Wharton’s Kembrel.com launches first private retail sales store on Facebook

Last week, as students at Temple University began their first week of classes, across town, Cherif Habib and Stephan Jacobs were putting finishing touches on the official launch of a six-month project before they, too, hit the books.

Sure, the two second-year Wharton MBA students might have planned the launch before they became brain-deep in business studies, but it’s more likely perfect timing for Kembrel.com, their online retail store aimed at the college student apparel market.

Kembrel sells clothing, shoes and accessories for men and women. It’s recently moved into the gadget market, too, offering add-ons for iPhones. Since a soft-launch in April, Kembrel has racked up 20,000 registered users through word of mouth marketing efforts. It’s also began promoting a “pop-up” shops at local universities where the team sets up a small merchandise shop and explains the site to students.

Founded in April, the company had early success during Wharton’s Business Plan Competition, and Kembrel received the $3,000 People’s Choice Award, as we reported in May.

Their success hasn’t been by chance— the pair both had a background as software engineers and with entrepreneurial backgrounds.

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Event Highlights: July 25 – July 30, 2010

Before you begin contemplating popping the cap off of a fire hydrant, consider this week’s tech events calendar. This week is packed with events you won’t want to miss. Although we can’t promise anything, there will likely be free air conditioning, too.

This week get the low-down on what’s hot and new in Mac on Tuesday, check up on the folks at Hive76 on Wednesday and join Technically Philly at the Supernova Forum 2010 on Thursday and Friday.

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Timothy Allen talks about education innovation at Wharton

Timothy Allen has to clarify.

Timothy Allen of Wharton

The programmer and analyst with Wharton Research Data Services is something of a community organizer to boot and July is busy enough that Allen has to make sure that the record is set straight.

There are three events — “very exciting events” Allen clarifies — happening at Wharton in the coming weeks. These clusters often happen on campuses when most students are elsewhere.

In addition to the East Coast debut of the famed decade-old Supernova conference that, for full disclosure, Technically Philly is co-sponsoring at the month’s end, in two weeks, Wharton is also home to two events dedicated to innovation in education.

Allen says that has something to say about Wharton and what the relationship of the city’s technology community to education can mean for the region’s future.

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Friday Q&A: Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital

Josh Kopelman is angry.

When Technically Philly pops into his office, the normally cheery venture capitalist is busy trying to figure out why First Round Capital’s email service is down.

“They say six minutes of downtime,” he says. “but they’re way over that.”

After a brief phone conversation (he would later blog about the downtime) he immediately returns to his normal upbeat demeanor and for good reason: Kopelman is one of four founding partners of one of the most active early-stage investment companies in the country. The firm has become as much of a brand as the companies it invests in, boasting the most-visited VC site on the web.

Located in a small, nondescript office building in West Conshohocken, the firm has expanded to San Francisco and will open its New York City offices next week, giving it a headquarters in two of the largest technology communities. The firm is setting a new standard in investment by making a high number of smaller, early stage investments while nurturing companies from the ground up.

First Round, however, is just the latest chapter in the Wharton grad’s career. Kopelman, a New York native, started Internet information company Infonautics while still in college and almost didn’t stay in Philadelphia.

“Once you have 17 people in the company with mortgages and me without, that pressured me to stay,” he says, “Then I grew attached to the area, built networks and planted some roots here and started Half.com.”

Since then, Philly has treated him well: Kopelman and his partners sold Half.com to eBay for $350 million in 2000, giving Philadelphia one its biggest tech “wins” in the Web 1.0 times. After starting and selling Turntide to Symantec in less than a year, Kopelman switched from entrepreneur to investor, making Philadelphia home to one of the most influential Internet investment firms in the world.

We sat down with Kopelman to talk about his take on Philadelphia, what kinds of companies he looks for and why Philly (and every other city) has no comparison.

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Links: MC Hammer at Wharton, chatting Jimmy Wales and More

DEFINITE READS

• Pittsburgh Tribune Review reports that that city will put a bid in for Google’s announced ultra-fast Internet product.
• Keystone Edge has a Q&A with University of the Arts professor and tech-art entrepreneur Slavko Milekic.
• The Inquirer reports that MC Hammer will be appearing at a Wharton event, and, yes, TP will try to crash the party.

Below, Gabe Weinberg talks with Jimmy Wales, comic book classes and more.

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Friday Q&A: Steve Barsh, CEO of Packlate.com

Update: Minor copy edits. Changed logo.

As reported in this week’s Venture Capital Roundup, Steve Barsh has had a busy week.

The DreamIt Ventures managing partner got his tons of national press for his latest startup, Packlate.com, from TechCrunch, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. The company, based in University City (though with plans to move to West Conshohocken) aims to be a last-minute vacation booking service and has received funding from ETF Ventures and First Round Capital.

“It’s not a rocket ship yet, but it is kind of jiggling on the launchpad,” says Barsh.

Barsh says the idea has been brewing for years as he mentored young entrepreneurs at DreamIt while maintaining vacation properties in Utah.

“You know the saying ‘Those who do, do. And those who don’t, teach? I like to do both,” he says.

Currently he says he is still dedicating ten percent of his time to DreamIt but says he wants to focus most of his efforts on his new startup. We spoke with Barsh about Packlate’s future, how DreamIt can survive with preoccupied management and when we’ll be able to book a Jersey Shore vacation with Packlate.

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Technically Not Tech: DocASAP is Open Table for doctors

A screenshot of DocAsap's homepage

Wharton student Puneet Maheshwari‘s child had an ear infection.

And, as any parent can tell you, hell hath no fury like a child sick. After combing through the Yellow Pages for the right doctor, Maheshwari was forced to go to the emergency room out of frustration and pay significantly more money than if he had found a specialist.

Like any good Wharton student, Maheshwari thought he could do better, and DocAsap was born.

The service, much like what OpenTable does for restaurants, searches for doctors based on criteria you define and allows you to schedule appointments with them. For example you could search for pediatricians that take Blue Cross in South Philly and DocAsap would give you all of the eligible candidates. Currently, the site only reviews Philadelphia-based dentists, however the site plans to expand to other markets and more types of physicians.

“We should have a really good coverage ratio in the Center City area soon,” said co-founder Vicente de Baca. After filling out the Center City area, DocAsap will then branch to the suburbs and, if everything goes according to plan, nationally. And unlike many Wharton grads, the duo plans to stick around for a while.

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Friday Q&A: Dave Konopka of HigherEdCamp

Edit: corrected date.

Continuing in BarCamp Philly’s success, HigherEd is the latest in a long line of BarCamps that included HealthCamp and Technically Philly’s own BarCamp News Innovation. On June 6 at The University of Pennsylvania’s Huntsman Hall, HigherEdCamp will gather members of a large group of local universities to help foster collaboration between the typically fractured academic community, especially when it comes to technology.

Technically Philly sat down with Dave Konopka, a Web developer at the University of Penn and one of the event’s organizers. Konopka believes highly in Philadelphia’s role as a college town, and believes like many, that the technology industry is key to the city’s innovation.

We ask him why should the tech community should be interested in this event, how he got the usually rigid world of academia to support him and how he believes tech nerds can take advantage of our vast university system.
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Events highlights for the week of May 11 – May 17, 2009

Hello, newly sunny Philadelphia, that’s a hell of a farmer’s tan you’ve got there.

Let’s keep that weekend energy going with our region’s active tech community. Half of our highlights are straight outta West Philly. It’s not bias, we swear! But if you just refuse to do anything West of the Schuylkill, our events calendar would be happy to schedule an appointment for you.

On Saturday and Sunday, help University City with some GPS mapping. The folks at Philly OpenStreetMap realized long ago that Google might one day threaten our existence so they’re mapping the world until it happens. How else are you gonna find the way to good Chinese restaurant when the Goog steals your identity and shuts down Maps?

Wednesday, academia will sign-up for Second Life, get harassed by creepy dudes and annoying tweens, and beg for a way to get the heck out of there while still applying some of those virtual concepts to higher education. With Wharton hosting, it might be a little smarter than our summary.

Monday, IndyHall will host a PHP Meetup featuring Sigurd Magnusson of Silverstripe, an open source CMS for the WordPress haters out there. Magnusson will even be taking feature requests, so give him some advice or he’ll ignore your feedback when the next version hits.

Philly Office Geeks are trying to spread the word about social media in the business community on Tuesday. It might be a clever attempt at getting network privileges for Facebook in the office, but we’d bet there’s a little more too it than that.

All events listed on the event calendar are free to attend. Be sure to check our complete calendar for more information, or follow us past the jump.
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NIR Diagnostic wins Wharton Business Plan Competition

Chris Schaeffer of Realistic Eye gives his elevator pitch. The company ended up placing third.

Edit: added RIMS video.

The main event was over already, but the eight hopefuls gunning for the Wharton Business Plan Competition had a chance to bag an extra $3,000 by convincing the dinner audience that they were deserving of the People’s Choice Award.

Each company sent a representative to the steps in the basement of Wharton’s Huntsman Hall to plead their case to roughly 100 attendees who may or may not have been taking advantage of the free food. Approaches ranged from the youthful, energetic charisma of StealthRowing’s Daniel Harbuck (covered earlier this week by TP) to the frank nature of Cuddlebot’s owner, who told the crowd, “we’d love your cash.” After the pitches were finished, the judges huddled to decide the grand prize winner as the audience members dropped ballots in a silver box carried around by the organizers sporting yellow ribbons.

Hours later, NIR Diagnostic came out of the four-round competition $23,000 richer, bagging the $20,000 grand prize as well as the $3,000 people’s choice award. The company is developing a wound diagnostic device that would bump accuracy up to an estimated 85 percent from 50 percent.

After the jump we summarize and comment on each company’s elevator pitch and tell you which one is most likely to lead to a Terminator-like future.
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