In The News

Choosing wisely and widely, the New York Times Travel section profiles four Philadelphia eateries: Supper, Barbuzzo, JG Domestic and Fish.

Though tourists still mob Philadelphia's famous cheesesteak institutions, these days locals are just as likely to line up elsewhere for house-cured charcuterie, farm-fresh beet salads and delicate foie gras terrine.

Confirmation of the city's evolving palate came on a recent evening in the form of a spellbinding smoked sweet potato soup that a waiter poured tableside at Supper, a restaurant in Center City. As I scraped bits of toasted marshmallow off the side of the oblong bowl and swirled my spoon through the cinnamon-kissed diced apples at the base of the spicy puree, the aromas roused rosy remembrances of Thanksgivings past and swept away my outdated notions about the range of Philadelphia cuisine.

Original source: The New York Times
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You've got to give attorney David Orphanides a lot of credit. He's come up with an alternative to "artisanal," one of the more awkward-sounding terms in the English language. Jettisoning the word, but not the concept, Orphanides uses the more classic "crafted" when describing the four tenets that make up the philosophy of Fairmount's soon-to-open Fare restaurant, which also relies on local, organic and sustainable practices.

Orphanides eats organic and shops sustainably at home, so it makes total sense, he says, that Fare mirrors that lifestyle. "It's second nature for us. We couldn't see doing it any other way." Also on board are Savvas Navrosidis, who owns Fairmount Pizza, and attorney Andy Siegel.

Fare, which opens to the public in "early spring," eschews heavy creams and sauces for "food that's still very satisfying and filling." The projected 85-seat bar and restaurant located at 2028 Fairmount Avenue, across from Eastern State Penitentiary, is fit out with completely green, locally sourced furnishings. The black walnut bar comes from Pennsylvania trees. Wine, beer, and liquor served on that lovely expanse of local wood aims to be "biodynamic and organic, from local vineyards and distilleries," according to Orphanides.

Fare's menu evolved from an original concept of smaller snacks to include dishes for all appetites. Small plates and snacks range in price from $2-$8; salads are $6-$9, and main dishes range from $11-$18. Fare "started out more as a place for people to have a drink and socialize, more of a lounge" for Fairmount locals, but when chef Tim Bellew signed on, the menu expanded. Bellew's previous engagements include Fire in Cherry Hill, Black Eyed Susan in Long Beach Island, and MANNA catering in New York.

Source: David Orphanides, Fare Restaurant
Writer: Sue Spolan

Rapidly ascending Viridity Energy last week drew a series B investment of $14 million from Braemar Energy Ventures and Intel Capital, reports GreenTech.

Founded in 2008, Viridity Energy offers "distributed demand management software, systems and services," that can turn very energy-consuming businesses into producers and sellers of power back to the grid. Viridity's technology can also help companies get paid to control and reduce their energy consumption.

Viridity Energy's chief executive and president Audrey Zibelman said on Tuesday:

"We're moving from an (energy) industry dominated by large-scale generation where customers are passive to one where customers are active in what they consume, and what they produce. First, there were personal computers. Now we're going to personal energy."

Original source: GreenTech
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A Microsoft survey of 2,000 IT decision makers ranked Philadelphia third among U.S. cities adopting and using cloud computing solutions, reports Sys-Con Media.

Philadelphia ranks among the top three "cloud-friendly" cities for small businesses. A majority (87 percent) of IT decision makers at large companies have at least some knowledge of the cloud compared with only half (50 percent) of small businesses. Regardless of company size, a high percentage cites low total cost of ownership as a reason to transition to the cloud.

Original source: Sys-Con Media
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Philadelphia-based Hollandia International will debut its iLight bed, complete with illuminated headboard, in Las Vegas this month, reports Furniture Today.

The iLight Bed is designed to elevate the bedroom experience with the introduction of some new high-tech features, including a color-changing LED system built into the headboard, along with docking stations for iPads, iPhones and iPods, surround sound speakers and Hollandia's Platinum-Luxe adjustable mattress system.

"Our research showed that color and light, when used in the right way, can have a powerful impact on the way consumers feel in their homes, whether the goal is to relax, feel productive or to entertain," said Avi Barssessat, CEO of Hollandia.

Original source: Furniture Today
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The managing director of Berwyn-based magazine company JTE Multimedia, John Elduff, paid $2,000 for the rights to the Collier's Weekly trademark with hopes to resurrect the brand, reports Daily Finance.

While the magazine has been dead for over half a century, its once-prominent spot in American culture continues to cast a long shadow. Elduff asserts that he has already gotten a lot of attention from prominent writers who want to be part of the new magazine: "I get between five and 10 unsolicited offers per day from authors who want to write for the new Collier's." And with Collier's redux aiming for the caliber of its namesake, he emphasizes that "It will not be a novelty to be published in Collier's. It will be an honor."

It's a hard time to keep a magazine open, much less raise one from the dead, but Elduff knows quite a bit about the business. His company publishes a trio of successful medical journals: Postgraduate Medicine, The Physician and Sportsmedicine and Hospital Practice. He notes that his target demographic includes the nation's largest cadre of prescription drug users, which would put Collier's in a prime position to draw from a steady stream of prescription drug ad revenues.
 
Original source: Daily Finance
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A University of Pennsylvania scientist co-authored a research paper that sheds new light on the previously dismissed wing colors of many insects, reports Gizmodo.

Generations of biologists seem to have missed this partly because they didn't look for it, and partly because the colors are most evident against a dark background. Against a white background, they're invisible - which is exactly how most entomologists study transparent wings.

"You hold the wing up against the light, so you can see the veins," said study co-author Daniel Janzen, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Pennsylvania. "If you're looking through a microscope, you try to get a clear view behind the wing. It's the antithesis of getting wing color."

Original source: Gizmodo
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The Bucks County Playhouse, which closed in December after more than 70 years, will get a new life thanks in part to a locally managed nonprofit, reports the Associated Press.

A new nonprofit called the Bucks County Playhouse Conservancy is raising funds to buy the property from the bank and renovate and reopen the theater. Bernstein said he and his Broadway colleagues are developing programming for the theater's 2011 summer season.

A bank took over the playhouse last year after finding Ralph Miller, the theater's owner for more than 30 years, in default of about $2.2 million on the mortgage. A sheriff's sale of the property in December produced no bidders.

Helen Hayes, Grace Kelly, Robert Redford, Bernadette Peters and Walter Matthau are among the actors who appeared at the playhouse, which in its 1960s heyday was a place for Broadway and Hollywood actors to perform in summer stock.

Original source: Associated Press
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Yannick Nezet-Seguin has raised excitement and expectations in early reviews as the new leader of the Philadelphia Orchestra, reports the New York Times.

But the larger issue during a period of artistic and administrative upheaval at the Philadelphia Orchestra has been not so much how the band would emerge stylistically, but whether it would survive at all. My last experience here was in September 2009, for a season-opening (technically, preseason) concert conducted by Mr. Dutoit, and the house was less than half full.

Mr. Nezet-Seguin, 35 and dynamic, seems at least to have stirred excitement. In fact, an extra concert was added to this series, on Sunday afternoon, because of ticket demand. It didn't hurt, certainly, that the other work on the program was Mozart's crowd-pleasing Requiem.

Original source: The New York Times
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Philadelphia Insurance CIO Alfred Goxhaj writes of his Bala Cynwyd-based company's roadmap for cloud-computing in a blog post for industry blog Insurance & Technology.

Businesses need to respond quickly to market demands and to scale resources up or down on demand, while providing customer access to those resources from anywhere at any time -- all while reducing costs. In such a high-pressure, competitive marketplace, building availability, flexibility and agility into the IT infrastructure is key.

With these considerations in mind, Philadelphia Insurance Companies' (more than $2 billion in 2009 gross written premium) IT department has developed a living road map for its private cloud initiative, the drivers of which are standardization, virtualization, distributed data management and automation into the data center.

Original source: Insurance & Technology
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A locally led study suggests the kind of formula babies drink has a major ipmact on weight gain and could impact future risk of developing obesity, diabetes and other health issues, reports U.S. News and World Report.

"Events early in life have long-term consequences on health, and one of the most significant influences is early growth rate," study lead author Julie Mennella, a developmental psychobiologist at Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, said in a news release from the center. "We already know that formula-fed babies gain more weight than breast-fed babies. But we didn't know whether this was true for all types of formula."

In a study published online Dec. 27 in the journal Pediatrics, researchers assigned 2-week-old bottle-fed babies to either take a formula based on cow's milk (35 babies) or a protein hydrolysate-based formula (24 babies). The infants drank the formula for seven months. Both had the same amount of calories but the cow's milk-based formula had less protein.

Those who drank the cow's milk-based formula gained weight faster, more than babies typically do on breast milk.

Original source: U.S. News and World Report
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Slate examines the Comcast Experience--the world's largest HD LED screen--and why it's reminiscent of the Renaissance period.

The so-called Comcast Experience runs for 18 hours a day. Some of the segments are little vignettes--"like New Yorker cartoons," says Niles--featuring a recurring cast of Broadway actors, dancers, and acrobats in unusual situations: descending on window-washing platforms, doing back-flips, swimming. The figures appear completely lifelike, thanks to the high resolution of the Belgian-made 10-million-pixel screen. Sometimes the digital wall becomes a huge movie screen. The day I was there, I ! saw a view of Logan Circle, a Philadelphia landmark, as well as an uproarious clip from Flying Down to Rio, chorus girls dancing on airplane wings.

The Comcast Experience is a kinetic version of the wall and ceiling frescoes that were common in the Renaissance and likewise integrated art with architecture. Giant murals were also a feature of public buildings in the 1930s. Perhaps the greatest work of that period was Diego Rivera's mural, Man at the Crossroads, at Rockefeller Center, although Rivera's inclusion of Trotsky and Lenin insulted Nelson Rockefeller, who ordered the mural destroyed. Nobody would find the Comcast moving images insulting; they are more like Veronese's domestic frescoes--good-natured, quirky, and just plain fun.
 
Original source: Slate
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The New York Times holds up the Philadelphia-based Berserker Residents as an example of the current surge of science fiction in modern theater.

The novelist Isaac Asimov once defined science fiction as art contending with "something that is not yet so." And while drama is the original virtual reality, an everyday exemplar of an alternative universe, sci-fi stories have made their way onto the stage far less often than into books or movies. Even though the surrealists and absurdists and symbolists have long since shown us that anything is possible onstage, most playwrights and directors prefer to hew to the laws of time, gravity and thermodynamics.

Many companies, like the Berserker Residents, take a more playful approach to the genre and celebrate a deliberately low-budget aesthetic. "Our particular brand of sci-fi is very comic, goofy, irreverent, slapdash," (The Annihilation Point author Tim) Sawicki said.

Original source: New York Times
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New York Times critic Edward Rothstein unceremoniously lumps Philly's recently opened President's House into a growing group of identity museums that frame history to tell a neglected story.

Then there are the two most recent examples. The President's House site is where the nation's executive mansion stood from 1790 to 1800. And a display there could have provided some unusual insight into the American past, because not only did George Washington, as he shaped the institution of the presidency, sleep there, so did nine of his slaves. On Independence Mall in Philadelphia, which is devoted to ideas of American liberty, it would have made sense for this site to explore the conjunction of these two incompatible ideas--slavery and liberty--particularly as both were knit into the nation's founding.

Instead, during eight years of controversy, protests and confrontations, the project (costing nearly $12 million) was turned into something else. Black advocacy groups pressed the National Park Service and the city to create an exhibition that focused on enslavement. Rosalyn McPherson, the site's project manager, emphasized in an interview that the goal was to give voice to the enslaved. Community meetings stressed that slaves had to be portrayed as having "agency" and "dignity." A memorial to all slaves was erected, inscribed with a roster of African tribes from which they were taken--a list that has no clear connection to either the site or the city.

Original source: The New York Times
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Jack Abraham and Nat Turner, one-time Wharton Venture Award winners, recently sold their companies for big profits, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Abraham sold two-year-old Milo Inc. to eBay Inc. last week in a deal worth about $75 million. Milo, which operates a website that helps consumers find products in brick-and-mortar stores, raised a $4 million Series A funding in November 2009 from True Ventures, Founder Collective and a roster of prominent angel investors.

Turner sold three-year-old demand-side advertising platform Invite Media Inc. to Google Inc. in June for a price north of $70 million. Invite Media, backed by First Round Capital, Comcast Interactive Capital and angels, helps ad buyers more efficiently purchase from the numerous and increasingly more real-time advertising exchanges.

"Penn produces these people that are tech and business savvy," (angel investor Chris) Dixon said. "I would love to say I mentored (Abraham and Turner), but they're just great."

Original source: Wall Street Journal
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