“The news organizations that survive will be stakeholders on the important issues,” I told Phillymag
Tag: Technical.ly
Technically Baltimore and Baltimore Innovation Week: we’ve expanded
First shared in April and then announced more fully last month, earlier this summer, I helped soft-launch Technically Baltimore, another local technology news site committed to covering and growing the conversation around technology bettering the region there.
What’s even better is that, with the help of more than a dozen partners, we’re also organizing the inaugural Baltimore Innovation Week the last week of September, featuring more than 20 events.
It’s an entirely new challenge to go to a new city, though we’ve spent at least a year familiarizing ourselves with Charm City and its meaningful, passionate technology community and have hired a full-time reporter there. Our goal is to take what we’ve learned in Philadelphia and do it better in another city we love: connect entrepreneurship, enterprise, digital access, smarter government and creative and artistic communities at their intersection and try to use news as convener and connector to raise awareness and strengthen their impact on Baltimore.
Let me know if you know anyone we should know. It’s a thrilling opportunity.
Technically Media: working full-time for myself
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.
We have a payroll services company, accountant, attorney, and, after my third partner comes on fulltime, we’ll look toward health insurance. I’m surely proud of that.
Brief Fox 29 appearance discussing e-waste
That’s the beautiful twin I call home in Frankford, in lower Northeast Philadelphia, behind me, and, yes, that’s a screen shot of my ugly mug on the last night’s Fox 29 10 o’clock news.
I was interviewed by John Atwater of Fox 29 for their followup to a PBS Frontline documentary on e-waste in developing nations. To show the piles of outdated technology that are scrapped by Western nations and shipped to be dumped in places like West Africa’s Ghana, the documentary shot footage of one, and found a computer from the School District of Philadelphia.
A Technically Philly reader spotted it and sent it our way, and we ran with it. Writing the first local story on the matter and then pushing on the district to announce an investigation. That last larger story got a fair amount of buzz on Philly social media circuits, and Fox 29 picked up on it from Twitter.
Now it’s in big media’s hands — until TPhilly can begin monetization and become big media, of course… or something like that. See the take on it from running on Technically Philly.
After the jump, check the video and my take on the experience.
Philacon Valley: The surging technology communities of Philadelphia, the Delaware Valley
Wipe clean the rust.
Philadelphia, Pa., the first great and longest-lasting great American city, which fell on long-hard, embarrassing times for much of the second-half of the 20th century, has every reason to take on the future of urban existence — innovation.
I’m using the opportunity to also introduce a new venture, Technically Philly, a blog covering the community of people using technology in Philadelphia.
And that community is growing. If it’s green development or technology, Philadelphia has a thriving underground version of it. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to Philacon Valley.
Launching Technically Philly: a news site for the technology community
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.