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.

Co-founders Raphael Krut-Landau, 22, and Asheesh Laroia, 24, tell stories about San Francisco (where Asheesh worked on Creative Commons) New Orleans (where Krut-Landau visited to volunteer), Harlem, Baltimore and Paris.

The duo hatched the idea while at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore after being frustrated by filling out online forms for programming jobs.

“You don’t have to spend hours filling out OpenHatch,” says Krut-Landau.

Soon, they applied to startup incubators all around the country, including the famous YCombinator incubator. Eventually, to their surprise, they were accepted to the inaugural class of Shotput Ventures in Atlanta, a program much like DreamIt Ventures in Philadelphia, where they received “enormous help” in starting the company.

“The form took about five minutes,” says Laroia who had to quit his job at Creative Commons in San Francisco to move to Atlanta.

“They had speakers come in and [Shotput Ventures founder David Cummings] would ask the reasons people should start a company in Atlanta. One speaker replied ‘There is no reason’,” says Krut-Landau.

After their stint in Atlanta the company debated whether they wanted to be based. The crew eventually decided on their current Cedar Park townhouse by 47th and Baltimore. They chose the neighborhood for two reasons: cheap rent, and Laroia was familiar with the area as he has friends who attended Swarthmore who lived nearby.

“For most people in Philadelphia it’s the ‘thar be dragons here’ part of town,” says Krut-Landau.

The two co-founders work out of the house with visits from their intern Parker Phinney. The living room of the home has been converted to a makeshift office. Computer cords are strewn everywhere and an original Macintosh computer sits on a nearby shelf. The guys even say the tables trace their origins to the offices Limewire, the P2P sharing software.

The service has only been public for a month and a half, and the company is reluctant to talk about a monetization strategy before establishing a user base. OpenHatch has a variety of loose monetization plans, most likely is a way of connecting programmers with companies who need professional help on open-source software, much like Red Hat supports Linux.

The company has also tossed around a jobs board with listings divided by programming language and platform.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since its grant ended in March, it is trying to develop a business plan to generate revenue by creating video for nonprofits not in its current network. It’s also working with other groups, like the Philadelphia Department of Technology, to see what kind of opportunities can come through collaboration.

The future of Media Mobilzing seems uncertain, but strong. The organization just moved into a new office in West Philadelphia, and it seems that Wolfson has learned more than a media mogul about the future of journalism.

Still, Wolfson would probably be the first to tell you that sometimes, things just aren’t as they seem.

Rewind to 2005 when the city first unveiled its Wireless Philadelphia plan, when it hoped to provide Internet for every city resident.

It was a perfect opportunity for Media Mobilizing. Wolfson said that several aspects of its original grant application made reference to the possibilities that a wireless network could provide for a project like MMP.

Which is exactly why when Wireless Philadelphia began folding in 2008, it was a serious detriment to MMP, Wolfson says. So he took action.

“We were so excited about the technology and what it was promising. When the hopes and expectations didn’t come through and no one was holding Earthlink, the city and Wireless Philadelphia to account, we felt we needed to,” he says.

Wolfson helps organize the Philadelphia Digital Justice Coalition, a group of 30 organizations that put pressure on the city to save the Wireless Philadelphia and is currently helping shape Philadelphia’s Department of Technology’s $100 million Digital Philadelphia vision, which we reported on in May.

“We’re trying to think how the broadband stimulus package could be a part of this plan and how we need to marshall it in, in [Philadelphia Chief Information Officer Allan Frank]‘s terms, to create an information technology economy,” Wolfson says.

“But also, we need to think about digital human capital: how to make sure that all of Philadelphia has the skill sets to utilize and take advantage of the Internet.”

Wolfson thinks that 50 percent of the city’s population isn’t online, but says that the research is incomplete, and he hopes that the Department of Technology will compile a study to have a better idea.

“We have no idea what the digital divide in the city looks like,” he says. It’s something that Wolfson has devoted himself to fixing for the past 5 years.

“Watching a bunch of students in high school doing interviews with taxi drivers suffering because of a [limitation the Philadelphia Parking Authority has maintained], and watching the students grow by doing the research and journalism to understand this story is really beautiful,” he says.

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.

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.

Stroll, ranked 62nd, was accompanied by the following four companies: its Callowhill community neighbor Avencia, the geographic analysis and software development firm that was ranked 13th; East Frankford design collaborator and fabrication company Amuneal, ranked 51, and Perryman Building and Construction Services, which was ranked 94th and is based in West Philadelphia at 45th and Market (help me with what neighborhood that is in the comments below).

The Inner City 100 list has no industry specifications, but from Stroll’s Web base to Avencia’s software development and the high-end design and fabrication of Amuneal and growing sustainable requirements of construction for Perryman, all four of Philadelphia’s representatives could be considered members of our region’s creative economies.

Stroll’s neighbor Avencia, no stranger to Technically Philly, was the highest ranked Philadelphia firm, at 13th. Their five-year compound annual growth from 2003 to 2007 was 647 percent. No decimal point needed.

Philadelphia was better represented than each of the five cities with larger populations, see at right. No New Jersey or Delaware companies were listed.

Other cities represented by multiple businesses include Detroit, Miami, San Diego, Baltimore and Buffalo.

Pennsylvania was the third most decorated state with six company nominations; Philadelphia was helped out by two from Pittsburgh. California was by far the best represented state, with 15 companies, followed by Massachusetts with eight.

Collectively, the 2009 Inner City 100 grew at a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent and an average rate of 324 percent between 2003 and 2007. More than 5,000 nominations for the 2009 list were received. The top 100 have employed nearly 17,000 people and created nearly 10,000 new jobs over the past five years.

See additional facts about the annual list here.

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.

More:

• “The Wild Thing” Peter Key of the Philadelphia Business Journal reports that a collection of historic documents from the life of Commodore John Barry, the Revolutionary War hero who we say is father of the U.S. Navy and always dreamed of having a bridge near a Superfund site, is now available online at the Independence Seaport Museum or through Villanova University’s Falvey Memorial Library, which digitized it. Those documents from as early as 1723 mean that that Angelfire site you made as a kid and can’t take down is no longer the oldest thing on the Internet.
• The Sacramento Bee reports that California legislators are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold their request for a statewide ban of violent video game sales to minors. It’s seen as a landmark case, even if, as the Christian Science Monitor reports, California’s ban may be a legal long shot.
• The Inquirer’s Joe Distefano reports that HostMySite.com, a business Web site manager based in Denver but depending on a 229-person service center in Newark, Del., has bought Louisville-based rival Hosting.com. It’s said to create a $50 million sales company and have featured major investing from former Philly firm Wachovia Capital Partners. Can we please lower business taxes in this city so The ‘Stefano and I don’t have to reach so much on these?
• The Associated Press reports that seven people in New York State were charged in running a 24-hour prostitution ring through Craigslist. That follows the enormous news that, as the Advocate, and many, many others, reported, Craigslist filed suit against the South Carolina attorney general in order to thwart his filing criminal charges against the classifieds Web site for “abetting” prostitution. This is all part of a slew of bad press for the Internet staple, including obsessive tabloid and cable news coverage of a Boston murder following a Craigslist relationship and, as reported by TV station KMHO, more recent news about a Seattle man who found a woman on the site who agreed to be killed during sex.

• Our Most Trafficked Story of the Week: Google CEO Eric Schmidt weighs in on Philly’s tech future

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything if you spent the week preparing for your Memorial Day weekend plans, with Friday Tech Links.

It’s a helluva school project.

While completing MBA degrees at Drexel University in 2006, Chuck Sacco, Doug Bellenger and two others founded PhindMe Mobile, with vague plans on improving the mobile Web-based interaction between businesses and their customers.

Since then, two have bailed and now CEO Sacco and COO Bellenger are leading a small team crafting the future of mobile Web direct-to-consumer advertising.

Sacco, who did his undergraduate work at St. Joseph’s University, has a few technology startups in his past and has learned from them, he said.

“For me, it’s always been about having platforms where you can plug in functions and take them into new markets as the world changes,” he said.

PhindMe, has to be an example of that – one on which Sacco was willing to bet. He and Bellenger put in about $80,000 of their own capital to launch, and last June they borrowed nearly $225,000 more from friends and family, according to the Philadelphia Business Journal. They launched in October, and they say they’ll break even as early as June – helped by the national attention they’ve gotten in advertising communities.

Below see how the South Jersey native – who says he has “always considered Philadelphia as home” – describes PhindMe’s future and for whom the alumnus of St. Joe’s and Drexel cheers in Big Five basketball.

Transcript of interview was edited for length and clarity.

1. Tell us about PhindMe Mobile and why we should be paying attention.
   PhindMe Mobile is part of what is an emerging $8 billion mobile web content market.  That market is the massive shift of information from one media – PC-based Web – to another – mobile-based web. But it’s more than just providing a way to get good, relevant content accessible on mobile devices. It’s providing businesses with a way to leverage that content to improve their marketing to an increasingly mobile consumer.
   Since we built a platform to scale in a big way, we’re not going after a small number of big projects. And we’re not trying to be seen as a development tool. For us, it’s really about how to do we make it as easy as possible to get as many businesses using our tools as possible.  It should be as easy as email or blogging.
   
2. So what do you offer customers?
   We have evolved quite a lot since our initial concept. At that time, we were just looking at how to use the GPS feature on cell phones to help consumers find local business information. Even though only a few years ago, this was before the iPhone, before text messaging really took off, and before a lot of the mainstream interest in social networks. Our focus was providing timely and relevant information about any business to consumers.
   From our original concept, we evolved the business model a couple of times, eventually figuring that the core problem for consumers was going to be the lack of readable and actionable-information content about businesses. While businesses have a lot of web-based information, very little of it is natively useful on a cell-phone Internet browser, largely due to the differences in the medium – remember the old adage “the medium is the message.” So we set out to solve that problem by giving businesses a tool to help them deliver content to consumers in a way that is easily digestible and actionable.
3. What is PhindMe’s relationship to Drexel?
   We are big fans of Drexel, especially their LeBow School of Business. Because the original business concept grew out of an MBA class project that later was entered in their business plan competition, we have a strong affinity to Drexel. They have been big supporters, and moving our business into their Baiada Center for Entrepreneurship was a natural choice. We get access to great physical resources, advisers and students who have been a big part of our progress.
4. OK, you’re a big fan of Drexel, but you did your undergrad at St. Joe’s. So, who’s your horse in Big Five basketball?
   I guess my heart is still with St. Joe’s when it comes to basketball.  St. Joe’s has had some great teams over the years, and hopefully they will approach what Villanova has done recently.
5. What is the future of technology and marketing? Can Philadelphia be a major player in it?
   Marketing in the future is going to be mostly about technology. Marketing is a funny business. While there will always be the creative elements, marketing firms are by their nature not very scalable. The big firms can squeeze out margins consistently, and a lot of that has to do with the fact they use technologies in the right way. So I’d like to see Philadelphia focus in that area, determining how we can make marketing a more powerful engine for the economy.
6. What’s your take on the region’s innovation culture?
   The Philly tech scene is emerging as an amazing resource for entrepreneurs, investors and service providers alike. I’m almost getting tired of saying “it’s getting better” because I think it’s getting to the point where it is better. But it is also different. We can’t be like Silicon Valley because this isn’t Silicon Valley. That’s OK, and actually good, because what it means is that we can differentiate on the things that make us unique – people, geography, schools, etcetera. Those unique qualities seemed to have been better defined over the past couple of years by the community.
7. What is the future of PhindMe Mobile?
   Our future is less about cool new features and more about ensuring we have the most efficient ways to distribute our products. Right now we are really focused on generating leads, creating new customers and providing them a great set of tools. Hopefully you’ll see some new distribution deals for us where we get our products into the hands of some big players and become known as the new standard for the mobile web.

Every Friday, Technically Philly brings an interview with a leader or innovator in Philadelphia’s technology community. See others here.

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.

Because that’s what we do best.

• The Pew Charitable Trusts released its first annual State of the City, with a ton of interesting information. Maybe one of the best things the Inquirer has done for the city in a decade or more was squeezing former national political writer Larry Eichel out in November. He went to Pew and has been making moves since.

Have more link fun after the jump and find out just what the H that photo is of.

• Inquirer business columnist Joseph N. DiStefano does his best to seem impotent in his Comcast coverage by actually letting Silicon Insider report on the possibility of our own telecommunications giant buying out SprintNextel. I guess we’ll have to start doing his job, too. Give us time, give us time.
• Daily News technology columnist Jonathan Takiff tells you about the success of the gaming industry and a host of cheaper upcoming video game alternatives that may shake up the scene, including an online gaming service with, you guessed it, a social networking component.
  Our highlight: He uses the phrase “One big diff.”
• The Inquirer rewrites a press release announcing that BioAdvance, a University City biotech incubator (that’s their staff in the above photo), is providing $550,000 in seed-stage funding to Novira Therapeutics, which is also Philly based.  Novira is apparently trying to develop drugs against viral infections, and will use the funds for its projects and to develop its management team. Maybe it should work on its Web site.
• The Philadelphia Business Journal reports that C&D Technologies, a Blue Bell manufacturer of batteries and battery systems, has opened a business unit in Shanghai. PBJ drinks the Kool-Aid from the company’s press release and suggests the move is to “take advantage of infrastructure spending intended to boost the Chinese economy,” and not, um, to take advantage of cheaper labor.

Every Friday morning we make sure you didn’t miss anything if you spent the week in a drunken stupor, with Friday Tech Links. See others here.