WeWorkinPhilly directory of creative, technology, business community; launches with ‘word-of-mouth’ growth

The publicly-edited guide to the region’s creative, business and technology community dubbed WeWorkinPhilly.com has surpassed 400 people.

Launched last Wednesday by Indy Hall co-founder Alex Hillman and developer Linus Graybill, the project uses the Citizentry framework, led by Reid Beels for a community guide in Portland.

Today Hillman shared some word-of-mouth growth numbers, including 420 people to date, 117 companies and other groups and projects.

Users can sign up using Twitter or LinkedIn accounts and create profiles for their companies, groups and organizations relevant to the community.

Zivtech launches Houston Command Center open source glue for Drupal, Salesforce, other connectivity [VIDEO]

A demo of Houston Command Center, a tool designed to integrate common local and cloud-based systems, has been released by Zivtech, the Old City Drupal design shop behind the project.
“The main idea behind Houston is to create a single application out of a couple of disperate systems,” said Zivtech co-founder Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg. “The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts, so it creates, in some sense, a central command center for all of your local and remote apps.”

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Phila.gov business services portal to add 75% of licenses and permit applications online by 2012, interactivity

Before its second birthday in November, the City of Philadelphia’s Business Services Center website will add more interactivity and have the majority of licenses and permits available, officials tell Technically Philly.

“The portal was the first step in the overhaul of Phila.gov, collecting and sharing all business-related information for business users, rather than asking them to hunt through multiple departmental sites to get what they need,” said Sara Merriman, the director of policy initiatives for the city’s Department of Commerce.

The next release of the portal, internally scheduled for late summer, will include three major ‘interactive’ features: (1) a wizard tool to help direct businesses to the licenses they may need, (2) a wizard output into a dashboard that users can save and return to as they work through their tasks and (3) a business registration feature that will in future releases be used as the basis for further interactivity like online permit delivery and payment tracking, Merriman said.

In addition to the added interactivity, by the end of 2011, the portal is planned to house most city license and permit applications.

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FoundedinPhilly.com from Gabe Weinberg serves as community stake in the ground

It’s about perception.

Sensing that the perception of Philadelphia’s startup community in the minds of entrepreneurs hasn’t grown with the community itself, Duck Duck Go founder and Hacker Angel Gabe Weinberg launched this week a very small, very simple stake in the ground.

FoundedinPhilly.com is nothing but a few logos and a block of text, linking to some choice businesses and organizations that make up the community:

We have hackers. We have hackathons. We have real hackathons. We have mailing lists. We have super angels. We have hacker angels. We have open angel forums. We have VCs of all kinds. But enough about money. We have big events. We have cool events. We have lots of events. Hey, all you can handle bro’. We have multiple accelerators. We have co-working space. We have startup news. We have traction. We have exits. So join us already…

“I think most people outside Philly think the idea of a Philly Web startup scene is a joke,” Weinberg tells Technically Philly. “Inside Philly, I hear a lot about missing pieces, but from where I sit, we have the puzzle solved at this point.”

So he tossed online the simplest, most direct message to others, conveying that Philadelphia has all the parts of a foundation for one of the great entrepreneurship environments.

“If anything, we need more ambitious startup founders,” Weinberg says.

Switch preview: How to game Packlate

If you’re planning a vacation in the next few months, your Switch ticket will likely pay for itself.

At Switch, not only will Packlate CEO and founder Steve Barsh show off how Packlate works, but he will also show us how to get a “screamer of a deal.”

“People always ask, ‘How can I really book this [house] without waiting until the last possible minute?’,” he says. “I’ll show you how.”

Right now on Packlate, you can book a three day stay in Cosa Rica for less than $250. Of course, that rate applies if you’re willing to leave in, say, the next six hours.

Being impulsive enough to take up such a deal is the premise of Packlate, a West Conshohocken-based website that helps private vacation homeowners fill unused inventory while giving flexible travelers a deal.

Started by Barsh, a former managing partner at DreamIt Ventures, Packlate has expanded quickly since we last spoke with the company. The site now allows users to book vacations in over 20 locations with more planned.

Come get inspired by Packlate and four other Philly innovators at Switch on October 6th at the Levitt Auditorium.  Get your tickets today.

A big thanks to our sponsors: First Round Capital, Genacast Ventures, The University City Science Center,MCD Law Partners, VC Deal Lawyer, The Greater Philadelphia Chamber of Commerce, Corzo Center for the Creative Arts and the University of the Arts.

Philly.com sports portal possibly hit with malware attack

Visitors to Philly.com's sports section saw this malware warning in Safari this morning

Updated, 3:20 p.m.: According to a statement from Philly.com, the site has confirmed that a widget on the site contains code that is “not recognized by Google,” and was thus misinterpreted as malicious code. It hopes Google will remove the “malware” warning soon. “We do know that it was that code, we found the code that Google was flagging and it is a third-party widget on the site. We are working with that vendor to get that widget back up,” Editor and Vice President Wendy Warren said in an interview.

Philly.com‘s sports portal is appearing in Google search results and in browser notification systems as a site infected by potentially malicious malware, possibly caused by the site’s Flash-based advertisements.

Vice President and Editor Wendy Warren told Technically Philly that the organization is “responding very aggressively” to investigate the situation and that it is possible that code on the site might be being misinterpreted as malicious.

Warren said in a telephone interview this afternoon that there had been no reports that harmful software had been installed on user computers.

“We’re not sure if there was malicious code or not. Though we can’t rule it out yet, we’ve not found any evidence of it,” she says. “We’re going to check every piece of code that we haven’t written ourselves.”

Philly.com site administrators have disabled Flash-based advertisements and third-party widgets in the Sports section, where the malicious code has been found, Warren says. [Full Disclosure: Technically Philly has conducted business with Warren and Philly.com]

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Friday Q&A: Austin Lavin, formerly of myfirstpaycheck.com

Myfirstpaycheck.com founders Austin and Celeste Lavin.

Austin Lavin is excited.

During his phone conversation with Technically Philly we can nearly hear the 25-year-old smile through the phone. His excitement is well-founded.

Austin, along with his 19-year-old sister Celeste, just sold their first company: myfirstpaycheck.com.

The siblings founded the Ardmore-based Web site in 2007 when then-15-year-old Celeste Lavin began looking for her first job. The family noticed that, in an age where teenagers spend increasing amounts of time online, there were no career resources for teens.

The duo built a job board that also featured career resources for young people, a niche popular enough to attract the attention Phoenix-based Simple Employment Solutions.

We sat down with the Penn grad to ask him what it felt like to sell, his advice for others and when he will be buying his yacht.

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With new owner, Scribnia to move to Canada, New York

After a long trial separation, it looks like Scribnia and Philadelphia are breaking up.

To refresh your memory, the author rating service was founded by Dartmouth grads Russell D’Souza and Jack Groetzinger during last year’s DreamIt Ventures class. Before their time at DreamIt was up, the duo sold the company and went on to found Seatgeek, which presented at TechCrunch 50.

Scribnia was trying to become the Yelp of internet writers giving each author a page where readers could rate the writers on several criteria based on the writer’s niche. Technically Philly profiled the company last year.

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