A few weeks after a disastrous 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 150,000 people, Peter Groverman was organizing.

By the end of his planning, Groverman—a Villanova law student and CEO of local advertising startup Tapinko—had brought together 126 people from around the world and 40,000 pounds of cargo, including $1 million in medical supplies, which all travelled on an airplane chartered to fly to Haiti last month.

It was another drill for Groverman, who first began organizing relief efforts when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast in 2005 and he gathered 40 students to head to New Orleans. But Groverman says another Philadelphia entity was helping drive his recent mission: Rittenhouse-based mobile payment startup Venmo.

Using the text message-based payment system, Groverman was able to raise $50,000 immediately—when that immediacy was vital. “Venmo [was] the whole backbone of our fundraising effort,” he says. “I cant imagine any nonprofit not using text message-based donation systems. There’s no need for a check, no need to go to a bank to deposit. I didn’t have time for checks to come.”

Having now returned, Groverman is focusing much of his time and energy on the nonprofit venture The Relief Foundation, hoping to make it a premiere foundation tapped into social networks like Twitter and Facebook to mobilize young people. Groverman is working to organize a second trip in June.

“Some people talk about these flash mobs, but we’ve created flash relief,” Groverman says.

Relief Foundation’s Haiti efforts are a powerful example of how Venmo can be utlized. But the mobile payment service’s value extends beyond charitable efforts.

The company hopes that it will become the standard for the cashless exchange of money between friends and at retailers where cash is not convenient, like lunch trucks and coffee shops.

Users sign up for the service and can send money to friends and retailers using a simple text message: “Send $12 to Tom,” you could type, to pay your friend for the cash he fronted for lunch.

Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail—who were roomates at the University of Pennsylvania before graduating in 2005—founded the service last year, placing it in a private beta last fall.

“We were always exhanging money when we’d go out to dinner. A couple times, he sent me a check in the mail. I had to go to the bank and cash it. It was really inconvenient.” So, with cell phones in hand, it seemed like a natural fit to send cash through a medium they were both more familiar.

It’s a business model that’s seen traction, even here in Philadelphia. XIPWIRE launched its mobile payment service late last year, as we reported.

But what perhaps sets Venmo apart is its unique proposition of creating a financial network around its service, similar to Twitter’s network for communication or LinkedIn’s network for professionals.

“These are the people you got to lunch with everyday, the people you meet for dinner, the people you buy things from on craigslist, really anyone you need to exchange money with,” Kortina says.

By focusing on perfecting user experience, Venmo has serendipitiously identified additional benefits. The team has found that simple features—like allowing notes to be added to transactions—can drive social benefits that compliment it as a financial utility.

“Users can send a transaction as a reminder or give props for doing something cool. It’s a behavior that I haven’t seen on any other payment service,” Kortina says.

With a beta being tested by friends and an increasing number of users, the team has been taking it more seriously.

Magdon-Ismail started working on Venmo full-time in January, giving up a position at TicketLeap as a Director of Engineering. Kortina left URL shortener Bit.ly, based in New York, the same month.

When we spoke to the Venmo team in February, they were hoping to raise some funding by the end of the year. In March, the company closed its first round of funding, of between $300,000 and $400,000.

Last week, the company announced a partnership with the Black Eyed Peas and the i.AM Foundation to offer mobile payments for the group’s fans to donate to its Haiti cause, indicating that there’s likely much more to come for the Philadelphia startup.

Pulling a fabric graphic printed by Larger Than Life Prints from a wall is easy and clean. The graphic has been removed without a tear. The wall remains unmarred, without a mark.

It’s a landlord’s dream.

The Old City-based company, founded by Kendall Schoenrock and business partner Carsten Petzold, provides the technology that allows users to submit their own high-resolution graphics and print them on one- to seven-foot fabric sheets that can easily be placed on a wall. Artists, too, are able to cash in on the action. By partnering with the site, they are able to price their works appropriately, and keep a portion of the sales after material and labor has been deducted by LTL.

Thought it may seem little like a technology startup, LTL is funded by Ben Franklin Technology Partners and has been active in Philadelphia’s and Silicon Valley’s technology communities.

Recently, the company announced a partnership with San Francisco-based Start SOMA to feature well-known artists organized by Start on one of LTL’s partner pages. The two companies have managed to nab art by Susan Kare, the graphic designer who created the original graphics and fonts for Macintosh computers, urban artist Justin Bua, Sugarluxe and a handful of other known artists.

Both have also launched a series of iPhone applications [iTunes link] featuring artist work as iPhone wallpaper graphics that can be quickly purchased as large wall prints from the LTL store.

The partnership was forged to supplement LTL’s already growing portfolio of wall prints, this time, with professional artwork.

“It’s high-profile, high quality content for our catalog, and we’ve taken that to the next level with a Start Mobile iPhone app,” Schoenrock says. “We’re attempting to enable consumers to buy high quality art from well-known, curated artists at an affordable price, printed on our unique removable material.”

Schoenrock says that sales have been “impressive,” though he declined to disclose specific figures. At least one artist, who offered a free wall graphic in a contest to their fans, received more than a thousand entries to win.

Last December, LTL Prints rolled out a more customizable upload tool, as Schoenrock explains below.

Start Mobile recently made headlines on TechCrunch when its iPhone app that contained Shepard Fairey’s famous Obama “Hope” poster art was rejected from Apple’s App Store. Surely, the TechCrunch press hasn’t hurt the company. LTL Prints, too, was featured on the popular technology site. The “pop” that LTL got from the feature was real, Schoenrock says.

“There’s a myth out there that TechCrunch readers don’t buy anything. I would say that’s not true in our case. [The TechCrunch push] was the perfect storm of a target audience that was really passionate about the things we were talking about.

Though Schoenrock says his company chose to send its product to the online publication free of charge, it was by no means a sponsored post. LTL has done business with TechCrunch in the past, when Michael Arrington & Co. purchased prints for one of their meetup events.

Schoenrock says that it is achieving its milestones with BFTP and has the new digs to prove it. LTL recently moved its production equipment out of a small Center City-based apartment to a larger 2,000 square foot facility in Old City.

Fortunately, it’s a small setup—the company owns a single 1440 dpi 6-color printer with eco-solvent inks that prints on a removable fabric. A laser-guided blade cuts the prints. It’s slick—in a demonstration with Technically Philly, Schoenrock showed how quickly and quietly the device can make and cut prints with efficiency and precision.

But how did a wall graphic printing company get hooked up with TechCrunch? And why does it have such strong roots in Philly’s technology community?

Perhaps it’s the company founders’ backgrounds.

Schoenrock graduated from Villanova in 2003 and joined ePrivacy Group, a consulting and anti-spam tech firm, members of which spun off to create TurnTide, a First Round Capital-funded investment based in Conshohocken that was acquired by Symantec in 2004, six months after inception, for $28 million in cash.

Schoenrock was an angel investor in TurnTide.

“It’s hard to articulate how amazing that experience was. I bought a little red sports car and went to Villanova for an MBA,” he says.

Wanting to get back into technology after graduating with his master’s, Schoenrock hooked up with Petzold, a German entrepreneur and founder of Spreadshirt, a global leader in custom apparel Web sites like Cafepress and Zazzle, who has grown the business to do sales in the low two-digit millions.

They decided on custom wall graphics, which wasn’t too off the Spreadshirt business model, but unique enough to stand alone.

A pivotal question remained: whether or not the company would launch in New York or Philadelphia. Schoenrock convinced Petzold to settle down in Philly, reminding him of his relationships in the angel investing community and Philly’s resources and workers.

“Philadelphia has been absolutely great,” Schoenrock says.

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Every Monday, Technically Not Tech will feature people, projects, and businesses that are involved with Philly’s tech scene, but aren’t necessarily technology focused. See others here.