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.

Habib founded and successfully sold equity stake of Canadian mobile phone acessory distributor and online retail store puremobile.com. Jacobs founded RealAcad, a nonprofit initiative dedicated to nurturing entrepreners worldwide.

But the apparral market is a new one for both business partners. As Habib tells us, flash sales companies like firewalled GILT, which promises young, East Coast professionals exclusive access to up to 70 percent off of luxury retail brands, are an inspiration.

Many flash sales sites approach brands with the pitch that their overstock product — apparral for which too much was ordered, is perhaps past season, or that a large retailer might have cancelled an order of — could be sold at discount, but better than not sold at all.

Kembrel is trying to tap into a similar model, yet with a twist. It pitches true engagement to its audience of the lucrative, yet hard-to-reach college demographic.

“These [students] are in college now and poor. But they’ll graduate in a year or two, they will make a lot of money and are going to continue using your brand. For that reason, [brands] give us good merchandise,” he says.

And the site activately engaging students where they are every day: on Facebook.

The company, which self-funded, even launched what it claims is the first ever private, retail sales store on the social network. The application allows customers to browse products and purchase with a credit card apparel within Facebook. And items added to the Kembrel Facebook shopping cart can be viewed later at Kembrel.com or vice versa.

Habib says the company plans to launch more social commerce solutions, offering ways to integrate its shop into Facebook profiles, for example, and possibly sharing a cut of revenue with customers during conversion on their pages.

Habib compares its reach to Red Bull’s often-seen convertible promotion. A souped-up Mini Cooper drives around town, a custom-fit icebox trunk full of the energy drink, stopping to give away free samples.

“Not every company—especially apparel companies—has that kind of reach, that model of reaching students. We figured we could be that lead gen and consumer acquisition channel for these brands,” Habib says.

In just a few short months, retailers like Original Penguin, American Apparel, C&C California, Laundy by Design, Life after Denim and iPhone accessory-makers Dxeim & iSkin, have come onboard.

“We don’t say, ‘This is a channel to get rid of your bad stuff. We really want to acquire new customers you didn’t have access to before. Those are magic words to any brand.”

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.

Monday, July 27: In this age of new media, it isn’t an inconvenience to know HTML. We tear up a little bit thinking that someone is willing to teach the language for free, as it’s practically as much a necessity for creatives as food, shelter and Photoshop. Join HTML for Beginners to refresh your memory on that markup or finally learn what the hell a DIV tag is. 7:00 p.m. Delaware County. RSVP. [view more events]

Friday, July 30: It’s a tough call for us: do we publicize the events that are already booked solid? Well, we gotta hand it to Philadelphia Drupal Camp for selling its tickets out like there’s no tomorrow. You never know how these things will turn out: they’re hoping to open some spots if anyone decides to drop out. But don’t count on it, Druppy. Mugging is not out of the question. Kidding. Kinda. All day. University City. DETAILS. [view more events]

Friday, July 30: Golly, when we were just tykes rattling away on our Dell PCs and homebuilts, we dreamed of having a car to head out to a LAN Party. It was the stuff that gaming dreams were made of. Now, a group is getting together to see to it that a permanent spot is initiated in Philly to house those get-togethers. Join Philadelphia LAN Party to help the planning process. A gaming party accessible by public transportation? We’re stoked. We’ll be the dudes hauling Blanda‘s gigantic workstation. 2:00 p.m. University City. RSVP. [view more events]

Saturday, August 1: We haven’t heard much hype ’bout this one, and why not? DIY Days is an all-day event with one of the most impressive list of local creative media entrepreneurs we’ve seen. It’s got a healthy dose of tech, and for those of us with art in our blood, filmmaker-, musician- and writer- innovators, too. An expected topic throughout the day: How do we monetize this stuff? Amen, folks. Amen. All Day. Center City. RSVP. [view more events]

If you have an event that you think we should be listing, email us. We promise that no email falls in to the contact form netherworld.

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.

One of the hot issues at the moment, is the future of Ben Franklin Technology Partners, what is your take on their future?

Ben Franklin companies have had a huge impact on this region. Somebody that’s never been in the business doesn’t understand that once that money goes into a Ben Franklin-funded company… Give me a Ben Franklin funded company.

How about Vuzit?

Vuzit! So Vuzit has vendors that are local and that they are spending money with. They have attorneys that they are spending money with. It creates a curculation of funds in the early stage of businesses, which is undeniable. You look at any stat out there and you will see that small businesses create jobs, not big businesses.

That was something that was often tossed around during the presidential election.

Yep. And if you look, the patents filed by small businesses are more relevant, they get cited more often and [generate] more sales revenue. So small business are more innovative and therefore have a greater impact on society … If jobs are the government’s number one priority, [Ben Franklin Technology Partners] is the last thing I would cut.

What role does DreamIt play in fostering small businesses?

We’re very early-stage, we often invest in ideas on a napkin. So they have a long way to grow.

Last year we had several companies that got additional funding and that added jobs in the area and those companies will have a big impact. We are bringing companies here now, and once they are here they are more likely to stay here so they will add jobs to the region.

The 7th district of PA (click to enlarge)

Can you detail how DreamIt works?

We open up the application for a couple of months, this year we received several hundred. We care about what’s the need in the market place, what makes your product different and what makes you think you can do it. If it takes you more than an hour to finish our application, you’re doing it wrong.

We have some companies that are already generating revenue .. and some companies come in and do a 180-degree turn, and that’s great.

How so?

If you find that out fast, good, and you can change directions. And that is one of the things we need as a society. We need risk-taking to occur. We need to see what works and doesn’t work. That’s how you create innovation, that’s how you create new markets and that’s how you create jobs.

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.

Those companies crashing at LeBow’s incubator will be in decidedly more energy efficient digs once the university gets its smart grid system up and running, it boasts.

The technology from Veridity, called “virtual generation,” is said to give customers the chance to develop independence from the public grid by storing and dealing power. The grid reduces energy waste by using computer monitoring instead of a switch to allocate energy resources by use.

“Drexel has a long-standing commitment to apply the University’s technical and research capabilities to solving challenges in our communities. One of the greatest challenges we face today is the ability to meet current and future power demand through investment in clean and distributed energy resources,” interim University President C.R. “Chuck” Pennoni told inTech.

The new incubator bunkmates — who join 15 other businesses housed at Baiada by Armstrong’s count — all won a competition to earn the space, in addition to seed money, including the $12,000 awarded to Stabiliz.

The 20-something principals behind the Ranter texting tool seemed to catch Armstrong’s fancy — highlighting the crush of Drexel’s recent Web news.

Ranter will have a beta version of what Armstrong called a “would-be Twitter killer,” in three months.

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.

Tuesday, June 30: Philly.rb will meet out in the ‘burbs to help you get post those project hurdles that are holdin’ you down. Join them at a comfy new coffeeshop to get down and dirty with that project you can’t wait to get done. 6:00 p.m., Conshocken. RSVP. [view more events]

Tuesday, June 30: SEO Grail meets Tuesday as well, with local web developer Seth Goldstein on point. Goldstein founded Goldstein Media LLC to help small business owners drive traffic to their sites with Optimized Engine of Search, or whatever order those letters are supposed to appear in. 7:00 p.m., Old City. RSVP. [view more events]

Wednesday, July 1: Catch DreamIt Ventures‘s showing of the award-winning race film “Truth in 24,” along with a follow-up chat discussing the entrepreneurial spirit of the production with Jersey-based NFL Films Director of Project Management Alan M. Brown. 5:00 p.m. University City. RSVP. [view more events]

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.

Tuesday, June 23: There are two kinds of events held by Philly’s OpenStreetMap group: the drinking kind and the mapping kind. This one is the former as the group is socializing and talking cartography in Center City. If you have a GIS (geographic information systems) itch to scratch, we recommend you show, as they are beginning to plan their next mapping party set for the end of the summer. 6:30 p.m. Center City. RSVP. [view more events]

Wednesday, June 24: If you’re new to the concept of usability testing read Don’t Make Me Think, then head on over to this week’s PhillyCHI meeting where Kyle Soucy will teach you everything the laymen needs to know. Demos will be available as Saucy covers everything from different testing techniques, to making sure you should be testing in the first place. And she would know, Saucy has had clients as large as the pharmaceutical company giant Pfizer and is the former head of PhillyCHI. 6:00 p.m. University City. RSVP. [view more events]

Thursday, June 25: Make it two days of UX in a row at the venerable P’unk Ave for a chat about the book Art and Fear with the UX bookclub. Kind of like Oprah’s book club, but less “Tom Cruise jumping on couches” and more “books about avoiding mission creep in design projects.” If you can’t make it out, or you haven’t read the book, next month’s pick is A Project Guide to UX Design. We expect a report on our desk by Friday. 6:30 p.m. Passyunk Square. RSVP. [view more events]

Thursday June 25: If user experience isn’t your cup of tea, this month’s Philly Tweetup should provide you with a breezy alternative. The city’s Twitterers will be gathering at McGillins, a bar that is easy to miss being tucked away on Drury Lane. We hope the city’s most popular users don’t all show up at once, lest the Center City cell phone towers crumble under the weight of a tweet every 3.4 seconds. 6:30 p.m. Center City. RSVP. [view more events].

Friday, June 26: As any journalist can tell you, Google can shake up entire industries and turn them upside down. Google Book Search has recently been catching heat from the publishing industry and the U.S. Government and Google Scholar has caught the attention of researchers. Affected by both, local librarians and publishers are gathering at Drexel to talk about the search giant’s role in their respective industries with Drexel’s iSchool. No word on whether a Bing session is planned. 9:00 a.m. University City. RSVP. [view more events]

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.

Sillik says he didn’t have a chance to snap a photograph, but says that the bike had the all the markings of the Google “Trike” (pictured above) that’s been making headlines.

The complicated-looking contraption is set on three wheels and houses a GPS and a three-dimensional setup of high-resolution cameras similar to the Google Street View cars that passed through our streets in 2007, according to a Google press release.

The camera setup snaps shots and geo-tags the photographs so users can have a street-level view of where they are going on Google Maps. The bikes were developed so Google could provide off-road access to landmarks, biking paths and places you just can’t park a car.

So far, only a bike trail in Monterey, California is live on Street View, but we have our fingers crossed that we’ll soon be seeing some Philly landmarks up-close.

Image courtesy of CNet UK.

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.

The Computerworld list gave Penn a glowing reference, a portion of which includes the following:

This Ivy League university wanted to improve security for its community following the tragic events at Virginia Tech. Toward that end, the IT group collaborated with the school’s public safety group to develop an “instant alert” system. The IT staff worked to find technologies to meet the university’s requirements, incorporated additional features, developed an infrastructure that does double-duty by also disseminating non emergency updates and hosted the system off-site with redundancy. IT also kept costs down by leveraging an existing technology.

Warm words for a university launching a three-year research initiative at the Buenos Aires School, which will examine issues surrounding closing the digital divide. The research will also document how using a technology-based curriculum can impact a school environment, student learning, and dynamics of school, family and community dynamics. The data will be used as a model for replication in similar settings elsewhere in Central America.

The list included other regional companies, including No. 43-ranked Lehigh Valley Health Network of Allentown, No. 67-ranked The Vanguard Group of Malvern and North Broad Street’s own Temple University, ranked 90th, as reported by Philly Tech News, including others that have a significant presence here.

Image courtesy of Slash Film.

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.

Scribnia was founded by Boston natives Russell D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger, both 24. The duo made the trip to Philly after receiving funding through DreamIt’s bootcamp program that netted them $20,000 in angel funding as well as a host of pro bono services.

The company of five employees has set up shop in the University City Science Center where it is trying to build its user base after emerging from a private alpha earlier this month with a post on Mashable.

“We had a very strong influx of users [after coming out of the private alpha] and we have managed to keep a lot them,” D’Souza said.

Currently, the PHP-based site claims to have just under 1000 users and 100 “claimed” author profile pages and, starting tomorrow, will roll out its new my Scribes feature that will help users discover new content.

“We wanted to create a way so that once you find an author, you don’t have to click on that author and Google their work, you can see all of their work on Scribnia and read it,” said D’Souza.

The result is a recommendation engine wrapped in an RSS reader where users can rate individual articles using a thumbs up/thumbs down system. My Scribes will then suggest authors based on the posts your rate.

Soon, the site hopes to leverage of its user ranking and comments into a paid premium service that will help bloggers drive traffic. For example, users could submit post topics they want to hear about and bloggers could access this list for a fee, similar to Skribit.

Scribnia will also sell authors information about how be more like the top writers in their niche. For example, the site will evaluate metrics such as pictures per post. Scribnia could then provide the average picture per post for the five highest rated food bloggers. Food bloggers not in the top five could then compare the metrics to their own numbers and adjust the content accordingly.

“We can provide quick, little things that writers can do to improve the number of readers they get,” D’Souza said.

Currently, D’Souza said the company is more focused on building up their user base after moving to Philly for the summer. The company said although none of its employees are from the city, it may consider sticking around.

“We’re here, and we really like it a lot, there is definately a chance we will be here in the long run,” he said. Of course, having the company’s funders here doesn’t hurt, either.

Every Wednesday, Shop Talk shows you what goes into a tech product, organization or business in the Philadelphia region. See others here.

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.

If the oldest and largest urban incubator and science park in the world wasn’t draw enough, Philadelphia’s growing reputation as a life sciences hub might help. And, yes, the companies also made mention that a big draw was Philly’s location between the American legislative capital and de facto financial home.

It doesn’t hurt that the center is zoned both as Keystone Opportunity and Innovation zones, which gives participating companies the opportunity for significant tax incentives. Resident companies employ some 7,500 people. See a list of those resident companies here.

The National Center for Patient Interactive Research, a newly established advocate for patient-generated data included in health information technology, also joined the center, opening operations at the center’s port business incubator, located at 3701 Market Street.

The center, which encompasses 15 buildings and 17 acres on the Avenue of Technology, boasts assisting the growth of more than 400 companies. The nonprofit is owned by 32 academic and media research institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Temple and Villanova universities. The center also has a campus in Newark, Del.