financial services : Innovation + Job News

Being at an awards dinner with cable giants like Showtime and Starz was a thrill for the self-professed TV junkies at Cherry Hill's t-commerce solution company icueTV. But standing next to them on the podium as finalists for the same award took this gratification to a new level.

At the New Orleans, LA banquet this week, icueTV was announced as a finalist for Cable and Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM)'s "Get Interactive" Awards. icueTV creates a sales portal for advertisers to connect directly with TV viewers as they watch. Watching Shark Week on Discovery? You can buy the DVDs right from your remote. icueTV has been steadily expanding, now represented within the six largest cable providers in the nation. But even with great traction, this is still a new technology and icue hopes this award signals recognition from the cable television industry that it's time to make a move.

"For years, people have thought about using the TV remote to buy products," says icueTV VP of Business Development Ralph Nieves. "We feel that this award signals that t-commerce is an idea who's time has come."

Starting out in political polling and other on-screen data tracking applications, icueTV developed a platform that expedites the purchase process, integrating a PayPal account, e-mail connectivity and one-touch purchasing. And while this is still an emerging technology, no one told icueTV. They have already begun hiring engineers tasked with finding new applications and clients as if this platform was old news. The company hopes this award will cement them as an industry leader as its technology becomes standard in digital sales and marketing.

"Our customers know who we are but to become certified and vetted took us four years," says Nieves. "We are not arrogant enough to think competition doesn't exist already but we are confident that no cable labs are examining commerce applications in the way we are."

Source: Ralph Nieves, icueTV
Writer: John Steele

Everyone is familiar with Black Friday. The frenzied dash of hungry holiday consumers to price-slashed stores the day after Thanksgiving has become an American tradition as timeless as the Christmas tree. But have you heard of Cyber Monday? Between 2008 and 2009, website retailers showed a 43 percent traffic increase on the Monday following Black Friday where online retailers begin their holiday sales.

This year, Conshohocken website optimization firm Monetate.com broke some records of its own, doubling in size over the last six months. From Dicks Sporting Goods to Urban Outfitters, Monetate offers a revolving door of keywords targeting the changing tastes of consumers without calling the IT department. As the holiday season gets underway, the quick turnaround of this solution has new clients joining up.

"If it's raining outside, the store owner pushes the umbrellas up front and adds 30 percent to the price and makes a lot of money that day," says Monetate VP of Marketing Blair Lyon. "Large retail sites have a hard time doing that because of all this overlapping technology that is in place, requiring the IT departments to get involved, preventing retailers from trying things."

With a year of record growth under its belt, Monetate isn't waiting for the holidays to make some purchases. With five open positions listed on its website, Monetate looks to hire 10 new employees in the next six months to handle the demands of an ever-expanding client list. With a veritable whos-who of Philadelphia retailers, Monetate looks to expand its footprint and hopes Cyber Monday can be its coming out party.

"We can have this implemented in minutes, giving it about two weeks to be effective," says Lyon. "That's why we are excited about attacking Cyber Monday. A lot of customers don't think there is enough time before the holidays. We can have them up and running for the holiday season right now."

Source: Blair Lyon, Monetate
Writer: John Steele

As document sharing has transitioned from walking a manila envelope down the hall to e-mailing a digital image, document viewing has become a complicated task. With hundreds of file types and varying security measures, it's hard to be sure your document will get where it's going and will be read when it gets there. Manayunk software firm Vuzit designed the DocuPub platform to simplify the process, allowing companies to view documents of all file types safely and securely, over a cloud-based server system that can even be read on mobile devices.

Founded by former Traffic.com employees Chris Cera and Brent Matzelle, Vuzit has drawn recent investments from Ben Franklin Technology Partners and Robin Hood Ventures, allowing Vuzit to make some upgrades. This month, the company announced it will be using the investment to add advanced search capabilities over the whole cloud or within document files. The company also plans to add search engine optimization.

"Chris and Brent saw that, as people wanted to send more and more files over the internet, they were going to want to do more than just send PDF files around, without having any idea what people were doing with the files," says Board Advisor Coley Brown.

With investment in place, Vuzit hopes not only to upgrade its software but its staff as well, looking to hire three to five new engineers and development professionals over the next sixty days. With these investments, Vuzit hopes to expand DocuPub's versatility, adding more file types (it allows 40 already) and allowing an ease of use not yet available.

"Most people turn everything into PDFs but in many cases, it's a pain or there are conversion problems," says Brown. "What most people would rather do is say 'here is my Visio file and even though you never paid for Visio, don't have a license for it, you can see it as if you did."

Source: Coley Brown, Vuzit
Writer: John Steele

It's a CEO's worst nightmare: your company's most valuable data suddenly disappears. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft sounded the alarm in 2004, when he estimated that intellectual property theft accounted for losses of $250 billion a year. Numerous case studies from Coca-Cola and Forbes have shown the effects as well. From trade secrets to client lists, document security may feel like paranoia but that is no consolation when it happens to you.

Center City cyber security designers DDC (formerly Document Depository Corp) created RADAR, a full-service critical data management system that recently added two new features. The first is a contract tracker that allows companies to share contracts and get digital signatures remotely. The second is a secured online chat room with document-sharing capabilities that DDC calls a Virtual Data Room. With these new products, DDC goes beyond just document sharing solutions to the protection of a company's most critical documents. 

"Most companies store data in filing cabinets, on CD's in e-mail so pulling that all together is a very painful process," says DDC Executive Vice President of Business Development Cristina Greysman. "Not to mention, the fact that, what if your CFO who has all that data stored on their laptop gets hit by a beer truck? What then? Can you get to all that data and if not, how much will it cost to recover it?"

As the company transitions from document sharing to a more security-focused firm, it has drawn private funding for recent additions like the Silicon Valley facility it opened in August or the European facility opened in Dublin, Ireland in September. As the rollout continues for RADAR, DDC will be adding staff as it tries to expand marketing efforts and online product offerings.

"We want to build out our customer support staff," says Greysman of new hires. "We will do consulting with clients to help them determine best practices for putting information into RADAR. It is possible that we will hire some additional sales staff as well."

Source: Cristina Greysman, DDC
Writer: John Steele

With Lab Hub, Blue Bell's Halfpenny Technologies hopes to take Health Information Exchange technology to the next level, integrating features like computerized order entry and results reporting with the company's already-respected exchange tools. With a little help from their friends, Halfpenny may be ready to deliver this turnkey technology sooner than expected as the company announced two big steps forward last week.

First came a $2.6 million venture capital investment. Locals like Bala Cynwyd-based Osage Venture Partners and LORE (Loosely Organized Retired Executives) Associates partnered with New York-based Milestone Venture Partners to put support behind Lab Hub. Investors believe the financing will help push Lab Hub over the finish line.

"Halfpenny's strong technology platform, domain expertise and solid business strategy combined with its growing client base have positioned the company to move to the next level, says Osage Venture Partners vice president David Drahms. "We look forward to partnering with Halfpenny in meeting the needs of the evolving healthcare market."

Halfpenny also announced the addition of four industry veterans to the Halfpenny Management Team. New team members include , executive vice president of business development Mitch Fry; chief financial officer Daniel O'Brien; senior vice president of sales Roger Newbury; and vice president of sales Jim Sheils. While trying to establish Lab Hub in new markets, Halfpenny officials hope these experienced team members can keep things growing.

"All of our new team members have impressive track records in healthcare and understand the complex challenges facing the industry today," says Halfpenny chief sales officer Bob Cox. "We are pleased to be able to draw upon the strategic vision and in-depth understanding of these healthcare veterans and look forward to their insights and ideas as we continue to develop solutions that address ever-expanding laboratory outreach, HIE and REC initiatives."

Source: Bob Cox, Halfpenny Technologies
Writer: John Steele

This week, Center City District CEO Paul Levy acquired the Holy Grail of city planning; a detailed set of data collected by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. The data may not provide eternal life for city developers but it will make life a whole lot sweeter.

After years of educated guessing to determine demographic breakdowns of Philadelphia's downtown, this data set has pinned down where the 267,331 Philly workers (as of 2008) make their living and hang their hats. Previously only having county data to work with, 48 states participated in a federal program to determine demographic data for cities. CCD published Philadelphia's Major Employment Nodes: Where City Residents Work, a 12-page report outlining where we work and where that may soon take us.

"This is the Holy Grail we have been searching for for 20 years because all this time we have been estimating how many people work downtown," says Levy. "A retailer wants to make a decision on where to locate? We know exactly how much money residents earn, how many work here. This is a huge tool for economic development."

One of the key myths busted by this wealth of new information is the idea that suburbanites hold most of the jobs in Center City. In fact,
Philadelphia residents hold 51 percent of Center City's private-sector jobs. And many city-dwellers, the report states, commute to outlying corporate hubs for work, which Levy says may drive transportation policy in the future.

"We know now that 15 percent of the jobs in the King of Prussia area are held by Philadelphia residents," says Levy. "So that starts to have huge implications for transit planning. In this report we can clearly show the importance of the downtown and how many people would benefit from improvements to transit."

Source: Paul Levy, Center City District
Writer: John Steele

Anyone who has used eBay before understands the ease of PayPal. But for the medical industry, where costs come with a long list of variables--whether or not a patient has insurance or if there is a deductible--the simplicity of PayPal is even more desirable. Center City-based InstaMed allows doctors and health care centers the ability to turn any computing device into a payment terminal, able to calculate the copay and deductable for a complete check-out. The technology now operates in over 7,500 health centers, representing all 50 states. This week, InstaMed announced receipt of $6 million in new capital growth funding, bringing total investment to $22 million.

"We allow health systems to get rid of all the hard terminals you would typically see at a retail store or pizza shop where they swipe your card," says InstaMed CEO Bill Marvin. "What's unique about InstaMed is we are one integrated platform for handling everything that has to do with money in health care."

With the new funding, coming from existing investors including Bala Cynwyd's Osage Partners, InstaMed will continue to expand market share, launching new marketing campaigns, and aggressively expanding business development. But as a relatively young company, Marvin is keeping an eye on quality, looking to update technology systems. By keeping their message and technology strong, Marvin's team hopes to make InstaMed as common as Tylenol in American hospitals.

"As a business that was really just an idea six years ago, we implemented our first hospital only three years ago," says Marvin. "We have experienced tremendous growth in the last three years and we are at the point where the existing data centers and technology infrastructure that we built needs to be upgraded and taken to the next level."

Source: Bill Marvin, InstaMed
Writer: John Steele