Supplier : Innovation + Job News

If you see your name on a game leaderboard, it's natural to want to make it to the No. 1 spot. Hoopla Software, based in West Chester, provides game dynamics to sales teams. Hoopla recently raised $2.3 million in Series A round financing, of which Safeguard Scientifics deployed $1.3 million.

 

When Mike Smalls, Hoopla founder and CEO, launched the company at the end of 2009, he says, "I didn't even know what gamification was." His desire to combine gaming and sales came, rather, from solving his own challenges running the sales aspect of organizations, including TurnTide, which was sold to Symantec, and Destiny Software. "It's always a challenge trying to get optimal behaviors and actions from your team." 

 

Smalls, looking into psychological and motivational elements, discovered game mechanics. "I didn't know it at the time, but I was stumbling across the same market as gamification of the enterprise. I was focused on the sales call center world."

 

The feed on Hoopla's wall mount monitor has a sports-like feel, and its graphics have been compared to ESPN. "The audience we are targeting, sales and call center folks, tend to be heavy sports fans. It works for them to have the analysis played out." He adds that sales people tend to be more competitive. "It's a little more in your face culture of competition. You wouldn't apply the same model to the Human Resources department," says Smalls.

 

Hoopla's initial product was a free countdown clock app for Salesforce, which generated a database of 400 customers. Smalls considers the scoreboard which followed to be Hoopla's flagship product, with "dozens and dozens" of customers already, without a lot of marketing. "Every one of our paid customers has come to us. We've built relationships with Salesforce sales reps or on the App Exchange." 

 

Hoopla's scoreboard technology is available on an annual subscription basis. Price points are based on the number of users, says Smalls, who estimates the cost at about a hundred dollars per user per year.

Source: Mike Smalls, Hoopla
Writer: Sue Spolan

Wes Garnett knows all about multiple sclerosis. "My mom was diagnosed eight years ago, then my great uncle was diagnosed a year later, and his daughter a year after that." Garnett has created Kurbi, a web-based & mobile optimized personal health record that allows users to record daily symptoms and share data with healthcare providers.

 

 Currently, Kurbi is in the prototype phase, and will officially launch at this month's Philly Tech Meetup. Garnett saw a need for the standardization of symptom reporting. "Time with the doctor is really short. Patients have to recall all of what happened since their last visit. They don't always have the words to describe their symptoms." 

 

Kurbi, instead, provides a detailed daily account of illness. "One of the main reasons we started with MS is that it is really unpredictable. It's a multi-system disrupter. It can affect cognition, vision, and balance at same time. The next day the patient has no problems, then the day after, there are problems with the bladder, hearing, and vertigo. Symptoms can last a day, a week, or two weeks."

 

In this early version, Kurbi offers patients daily notification and a symptom questionnaire to complete, which is then scored. Symptoms and their severity can be tracked over time, and compiled data is presented to the physician at scheduled visits.

 

At the moment, Garnett wants to offer Kurbi free to patients, and says the company plans on a fee-based recommendation engine. The obvious funding channel for Kurbi is the pharmaceuticals that manufacture medications for chronic conditions, but Garnett approaches the possibility of advertising and partnerships with care. "People like my mom are spending a thousand dollars a year on medicine. Before we enter into relationships with pharmaceuticals, we want to give a fair shake to our users."

 

Kurbi, adapted from the name of a talking parrot, came out of a Startup Weekend in Delaware. Garnett and partners live and work in Wilmington.

Source: Wes Garnett, Kurbi
Writer: Sue Spolan

Size Seeker, you are blowing my mind. A new company about to launch out of University City has the potential to vastly improve the online clothes shopping experience. "Only about 7 percent of clothes are for sale online," says Ian Campbell, co-founder of Size Seeker, which uses Xbox 360 Kinect technology to find correctly sized clothing for online shoppers.
 

Size Seeker will officially launch at this month's Philly Tech Meetup. "It's not necessarily bad to be provocative when you are an entrepreneur," says Campbell. "Retail is about entertainment and being edgy." Campbell and partner Mona Safabakhsh met in the Wharton MBA program, where they are both currently enrolled.

"We each had clothing in closets that we'd bought online," recalls Campbell of the company's inception. "It's hard to find what size you are. Due to a vanity sizing problem, you don't know if you're a medium or a large. We both had clothes in our closet that were past the 30 day return window. We'd ended up with clothes that were never worn."
 

Settling upon the Kinect for Xbox 360 as a means to measure people accurately in the comfort of their own home, Size Seeker built a program that captures the shopper's entire body in a matter of seconds. Campbell compares that with other programs that may take five minutes or longer to achieve the same results. Partnering with TC Squared, Size Seeker was able to create a database of 100,000 body scans, bringing the accuracy of future scans to within an inch.
 

Using the Xbox for Size Seeker gamifies fashion, says Campbell, who adds that the online clothing industry shows enormous potential, growing 20 to 25 percent over the last 10 years.
 

Size Seeker is now looking to hire developers for the data platform. "We are a B to B company," explains Campbell. "We are essentially helping brands and retailers reduce return costs and convert new customers." Size Seeker's technology may have the power to bring the clothing industry up to speed with items such as computers, of which 50 percent are now sold online.

Source: Ian Campbell, Size Seeker
Writer: Sue Spolan

Got a tough decision? Plug it into The Reckoner and see your peers' opinions. "One of the great things the internet has told us over the last four years is that you can ask it for advice and get actual good information back," says Dan Koch, founder of ReckonLabs, which created The Reckoner. "Giving practical answers to individuals has worked well for Q&A sites, but has not yet worked well for polls. Internet polling is still back in 1998."
 

The Reckoner seeks to bring the internet poll into the present, with a new kind of content curation and a heaping helping of humor. Launched at the end of November, the site took off immediately. In its first month, reports Koch, The Reckoner welcomed 11,000 unique users and 81,000 page views. One of the more popular questions currently in rotation asks:

TICKLING: ADORABLE DISPLAY OF AFFECTION OR A LEGAL FORM OF TORTURE?

 

The Reckoner, says Koch, will make money via two primary revenue streams: "The first is advertising. The second part is feedback. Knowing what customers are thinking is valuable." 

 

Koch envisions a company posting two possible ads on The Reckoner to elicit feedback, for example. He trusts that an occasional sponsored question will not ruffle feathers. "In America, so much of our culture is based on shopping and our relationship with our brands." For its part, The Reckoner offers advertisers unique access to an affluent, educated young adult demographic. "The Reckoner has to achieve a certain scale to make it worthwhile," says Koch.

 

Coming from Accenture, where he was a consultant on the road most of the time, Koch returned to his hometown of Philadelphia to create a business where he grew up. "One thing I've learned is that Philly has a great tech scene, much better than I ever thought," says Koch, who is a member of Indy Hall and participant in Philly Tech Meetup.

 

The future of The Reckoner rests on solid visitor numbers, with 10,000  and 50,000 unique visitors the two benchmarks. "The timeline is the key thing," says Koch, who has set July 2012 as the deadline to decide if the website is self sustaining, with an interim analysis scheduled for this March, at which point Koch will make a decision about pursuing outside investment.

Source: Dan Koch, The Reckoner
Writer: Sue Spolan

Innovation in Philadelphia: it's not just all about tech. Government, retail, media and the way we work and live made major strides forward in 2011.

The University of the Arts' Corzo Center for the Creative Economy funded arts entrepreneurs this year, and businesses like Little Baby's Ice Cream, Kembrel, Gritty City Beauty, LevelUp and ReAnimator Coffee are just a few examples of the retail revolution underway in Philadelphia. Storably and Inhabi launched to re-imagine rentals. Milkboy Coffee expanded from Ardmore to Center City, and made plans to move its recording studio downtown as well.

Crowdsourced civic change is a major trend in Philadelphia's innovation efforts. We were named a Code for America city the second year in a row; programs like Open Access Philly and Change By Us live at the intersection of technology and civic engagement, with government stewardship by Jeff Friedman. Adel Ebeid arrived to lead the city's newly formed Office of Innovation and Technology in increasing broadband penetration.

TEDxPhilly, Young Involved Philadelphia, Philly Tech Week, PhillyStake, the Philadelphia Geek Awards and IgnitePhilly mixed business with pleasure, merging crowds and companies in festive settings.

Gaming and gamification continues to trend; local efforts include Cipher Prime, Port 127, Play Eternal and networking group PANMA.

Incubators and coworking spaces surged, with Indy Hall making expansion plans for K'House, Philadev's Musemaka, OpenDesks, Startup Therapy, and Novotorium in Langhorne.

In media, Wharton Publishing went all digital; Ryan Seacrest opened The Voice studio at CHOP; G Philly, Hidden City's Daily and Generocity launched; WHYY's Newsworks grew; and if it was relevant to technology, Technically Philly covered it all this year, never missing a beat.

Writer: Sue Spolan

Philadelphia's most recent unemployment rates checked in at 10.9%, which is well behind the national average of 8.8%. While the entire tri-state Greater Philadelphia area fared better at 8.4%, 2011 showed plenty of companies that are hiring.

When a company cannot hire employees fast enough, it's got to be NextDocs. The Microsoft SharePoint provider is bringing people in at breakneck speed. Transcend United continues to expand in IT, through mergers, acquisitions and hiring. GPIC is always looking to staff its constituent companies.

Google search challenger DuckDuckGo expanded from a basement operation to offices in Paoli and is seeking employees to fill the new space. VCopious, which provides virtual environments for enterprise, expects to double its staff by the end of next year. GIS expert Azavea continues to expand.

Center City based Cliq is looking for engineers who can assist in the mission to transform social data into social knowledge.

Other growth areas are in life sciences; Greenphire, founded to streamline clinical research, expects to double staff following a Series A round of funding. Echo Therapeutics reported earlier this year it was hiring 25.

Farm to table continues upward. South Jersey based Zone 7 and Chester County's Wyebrook Farm expanded considerably this year. Philly Cow Share, Bennett Compost, and Common Market all thrived this growing season. The Healthy Carts initiative launched to address the problem of food deserts in underserved areas of the city.

Writer: Sue Spolan

Joanne Lang has star power. It wouldn't be surprising if the founder and CEO of AboutOne left a trail of glitter dust in her wake. In the past several months, the Malvern based startup has received a huge amount of attention and money, including nearly $2 million in funding from Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern PA, which pledged $100,000 in May, and a $1.6 million Series A round led by Golden Seeds, a majority women owned national investment network. Lang's company also just announced partnerships with Microsoft and Suze Orman's IDSafe.

AboutOne addresses the needs of an increasingly powerful online contingent: moms. While dads can also use AboutOne's family management tools, Lang's idea was borne of her own pain point as a parent. Lacking proper medical information in an emergency involving one of her four children, Lang realized that data stored in the cloud could literally be a lifesaver.

She left her job at SAP to start AboutOne, which aims to organize all household management tasks. In addition to medical data, subscribers can store images and videos, keep track of bills and receipts, maintain contacts and calendars with important family dates and deadlines, and even automatically send out cards. "I have Facebook for friends and LinkedIn for business, but nothing in the middle for the people I love the most: my family and children," says Lang. "There was nothing to manage my home life more smoothly."

The service has been in beta since April, and in January launches the full gamified version, using feedback from beta tester moms. Several key improvements include automation of information gathering via social media sites and points for using AboutOne that translate to gift cards and credits.

Lang is featured in the soon to be released documentary about entrepreneurs called Control+Alt+Compete, produced by Microsoft. "There were 63 companies presenting, and they picked three to follow," says Lang, whose gentle charm and enthusiasm outshines the other two companies profiled.

AboutOne is on a mission to give back, with a lifestyle blog, special help for military families, a Comeback Mom program for women re-entering the workforce, and promotions designed to give back to the community. The company, which was founded with five employees, has just doubled staff and is continuing to hire.

Lang will also be featured in an upcoming series The Alchemist Entrepreneur. "It's how about when you want something mentally, the forces come together and help you achieve that goal. Really weird things happen to me all the time. I feel like I have a business angel. When we got our office space, we couldn't afford to buy furniture. Twenty minutes later, someone's mom called asking if anyone wanted office cubicles. She dropped off top of the range furniture."

Look for the full scale release of AboutOne in mid-January. Those who sign up friends will be entered into a contest to win an Amazon Kindle.

Source: Joanne Lang, AboutOne
Writer: Sue Spolan

Todd McNeal's company Snapline looks like a whole lot of money: slick website, professional press release. "Snapline is just me," says Bella Vista based McNeal, who presented his idea at this month's Philly Tech Meetup.

Snapline uses information readily available on the Facebook API to provide a better shopping experience. McNeal has developed a set of plug-ins based on the social data. The first one, now in use, looks at your profile and gives recommendations based on things you like, as well as what other people of similar gender, age, and interest like.

A retailer using the Snapline plug-in can segment and market specific products. "A jeweler shows engagement rings to people who are single, and anniversary presents to people who are already married," says McNeal, who is now beta testing Snapline with one of the largest online flower and gift retailers. McNeal does not want to publicly divulge the company name just yet.

"I was with IBM out of college, working as a consultant with an e-commerce platform that was used by a lot of top retailers." It was there that McNeal developed a deep understanding of what was lacking in the retail interface.

McNeal plans on releasing several more plug-ins for e-commerce data management over the next month. "My goal is to get enough information to prove that we are a viable business, and then go look for funding in the early part of next year." McNeal's current marketing strategy is personalized face to face demos, making a go as a bootstrapped one-man startup with an enterprise solution.

Source: Todd McNeal, Snapline
Writer: Sue Spolan

Stephan Jacob began his Wharton MBA with a specific plan. The day he decided to start Kembrel, an online retailer that now has a brick and mortar presence, was the day he applied to Penn. "For me, those two years were about finding partners I could trust to start a business," says Jacob of Cherif Habib and Aymeric de Hemptinne, Kembrel co-founders and fellow MBA grads. Kembrel recently raised $1 million in startup funding from MentorTech Ventures, Blazer Ventures, and private sources.

Jacob, who grew up in Germany, came to Philadelphia with a degree in computer science from the University of Mannheim. None of the founders was born in the United States.

"I was not at all into fashion," admits Jacob. "Fashion as consumer, yes. But I was more into web and software development. It's been an interesting learning curve, understanding how the industry works in the United States, identifying the supplier network."

Jacob credits Wharton with essentials like connecting Kembrel with advisors and investors, and even the company name, inspired by Wharton's Vice Dean of Student Life, Kembrel Jones, AKA Dean Of Happiness.

The retail operation launched its first beta version in April 2010. "It was a business with a plan, not just a business plan," says Jacob. "We dedicated that summer full time to the business and launched in September of 2010 with the vision of being a marketing platform for consumer brands that reach the college demographic."

With 32,000 online subscribers and 400 members who have signed up for the newly introduced  VIP level, Kembrel has a national reach, with a presence on over 2,000 campuses. The greatest activity is at Penn, University of Texas, University of Cincinnati, Northeastern, Harvard, Florida State, Ohio State, and University of Michigan.

Kembrel just opened up a store at 1219 Locust, which is also the company headquarters and fulfillment center. "We've only been open since Nov. 18, and it's interesting to see the cross conversion. It's something we are still experimenting with, how we can create a consistent experience for our customers in store and offline." The ability to stop in and try on clothing alleviates the fit problem with online purchases, Jacob adds.

Jacob agrees that Kembrel must compete with the big brick and mortar players who already have an online presence, but that Kembrel represents more aspiring, less known labels and young designers who are not in national chains.

The company, with five full time employees and under $50,000 in monthly sales, is hiring on the buying and merchandising end, and is now looking into growing its national physical presence.

Source: Stephan Jacob, Kembrel
Writer: Sue Spolan

PCS Technologies, located in the Hunting Park section of Philadelphia, has been around for 20 years, but the past two years have seen rapid growth under the leadership of Chandra Allred.

"We just hired two people, and we are looking for more," says Allred, chief operating officer of PCS, who is still in search of a technical/creative writer, as well as programmers.

With clients that include Urban Outfitters/Anthropologie, The Gap (which also owns five brands, including Banana Republic and Old Navy), and Bed Bath and Beyond, PCS is a supply chain software firm. Their product, PCSTrac, helps companies keep tabs on millions of pieces of inventory.

"The Gap has 3,500 stores," explains Allred of just one of PCS Technologies' clients. "They use our scanning software to populate the enterprise wide system. Store associates don't scan at all. It's a huge labor savings." And a huge responsibility. "If there is an issue with our application, it's not just affecting the logistics and supply chain, but it's also affecting national and international inventory."

With under 25 employees, PCS software makes sure a million cartons a week get from the manufacturer to the store. Allred left her consulting business to join PCS in 2009. She was hired to retool the company's strategy.

"They were at a pivotal point in terms of growth. One of the co-owners of the firm approached me about running the company," Allred explains. "Since then there has been tremendous growth. In two years, our client base has more than doubled, and our installations have tripled."

PCS, says Allred, makes its money through recurring revenue. While there are initial licensing fees for its software, the company's main revenue stream comes from monthly product support fees.

"It's the reverse of a lot of software applications," says Allred. "In this industry, normal maintenance costs are 18 percent of licensing costs. Ours is completely flipped. Our software is very high maintenance. If data isn't showing up, you're stuck. It's a production environment."

Next time you're trying on a fuzzy cardigan at Urban Outfitters, it's PCS that gets it there.

Source: Chandra Allred, PCS Technologies
Writer: Sue Spolan

Cipher Prime has the market cornered on the music of beauty, and the beauty of music. The startup game developer based in Old City recently released Fractal: Make Blooms Not War on the Steam network, which Cipher Prime co-founder and Creative Director William Stallwood terms the largest game distribution platform in the world, for Mac or PC in English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.

With in-game titles like Clustodial Duties and Bippity Boppity Bloom, Fractal is a good example of Cipher Prime's philosophy of fun, creating a new genre of trippy puzzle games.

"I like pretty pictures and colors," jokes Stallwood, who is responsible for the gorgeous graphics that set apart Cipher Prime games like its newest title, Pulse: Volume One, which Stallwood says was the number one selling iPad music game in the world in May 2011, and Auditorium, the team's first title and its largest revenue generator.

Like the other titles in the Cipher Prime catalog, Pulse is easy to learn and hard to put down. A review in Digitally Downloaded called the newest release of Fractal " a thoroughly charming and chilled out little puzzle game." 

Co-founder Dain Saint is the soundtrack powerhouse of the duo, and Cipher Prime's music is set to spin off, with an upcoming CD release of game tunes.

Stallwood says the three and a half year old company is about to launch a fourth title, Splice, in the next month, although he cannot furnish details just yet. Stallwood, who is from South Jersey and attended the Art Institute of Philadelphia, and Saint, who grew up in North Jersey, are able to make a living having fun. Auditorium was a web based game that was then launched on iPhone, PS3 and PSP.

Fractal, built using Flash, initially didn't do as well, says Stallwood, hence the new and improved relaunch on Steam. Pulse began life as an iPad only game, and has won many awards, with 10,000 downloads a day at the outset, and currently purchased an average of 100 times a day, at a price of $2.99. Fractal is available at the iTunes store for $1.99, and Auditorium on Steam sells for $6.99 per download.

Source: William Stallwood, Cipher Prime
Writer: Sue Spolan
 

It is possible to make money in your sleep. Yasmine Mustafa, founder and CEO of 123LinkIt.com, has created such a successful affiliate marketing tool for use on Wordpress blogs that the company has been acquired by Netline Corporation, a national B2B syndication network. Mustafa is now onsite at the company's east coast office in Lansdale, where she is serving as Product Marketing Manager.

123LinkIt automates the advertising process for bloggers. Once you install the Wordpress plug-in, 123LinkIt does the work for you, finding keywords in your blog and creating hyperlinks to places like Amazon and other online retailers.
As a blogger, you don't have to do anything special to make money. There are no ads on the side of your page. There are no annoying pop-ups when the reader rolls over particular words. A 123LinkIt hyperlink looks like any other. The magic is under the hood.

"What's special is it has a tracking code," says Mustafa of the link, which drops a cookie in the reader's browser. "When someone buys the item mentioned in the blog, it lets us know there was a sale involved. We split the commission with the blogger, who gets 85 percent, and we take 15 percent." With over 20,000 dowloads of the 123LinkIt software, those commissions add up.

Mustafa, who grew up in Royersford, Montgomery County and attended Temple University as an entrepreneurship major, was struggling with her own blog readership and advertising revenue when she hit on a winning formula one day, almost by accident. "I wasn't seeing results, so I forgot about it. Usually my posts took hours to write and research, but one day I was on the train, and wrote a silly post on the top 20 entrepreneurial quotes. It blew up. The first day I had 20,000 hits. There was advertising on that post.  The next month, I got all these checks from AdSense and Commission Junction and I realized there is something here." Mustafa found the process of creating links to be time consuming, so she came up with the idea of automating the process, enlisting the help of developer John Bunting, who developed the first version of the product.

123LinkIt first targeted mom bloggers, says Mustafa, because they know how to engage their readers and promote their blogs, they write about products, and are not necessarily tech savvy, so an automated plug-in is ideal. The next groups 123LinkIt will target are fashion and technology bloggers. The company is part of Philadev Ventures.

Mustafa is a frequent tweeter, and has hinted at the announcement regarding 123LinkIt's upcoming deal on social media, so stay tuned to her twitter account @myasmine for details in the next few weeks. 

Source: Yasmine Mustafa, 123LinkIt
Writer: Sue Spolan

From headquarters in stately Wayne, Transcend United Technologies is taking over the world of IT and telecom through mergers and acquisitions. The company originally known as Fastech is on a fast track, acquiring nationally to provide infrastructure, networking, telephony, data center optimization and more, becoming a one-stop shop for the CIO.

"Historically, a CIO might be approached by two to four vendors," says Transcend United's CEO Rick Hirsh. "We saw that was inefficient." Companies, he says, have an easier time dealing with one partner.  While Hirsh says Transcend United isn't 100-percent vendor neutral, he terms his offerings vendor agnostic. The newest challenge for his company, and for IT in general, is keeping up with the explosion of wireless bandwidth requirements. Employees now have WiFi enabled smartphones, laptops and tablets. "Estimates of how they would use the network weren't even close," explains Hirsh of the BYOD revolution (Bring Your Own Device).

"We started with a strategy in 2009 to change Fastech’s model," says Hirsh.  "That strategy was based on the convergence of IT and telecom, the fact that most mid-market VARs were only successful at either IT or Telecom, but not both, and that we could build scale on both geography and breadth of solutions."

Fastech, originated in the Philadelphia area. Hirsh engineered the acquisition of two Philadelphia area companies, and another two in the upper Midwest, with a current total of 115 employees, 15 of whom were hired this year. Roughly half of the company works out of the Wayne facility, with centers of activity in Minneapolis and Omaha. "We can grow organically at about the speed that the tech market grows, which is 20-25 percent," says Hirsh of his company that is two-thirds employee owned.

Transcend United continues to hire in sales and marketing, and plans to acquire more companies in the near future.

Source: Rick Hirsh, Transcend United Technologies
Writer: Sue Spolan

It would be great to stick a Post It note on the front door of City Hall. Philadelphia's new Change By Us initiative, officially launched last week, offers citizens the virtual and social networked version of the Post It experience. The Knight Foundation, one of the project's funders along with The Rockefeller Foundation, also announced that it has thrown $25,000 into the mix, divided in a way to be determined, with the understanding that the funds will help facilitate community generated change in Philadelphia, according to Knight's Donna Frisby-Greenwood.

So far, says Jeff Friedman, Manager of Civic Innovation and Participation in the Mayor's Office, the Change By Us website has attracted 229 users who have generated 234 ideas, from poetic to prosaic. For example: "We've started our own grassroots campaign in Old City named Scoop the Poop Campaign. Our slogan is "No Pile Left Behind," reads one note. While there are many similar ideas having to do with pets and regulation of their behavior, there is also a groundswell of support for better use of community centers and public facilities. "The way the world communicates is changing," remarked Mayor Michael Nutter during the Change By Us press conference. "As social media evolves, the City of Philadelphia is at the forefront." Of the 234 ideas, 32 projects have so far been created on the site.

An important aspect of Change By Us is connecting citizens with resources, and a section of the site, which was developed with the help of the Philadelphia's Code for America fellows, offers one click connections to the East Park Revitalization Alliance, Congreso, and The Center City District, among dozens of others.

The second city in America to adopt Change By Us, Philadelphia is following the blueprint of the recently launched New York City Change By Us program, developed through a $100,000 initial grant, according to Jake Barton, whose group Local Projects created the New York version and acted as consultant for the local initiative. Going forward, Barton announced that the Change By Us platform is open source, freely available to every village, town, city or megalopolis.

The Philadelphia initiative has its own public service announcement, created by PhillyCAM, featuring local leaders like Young Involved Philly's Claire Robertson-Kraft and Department of Parks and Recreation's Mike Deberardinis telling viewers they are listening. Kraft says, "Jeff and I were talking about the priorities of the Change By Us program, and our three choices were smarter, safer and greener." Rather than attempt to choose one of the three, says Robertson, the Change By Us tagline includes all three goals. "There are projects on Change By Us that are similar to ideas generated at State of Young Philly."

Friedman adds that Change By Us can eliminate duplicate efforts. If a community group has improved a park in Northeast Philly, people in South Philly can find out about it, reducing time and sharing resources, he explains. Response leaders, says Friedman, will monitor projects coming in to steer them to the right departments and organizations.