Shop Talk: West Philly’s OpenHatch is “a business card for geeks”

Update: corrected college names, edited Atlanta information.

OpenHatch, like many companies, was one born of frustration.

The company calls itself a “business card for geeks,” a service that allows open-source programmers to automatically import contributions from services like Google Code, Github and Sourceforge to create an automatic index of a programmer’s work.

Currently, programmers have to manually keep track of their open-source projects. Which can be frustrating when it comes time to apply for a job or show off a portfolio.

While OpenHatch has only been public for a just under two months, the company has rolled out several key features to help programmers keep tabs on all of their work without having to spend time digging through code repositories.

Members get a profile page with a link and description to their work that is automatically populated. The site also has a map that lets programmers know what other people in their area work on the same project.

Just eight months in, the company’s ambitions to become the best marketplace for open-source talent is easy to explain. However, to tell the story about how the OpenHatch guys came to Philadelphia, you’d need a world map, a handful of pushpins and lots of patience.

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TNT: Chris Bartlett of the Gay History Wiki project

The site, at the moment, is awfully ugly.

“A Web site for dead people shouldn’t be too fancy,” says Chris Bartlett.

That proclamation was met with laughs from an engaged audience of 200 or more during his presentation at Ignite Philly 4 earlier this month, video of which can be seen below. But that five-minute presentation was a bridge from 20 years in a community, three years of research and the nearly half-century old Philadelphia gay community.

Bartlett, 43, is the founder of the Gay History Wiki, which aims to collect the life stories of at least 4,600 gay Philadelphia men who since 1981 have died following complications to their battles with AIDS/HIV and the friends and places who helped develop one of the country’s richest LGBT traditions since the 1960s.

The profiles are notably and purposefully varied, showing the lack of order the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s followed, Bartlett says, from a 31-year-old deli clerk at the Bellvue Stratford hotel to a fashion designer with growing clout to who just might be Kensington’s most famous drag queen and a driving force in driving Bartlett’s passion for the project.

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[Updated] Comcast Roundup: as much as 80 percent of broadband misadvertised, blog sponsorships and More

Every Thursday morning, find all the stories you need to know about your friendly telecommunications giant in the Comcast Roundup. Get an e-mail subscription to our Comcast news updates.

Updated 10/1/09 @ 11:36 a.m. Added Item

• As much of eighty percent of actual broadband speeds are slower than advertised, according to the Washington Post.While the news — which came out of far-reaching industry research from the FCC — doesn’t cite Comcast specifically, it’s hard to think of the company’s recent disputes with the FCC over limiting broadband capacity, isn’t it?

• The Inquirer’s Joey DiStefano asks whether Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is a “highest paid worst performer,” among some other regional chief executives who don’t appear to be bringing success with their paychecks.
• Will Bunch at the Daily News reports on Hollywood-based rumors that Comcast is in serious talks to purchase NBC Universal, which, after Bunch gives an inexplicable SNL-toned lede, is being flatly denied by the Center City MSO. It’s tough not to mention the chance to bolster the city’s media world, but let us never forget Comcast’s abortive attempt to buy Disney in 2004. Big ticket take overs like this are awfully rare and rumors are dime a dozen, so take this in stride.

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TNT: The state of hyperlocal online news in Philadelphia

Updated: 8/31/09 6:17 p.m., source title

Sarah Lockard should take more walks.

Earlier this summer, the Wayne native was on a long stroll when she decided she should contact Internet craft supply marketplace Etsy about working with AroundMainLine.com, the online magazine startup she launched last fall to cover the famed, ritzy swath of Philadelphia suburbs.

It was on another walk — one amid the crowds of last September spring’s blue-blooded Devon Horse Show — that the former B2B magazine sales executive decided the Main Line needed community coverage online.

Sarah Lockard

Both “epiphanies,” as Lockard called them, seem to have worked out just fine. AroundMainLine.com has partnered with Etsy to profile artisan goods from regional crafts-makers and, while she declined to disclose monthly revenue or funding, her online magazine features weekly content, has a Web designer on staff, photographers on call and a sidebar etched with advertising.

Lockard, 34, boasts that hers was the first for-profit online magazine in the Philadelphia region. But she won’t be the last.

The hyperlocal Web outfit — tied by geography, focused on a niche community and online-only — is meant to be a great wave of the future, seen by MSNBC’s recent purchase of crime and news aggregator EveryBlock, partnerships with online news startups and product launches like Outside.In and Patch.com.

Philadelphia has its first wave of adopters, but their sustainability is far less certain.

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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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Penn: Top IT workplace bringing tech-learning to Nicaragua

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.

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University City Science Center welcomes three new companies

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.

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Technically Not Tech: Media Mobilizing Project closes grant, looks forward

Media Mobilizing Project founding member Todd Wolfson is interested in the role that media and communications can play in helping build movements to end poverty.

He hasn’t been the only one.

In 2007, MMP was awarded a $150,000 grant from the Knight News Foundation. With that money, the media organization has been helping other organizations use journalism to further their cause.

Since then, Wolfson and his team have helped create a network of 10 groups, like the Philadelphia Student Union, Pennsylvania Head Start Association, Casino-Free Philadelphia, Taxi Workers Alliance of PA and other service sector unions.

MMP’s aim is straight forward enough: teach the basics of new media concepts in order to help those groups get the good word out.

The grant helped MMP maintain a staff, create six six-week workshops to train organization leaders in Web, video and basic computer skills and purchase equipment and computers for each group’s respective community.

Now, Media Mobilizing is shifting gears.
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Four Philadelphia ‘inner-city’ companies called nation’s fastest growing

Stroll’s company mission is nothing short of bold. They want to bring their customers products that are capable of “transforming” their lives.

And the audio-book Web retailer, which saw its revenue triple from 2004 to 2007 and ships mostly self-improvement merchandise, is doing it from 12th and Callowhill.

For that, Stroll is getting some congratulation. Along with three other Philadelphia companies, it was named to the 11th annual Inner City 100, a competitive ranking of the fastest-growing companies located in the “inner city” of a U.S. metropolis, last week. See what constitutes an inner-city here.

Only Denver and Boston, each of which had five companies headquartered there, were better represented. See the complete list here [PDF].

The list comes from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, a national nonprofit organization founded in 1994 by a Harvard Business School professor. The organization’s mission is to promote economic prosperity in U.S. inner cities through private sector engagement leading to job, income and wealth creation for local residents.

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Friday Tech Links: Our life sciences sector rocks, the Commodore and More

In which we link out to the tech news from Philly and elsewhere (when it matters) that slips through the cracks and make it way fun. See others here.

Our region’s life sciences sector ranked first in the “current impact” category, and second overall (to Boston, bah), in a biotechnology industry study conducted by the Milken Institute, according to a report by the Philadelphia Business Journal’s John George, a proud graduate from Temple University-Ambler. As we earlier suggested, this is really one of the more impactful, meaningful and substantiated stupid lists Philadelphia has been put in during recent years.

That news preceded the announcement of one of the year’s largest life sciences venture capital deals happening here. University City’s Avid Radiopharmaceuticals scored a $34.5 million financing, led by a San Francisco VC firm, but assisted by a couple of local boys, BioAdvance, also a Penn neighbor, and Safeguard Scientifics of Wayne, as also reported by George of PBJ.

California tries to ban violent video games for kids, a (sorta) regional Web site management company makes a big aquisition and a lot of messed up Craigslist stories you should read — in addition to our most trafficked post of the week — after the jump.

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