City of Philadelphia to offer tax breaks to tech companies

Tech companies in Philadelphia might finally see some long-awaited light at the end of the tax tunnel.

Mayor Michael Nutter has announced tax breaks for technology, design and video game firms that would hopefully encourage more companies to set up shop in the city.

As the Metro reported this morning, under the new tax policy, tech sector businesses would not be taxed for services sold outside of Philadelphia, which could pave the way for tax overhauls for all city businesses. The news follows Nutter’s address to the Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce last week outlining the need to experiment with the city’s tax structure.

Videogame Growth Initiative organizer Mike Worth, who’s helped lead a grass roots effort to lobby City Hall on tech tax issues, as we’ve reported, tells Metro that the incentives might help convince his game development studio Space Whale Studios to move downtown.

Biggest tech community stories we covered in 2009

Happy New Year, folks.

It’s been an exciting year for us. Though we’ll be celebrating our first birthday in February, we’ve had a chance to take part in Philadelphia’s vibrant technology community for 10 months. We’ve seen the amazing things that this community offered in 2009. Coming up on our 500th published story about this community, we’re proud to be a part of it. And we’re ecstatic to see what lie ahead.

No, Technically Philly has not started its own Mummer troupe. We do, however, want to ring in the new year by taking a look back at our top stories of 2009. Our month-by-month perspective, after the jump.

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Center City’s Final Form Games keeps it simple

A screen capture from "Jamestown" - Final Form's first title.

Edits: updated some brotherly confusion.

Mike Ambrogi along with his brother Tim and Hal Larsson don’t leave anything to chance. When all three plotted their move to Philly from the West Coast a few years back, the trio used spreadsheets to help time out the cross country operations.

“I did a look for one of ‘em recently but didn’t turn it up,” says Larsson.

The three are the founders of Final Form games, a video game studio based in what the guys like to call the “mathematical center” of Center City: 15th and Market.

Final Form Games is one of a handful of studios, along with the video game lobbying group VGI Philly, to begin building the foundations of a video game industry based in Philadelphia.

“There isn’t a huge game industry here. But we know what we are doing, and we can become a part of that and help grow what’s here,” says Tim Ambrogi. “It’s exciting being here when it just starts. ”

Currently, Final Form is working on its first title: a SNES-style top-down shooter – tentatively titled “Jamestown” – about the colonization of Mars by the 17th century British explorers. The group plans to release the game to the PC in the first half of next year and then, if all goes well, to the Xbox Live Arcade.

But the road to Philly was a bumpy one. Just a few years ago, all three were in California but it took a detailed plan to finally set up shop in the city, a plan they say was largely motivated by “ladies and the sandwiches.”

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Ignite Philly 4 hosts Free Library and Mayoral cabinet officials as VGI impresses

Videogame Growth Initiative's Mike Worth gives an energetic presentation at Ignite Philly 4 | Credit: Sean Blanda

‘Let’s continue these great conversations,’ he said in so many words.

Before an intermission of Ignite Philly 4 that could have been easily overlooked, Make:Philly’s Harris Romanoff made a modest call to presenters that the Ignite series has sorely lacked: an opportunity to keep the conversations and inspiration flowing and perhaps create truly definable, actionable steps.

“Make is extending an invitation to speakers past and present to speak and to answer more questions,” Romanoff said to a crowd of more than 250 gathered in the upstairs of Johnny Brenda’s bar in Fishtown.

Though it was apparent that no one was yet booked for Make’s monthly DIY tech/hack meetings, it was a notable recommendation for Ignite, having now surpassed four sold out events since 2007.

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Technically Philly and Geekadelphia Section 8 release party crowds Tattooed Mom

"Is that a trident," asks Bianca Cevoli, the Geekadelphia contributor who snagged this photo of a portion of Wednesday night's crowd at Tattooed Mom for our Section 8 release party.

Above a relatively sleepy Wednesday night bar crowd on the first floor of Tattooed Mom was the noise of our first co-hosted event with culture blog Geekadelphia, held earlier this week.

The eclectic hipster grunge South Street institution played host to the Philadelphia release party for Section 8, the soon-to-debut  Timegate first person science-fiction shooter for XBox and PCs. A decidedly more 20-something crowd of 60 scenesters and geeks came for the party, sharing the bar’s tagged and multicolored upstairs with two dozen others who trickled in and out throughout the night.

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The birth of Philadelphia’s video game scene

THE SUITORS: (L-R) Damon Alberts, Mike Worth and Hardik Bhatt of the Videogame Growth Initiative are trying to talk officials into making Philly worth game developers' while. (Credit: Mark Stehle)

Note: this article appeared in today’s Citypaper and has been republished with permission.

The members of the Videogame Growth Initiative Philadelphia (VGI) are buzzing around a seventh-floor conference room high above Broad Street. The group has two hours to convince representatives of state government that it’s worth creating new incentives to lure video game companies to Philly.

Audio engineer Mike Worth along with local video game executive Damon Alberts, Drexel professor Frank Lee, lawyer Dennis Manning and developer Hardik Bhatt, churn through slides, charts, spreadsheets and game screenshots at a rapid-fire rate as representatives from state government and city economic groups look on.

At first, the guests’ gazes are empty, and energy level low. But the high-octane presentation soon has them interested.

“There’s no reason Philadelphia can’t be the Hollywood for video games,” Bhatt says.
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