers and investors — piled into the Independence Visitor Center ballroom, away from cloudy skies and occasional rain, to hear presentations from 10 tech startups that were housed in the University City incubator this summer.

The buzz was just how few of the 10 presenting startups were actively and openly seeking funding — just three by our count — and the growth DreamIt has seen.

Some estimates put the audience size at nearly double last year’s inaugural Demo Day, during which the incubated companies present their progress after the three month program. There was national attention not present last time, with coverage from ReadWriteWeb and Tech Crunch on record.

Below we run through the ten companies and, more importantly, give awards for their presentations.

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TNT: David Clayton of the Klein Art Gallery, “at the intersection of art and technology”

"Stadium" by Lee Arnold is an example of the optically-related artwork that is part of The Vitreous, an exhibit at University City's Klein Art Gallery until Sept. 5.

An eager-looking gentleman in his late twenties with a toothy grin and a generic blue dress button-up was hanging around the Klein Art Gallery with what seemed like a few questions on his mind.

Though he remained polite, if he did get too friendly, it’d be tougher to dispatch him from Klein than most art installations. There aren’t steps worthy of an epic movie trilogy or foreboding 19th-century Gothic columns guarding its entrance. The nearly 35-year-old University City art venue, which recently opened its first nationally juried exhibition, is in the lobby of a Market Street office building.

“We don’t have a problem with foot traffic,” says David Clayton, Klein’s soft-faced, self-proclaimed “geek” curator. “You’ll get bike couriers and research scientists wandering through the exhibits. I think it’s a real success when we can just disrupt their day.”

So there’s no telling where that gentleman visitor came from or to where he disappeared after Clayton, 30, finished showing Technically Philly around the small and neat 22-artist exhibit called The Vitreous: Eyes and Optics, which explores themes of eyesight, visual perception and optical phenomena through contemporary art practices.

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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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Technically Not Tech: Kendra Gaeta and KidsZillions on branding and allowance saving

Kendra Gaeta is facing branding issues with her allowance service for kids but remains bullish on the idea. Here she presents her concept at Ignite Philly 3 on May 3, 2009 in Fishtown's Johnny Brenda's.

Updated 3:02 7/20/09 for copyright clarification

It’s KidsZillions now and legal vagaries may force that to change once more, but that doesn’t make Kendra Gaeta any less passionate about the mission.

You may have seen her present at Ignite Philly 3 in Johnny Brenda’s on May 3 (where we declared her to have given the best performance), but the allowance chore management savings site for kids that Gaeta described was then called KidsMoney.

During her presentation, she briefly alluded to the possible name change then and made the move not long after, respectfully forfeiting the brand to a juvenile financial management author with a similar mission.

Her team is now dubbed KidsZillions, but some legal advice has left them feeling compelled to make another jump.

An e-commerce company called GiftZillions owns their similar trademark, and while it doesn’t appear to have anything near the same education mission as KidsZillions, Gaeta is getting more advice that branding may be a problem there, too. (Her company is tweeting at the far less distinctive @KidProject)

“I’ve been told we could have enough of an e-commerce edge that users would see us as a kids versions of GiftZillions,” she says. “It stings a bit, that we [could] have the copyright for a name we really like and yet are told we shouldn’t do anything with it.

“But I know building the project is more important.” So that’s what she’s doing.

While the name debate continues and their Web site’s interactivity features remain in development, the company, which is part of the second class of University City incubator DreamIt Ventures, this week launched the Allowance Project, a video blog that will feature interviews of a broad, diverse cross-section of people explaining their savings and spending habits as children.

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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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