I was deeply moved as I stepped onto Dilworth Park. Awestruck. It was buzzing hive of gamified creations.
The Kickoff brought everyone out into the streets. Out of their high-rise caves, filled with moving pictured screens. Down to another venue housing similar technologies, yes; but also many real, living, breathing human beings, who’ve been dying to feed the most fundamentally social aspect of Maslow’s hierarchy, belongingness. Community.
We live in a very beautiful time in which the appeal of creative endeavors is beginning to outweigh the comfort and allure of barely equitable wages. More than ever, people are considering working for themselves, answering to their own ambitions and ultimately, serving their own passions.
The onslaught of a roaring underground movement in Philadelphia is beginning to surface above the fragile veil of public acknowledgement. Philly is a the birthplace for new discovery! Invention has been a ballasting cultural element throughout our history, and it’s about time that a new renaissance has taken such a solidified form.
Having been a humble contributor to the tech scene for no more than a year and a half, I felt profound sense of gratitude for how many familiar faces were there to greet me. I was equally grateful to meet so many new faces, many of them attracted to the freshness that technology offers our city. The excitement at Dilworth Park was palpable. It was a tangible energy, impossible to synthesize.
The juxtaposition of such an archaic architecture and the burgeoning seeds of Philly Tech Week’s Kickoff seemed to shout out loud, “Innovation has found it’s home here! We welcome a major shift in our nation’s timeline to a new paradigm in accessible technologies, filling the western world with new solutions to old problems and new opportunities, never previously imagined.”
I’d like to personally thank the Technically Philly Team. Thank you for leading the way. You are creating a voice for the movement and helping to ensure that our region will remain adaptive as our post industrialized society continues to shift.
The Walnut St. Labs Team and a few key Unisys people, namely Brittney Burchett, have busted their humps to ensure that our Prototyping Competition was a complete and utter success. There were a number of immediate challenges that beset the group in light of the event’s more “nuanced” format. The most blatant of which was the problem of ambiguity.
We blasted out emails and targeted newsletters, posted blogs and social media campaigns, got featured in a Technical.ly Philly article, passed out flyers to West Chester University’s brightest, and probably bugged the sh*t out of everyone we knew, but the questioned still remained, “What the hell is a ‘no code’ hackathon?”.
Despite the presence of some trailblazing-related obstacles, last night’s turnout was further validation that an inclusive framework for building competitions is really the way the go! Our recent mention in About.com’s article pretty much sums up the ethos for this event, “You don’t need to code to be in tech.”
We’re used to sweating bullets at Walnut St. Labs because we do events all the time, but this time was special. We had 20 pizzas on the way, a blank sandwich board, five cases of beer, a couple waters, a cobranded sheet cake and 100+ people registered to cram themselves into our space. Our team had ascended to a whole new level of uncertainty that few human beings are capable of sustaining. Luckily, its part of our organizational values. We find that comfort zones are a killer of rapid progression.
Brittney did an awesome job reaching out to various educational institutions who are leading the way in #edtech. Very few schools are aware of the disparate gap that lies amid a hungry tech job market and a dearth of available and qualified technologists, much less ambitious enough to bridge that gap. It was refreshing to see that so many of our contestants were young and, to some capacity, technologically adept.
STEM Academy and The Westtown School are two such institutions that really “get it” and are providing their students with opportunities to gain functional/practical knowledge for a digital age. Our hope is that the reverberations of such novel concepts will be heard by more conventional institutions who focus on fact recall.
Our launch party was the first time that we had the chance to show off the 3D printers to the public, and it was a total hit! While running the gauntlet with Unisys, we’ve also partnered with NextFab to create a “Mini Makerspace” at WSL. The mission is to expand the reach of newer fabrication technologies to populations that might not otherwise get the exposure. Wilhem Barnes did an incredible job entertaining a hoard of STEM Academy students. They really couldn’t get enough of the Bukito.
Brittney Burchett has worked really hard over the last several years to pioneer a whole division dedicated to innovative projects. Last night was a culminating experience for her, and it really showed! She was elated (and beaming!) to see these efforts displayed in the form of a community coming together to build teams and solve problems.
We’re infinitely grateful to her and Jim Thompson, the VP of Engineering and Supply Chain, who’s led the way in visionary efforts at Unisys for over 25 years.
Mary Fisher (pictured above with Commissioner Terence Farrell) was recently named Chief Operating Officer of Walnut St. Labs by our Founder, Chris Dima. She’s helped coordinate all aspects of Walnut St. Labs’ primary source of income, 23 North Digital. In addition to playing a leading role at our digital marketing company, Mary is also a mother of four. Her music choice is indicative of the combined weight of both her work-related and domestic responsibilities, ‘Deep Jazz’.
Chris explained how our relationship with Unisys was the result of continued serendipity. His neighbor and Score members, Bob Fedor, introduced David Houseman to Chris at our 2nd Startup Meetup. David was a former COO at Unisys, loved what we were doing and, in turn, introduced Chris to Jim Thompson.
Walnut St. Labs was tasked with the unique opportunity to convey a piece of highly technical internet security software to a group with varying levels of technical skill, in a party setting. We didn’t want to ‘kill the vibe’ by diving straight into the deep-end, so Chris and Brittney kept it light and fun, while informing the group about the importance of STEALTH’s social and economic context.
The truth is that some of the content from last night’s presentation was pretty heavy, but Chris did a great job of conveying the concepts with the oldest tactic found in “The Art of War”—humor. His decision to rely on the mystifying charm and energy of America’s most recognizable TV exercise personality was just what the doctor ordered.
Despite Richard Simmons’ more laughable attributes, he is the basic archetype for our Prototyping competition. As Chris so clearly stated, “It didn’t matter who you were or where you came from, Richard Simmons would include everyone”.
It may seem like a strange call to action, but Richard Simmons inclusive approach to exercise was a perfect candidate to drive this point home to our audience. We don’t care how experienced or well equipped you are. We just want to give you an opportunity to create with us.
Innovation favors those who question the norm. If the current perception of technology suggests exclusivity, then we need to relinquish all barriers that reinforce that perception and actively promote inclusion.
It was wild and crazy, but we were able to form 17 different teams, some of them containing up to five contestants. Many groups came prepared to sign up together, others entered alone and joined a team on the spot. We ended the night in a general state of disbelief. We had high hopes for this kickoff and we were able to supersede them.
We’re looking forward to the next 4 weeks where we turn the party into prototyping!
Four bitcoin enthusiasts weigh in on the current stage of bitcoin evolution during a collaborative panel discussion.
The Panelists Ryan Findley, founder of Neomind Labs, a Philly-based custom software company focusing on Ruby on Rails development. “We accept bitcoin as payment, but so far no one has taken us up on that.”
Andrew Schwabe, CEO and founder of new startup Formatic. “We want to find out why people don’t hit the submit button on your form.” Andrew has bought, held, and sold lots of bitcoin over the years but emphasizes, “Today is about us expressing our opinions. Nothing we say is buying, selling, or legal advice.”
Patrick Millar currently works with startups after serving as CTO at Chatham Financial. “My experience in the financial industry taught me about the annoying little things that have big implications.”
Jonathon Beschen, founder of FaceCrunch, a digital advertising platform, and a partner at SparkNET Technologies. “I’ve watched bitcoin in Hacker News from the beginning. Even though it took 2 years of studying it before I grasped what it can do, I purchased it early on.”
Bitcoin 101: What is it? Patrick: “What is money, period? Bitcoin is an invented currency, not tied to anything underlying, like the state or gold. It has no value other than that people are using it, but can be used as a medium of exchange. How do you value it? It’s worthless, yet it has value.”
Jonathon: “The founding premise is that it solves the Byzantine Generals Problem. How do you facilitate a trustless interaction between 2 parties? With the current system, you have to trust the bank or state that backs the currency.”
Andrew: “It wants to be currency, but in my mind it’s a science experiment. If you put your trust in the government that has that money, for example, and that government decides ‘we’ll just print more money,’ then that affects everybody.”
Ryan: “Bitcoin is unique in that there is a fixed supply. There will only be 21 million bitcoins, ever, but it is infinitely divisible.”
Benefits of Bitcoin Jonathon: “You have a ledger available that is totally transparent. It has a publicly auditable trail of every transaction. Even though originally, it was supposed to be completely anonymous, that audit trail helps keep regulators honest.”
Patrick: “In the developed world, bitcoin becomes a competitor to Visa and Mastercard. Since bitcoin doesn’t charge anyone a 3% transaction fee, companies that accept it are excited because it’s an immediate 3% addition to their bottom line. In the developing world, bitcoin can allow a young female farmer to be paid and to have control over what she is paid. That, in turn, has huge economic impacts to the developed world too.”
Ryan: “By using bitcoin’s marketing change tip, you can give someone a tip based on something they said on Twitter or get access to news stories.”
Jonathon: “With micro transactions, if everyone subscribes to driverless cars, you could say ‘I need an express lane,” and all the driverless cars that don’t need the express lane would get out of the way. Your fridge could buy milk for you buying bitcoin.”
Patrick: “There are privacy concerns with having people knowing where you are driving using trackable technologies like EZPass. With a bitcoin pass, payment and privacy could be guaranteed. It’s highly secure.”
The Block Chain Andrew: “Block chain is like the old-world ledger books. Two different columns, with each volume of that book being a block. Inside a ledger is a list of transactions that are sequential . The value is cryptographically, computationally, very hard to fabricate, because of all the CPU effort required to build the block. Everybody has a copy of the entire ledger, so it can be proven.”
Ryan: “The process transactions are created by happen in blocks. Each transaction is linked to the one before it. The latest one has to have a value that depends on the prior ones. With mining, you take the transactions, put them in a block to do a computation and put a value on it. Mining takes hardware and makes valid blocks. The network pays people for mining, and through the process of creating new blocks, you get paid in bitcoin.”
Patrick: “You’re bundling transactions in a block, and there’s a race to get the bundle approved, which is correlated to processing power. But there is also an element of chance. The more horsepower you throw at it, the better your chance of winning a race.”
Ryan: “In 2011, I was using a GPU graphics card with limited success. At one point, I had 4 graphics cards. Today, you need to build custom hardware.”
Jonathon: “The algorithm becomes more difficult as more power is applied to it. Specially made units can barely do the computations. So now there are networks and pools of people contributing their processing power in ‘mining guilds’ to harness the shared processing power.”
Summing up Andrew: “Like I said, it’s a science experiment, not a revolution. But a surprising science experiment. It’s not going to be a dominant currency. It takes too long to process transactions and the spend for CPUs is huge. But I think the underlying block chain technology is probably where the gold is, long term.”
WEST CHESTER, PA – Walnut St. Labs, an Innovation Lab in West Chester, PA, is partnering with Unisys Corporation to hold a product prototyping competition.
The prototyping competition, to be held at Walnut St. Labs across five weeks starting on April 15, will be geared towards user interface and user experience designers. The winners of the competition will receive a cash prize and will have the chance to meet with Unisys to discuss details of their design. Both Unisys and Walnut St. Labs will deliver eight micro courses during the competition in areas like Rapid Prototyping and Design Thinking.
“This is what we always dreamed about doing — elevating innovation by partnering with great companies like Unisys and doing innovative things,” said Chris Dima, Founder and CEO of Walnut St. Labs. “The team at Unisys understands innovation and will be a super productive partner.”
Walnut St. Labs was formed at the end of 2013. Its mission is to foster innovation through co-working, weekly events and technology incubation.
“Unisys has a long, proud history of innovation,” said Jim Thompson, chief engineer and vice president of engineering and supply chain at Unisys. “We also see a new wave of ideas from innovation labs like Walnut St. Labs, and we want to be a part of that. By combining Unisys’ tradition of innovation with the capabilities of Walnut St. Labs, we can have the best of both worlds.”
Over the course of the next few weeks, Walnut St. Labs and Unisys will be announcing details of the competition. Applications to participate are being accepted beginning April 1. For more information, please contact Ben Bock at Walnut St. Labs (ben@walnutstlabs.com) or Brittney Burchett at Unisys (brittney.burchett@unisys.com).
Walnut Street Labs is an innovation hub located in West Chester, PA. Its mission is to promote and create innovation in greater Chester County and Southeastern PA. WSL has established a physical space for startups to work and collaborate, a robust event calendar filled with inspirational entrepreneurs and innovators along with an advisor network, comprised of business leaders with a wide range of expertise.
About Unisys
Unisys is a global information technology company that solves complex IT challenges at the intersection of modern and mission critical. We work with many of the world’s largest companies and government organizations to secure and keep their mission-critical operations running at peak performance; streamline and transform their data centers; enhance support to their end users and constituents; and modernize their enterprise applications. We do this while protecting and building on their legacy IT investments. Our offerings include outsourcing and managed services, systems integration and consulting services, high-end server technology, cybersecurity and cloud management software, and maintenance and support services. Unisys has more than 20,000 employees serving clients around the world. For more information, visit www.unisys.com.
We are proud to announce that our incubating company MongoSluice, will be included in this year’s Phorum Philly event. MongoSluice streams MongoDB to any RDBMS. Simply point MongoSluice to a MongoDB collection and any RDBMS data store and hit enter: watch data stream from MongoSluice to SQL — all data types preserved.
Phorum’s website: “Phorum is a technology conference, for business and technology executives, which focuses on how enterprises can maximize the business value of specific technologies. Phorum 2015 features leading industry experts, business executives, and cutting-edge technologists who will examine how emerging technologies such as big data, mobility and cloud strategies factor into the integration of systems, technical support and global security policies.”
WEST CHESTER, PA – Walnut St. Labs, an Innovation Lab in West Chester, PA, is partnering with Unisys Corporation to hold a product 