#technically philly

Today, my colleagues Sean Blanda, Brian James Kirk and I, debuted TechnicallyPhilly.com, a news site covering the community of people who use technology in the Philadelphia region.

Meeting my January professional resolution of working for myself, earlier this month I came on full-time to a company I co-founded: publishing consultancy Technically Media, which is behind technology news Technically Philly.

We also moved into office space as part of my leading for us a major foundation grant research project on open data.

I made the jump for a startup, after leaving homeless advocacy nonprofit Back on My Feet, through which I learned many lessons.

Quewey: business Q&A startup pivots, now offers professional networking matchmaking

One local startup’s old idea is another’s new venture.

Quewey, the business-focused Q&A site, recently pivoted to offer a professional networking matchmaking service.

If the idea sounds familiar, it’s because a Philly startup has already tried it. Before Pinterest analytics firm Curalate was Curalate, it spent about two weeks testing out a networking matchmaking service called DrinkedIn. [Updated, see below] Co-founder David Luk says that Quewey, which launched last March and raised funding over the past year, had between 1,000 and 2,000 users, but there wasn’t enough activity on the site. Around the end of June, the team tried developing a private Q&A network based on employee benefits but Luk says benefits brokers weren’t willing to adopt the service.

A few weeks ago, the three-person team decided to change focuses again, this time taking inspiration from Curalate‘s former identity.

Luk, who’s friends with Curalate CEO Apu Gupta, has Gupta’s blessing for taking another swing at the model, Luk says. As we previously reported, DrinkedIn was hot during its brief existence with several hundred sign ups and national press. The real problem was that Gupta’s team didn’t have the technology to match people up so the process was grueling. Luk says he’s got an algorithm to support the idea.

Here’s how Quewey works now: You sign up with your LinkedIn account. Quewey matches you up with three professionals who have roughly the same seniority and work in similar fields. You go out with them.

The company is calling the networking set-ups “queweys.”

Luk says he’s just trying to gauge interest for the service now. In fact, when we chatted with him, he was out doing the whole street-team thing in Center City. His office is still based in Rittenhouse Square.

Updated 8/20/12 to correct the amount of time Curalate spent trying out DrinkedIn. The team spent about two weeks as DrinkedIn, not a few months.

A big thank you to Julianna Reyes at Technically Philly for the writeup!

The philly tech blog published a post today about our new StubHub extension that is available on Google Chrome.  They also talk about some of the things we are currently working on now and hope to get to in the near future.

Thank You everyone at Technically Philly for the article.

Philly's Tech Scene Getting National Recognition. Following the second annual week filled with 80 events around town with the goal of bettering the city of Philadelphia with technology (better known as Philly Tech Week), Philadelphia is now getting some national press about its future as a tech hub.

In a story from Fast Company (part of their United States of Innovation series) titled "Philadelphia Sets Sights On Becoming America's Next Big Tech Town," Shane Snow talks to Technically Philly's Sean Blanda (one of the guys behind Philly Tech Week, along with Brian James Kirk and The20's @christopherwink ) and others about the burgeoning scene popping up right here in The City of Brotherly Love. Writes Snow:

"As the costs of starting a web-based company--including the cost and difficulty of software development--have sunk since Web 2.0, university-rife cities like Philadelphia are witnessing a boom in startups. And for perhaps the first time in decades, young people are starting to actually migrate to Philadelphia as a destination."

The article talks about Technically Philly, but also gets into some local companies (InviteMedia, MyYearbook.com, DuckDuckGo and more), the large number of young people (many fresh out of some of our great universities) who are trying and doing new things. It also mentions why staying true to Philly's core business benefits is important (hence the pharma trend).

“What places like Philly... where startups are happening but aren't ‘startup towns’ need to think about is, ‘What else are we great at?’ And build startups around it,” says Phin Barnes, a principal at First Round Capital, who frequently moves from Philadelphia to capture opportunities in New York. “Philly has lots of pharma, so it makes sense to build a startup community around pharma and biotech. Startups are so competitive, you have to take every advantage you can."

What do you think: does Philly have real potential as a tech hub in the future?

“Philly is the greatest city in the country,” Blanda says. “This city is real life. It has real problems and real people, which give us all a tremendous opportunity to make a dent.”

-LD