BizTech@Wharton conference on Friday at Pennsylvania Convention Center

Tom Paine

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The 2014 BizTech@Wharton Conference will be held this Friday, November 7th, at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Now in its 19th year, BizTech@Wharton is a premier industry conference representing the latest thinking on the business of technology.

Subjects to be featured include Bitcoin, Cloud computing, Internet of Things, and Customer Analytics, among others.

Keynotes will be presented by Ben Galbraith, Vice President, Global Products, Walmart; Dennis Hoffman, Senior Vice President, Strategic Planning and Programs, EMC Corporation; Ben Relles, Head of Comedy, YouTube Originals; and Jonathan Zabusky, President, GrubHub, Inc. The last two are Wharton grads.

In addition to the six panel discussions, there will be a Startup Pavilion featuring apps developed at Penn and a Shark Tank-like competition (QuakerTank), and you'll have a chance to meet some companies that hold informal 30 minute coffee chats.

Here are the Top 10 reasons to attend the BizTech@Wharton Conference (via BizTech@Wharton).

Tickets, which are very reasonable, are still available.

The conference is organized by Wharton students.

GrubHub, with some Philly roots, raises $192 million in IPO

Tom Paine

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GrubHub, the online food ordering service which merged with Seamless last year, has raised $192 million in an IPO. After trading started today, its shares rose 31 percent to $34.
.
New York-based Seamless, founded in 1999 by Jason Finger and Paul Appelbaum as SeamlessWeb, received early venture backing from Conshohocken-based SeventySix Capital in 2000. Philadelphia-based food service giant Aramark acquired SeamlessWeb in 2006. Spectrum Equity acquired a $50 million stake in SeamlessWeb from Aramark in 2011, and Aramark spun off the rest of the company to its private equity shareholders in 2012.

When Chicago-based GrubHub merged last year with Seamless, Seamless was said to be the larger entity. GrubHub revenue rose 67 percent to $137 million last year, although an apples-to-apples comparison of both GrubHub's and Seamless' 2013 revenue bases suggest a slower rate. It opened today with a valuation of about $2 billion.

Seamless, which still operates as a separate brand within GrubHub, generates most of its
revenue by serving large business customers.