Quewey moving out, selling furniture on craigslist

Tom Paine

Quewey, the Center City-based business Q&A site that pivoted last month to matching people with common professional interests amd bringing them together for social meetups, is moving out of its Rittenhouse Square offices by the end of September.

They are selling furniture on craigslist:

we're moving out, anyone in Philly need furniture (part 2) philadelphia.craigslist.org/fuo/3241427903… philadelphia.craigslist.org/fuo/3241477575… philadelphia.craigslist.org/fuo/3242501214…

— Quewey (@queweyQs) September 24, 2012

I'm not drawing any conclusions about what this might mean; I reached out to the company for comment but haven't received any response yet. The website is still live, but I haven't seen any other word from Quewey about what might be happening.

Quewey has raised $350,000 from angel investors, according to FormDs.com. Founded by ICG executive and Wharton MBA Matthew J. Safaii (ICG was not an investor) and launched in March, the startup's original concept was built around using LinkedIn to qualify the background and expertise of contributors to the Q&A site. But it never seemed to get much traction in building a user base before moving to its new format last month.



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Daily Links 8/16/2012: Verizon-Cable Agreement Wins DOJ Approval Today (With Some Restrictions)

Verizon, Comcast Airwaves Accord Wins Antitrust Approval (Bloomberg)

Comcast Statement Regarding U.S. Department of Justice Verizon Wireless-SpectrumCo Commercial Agreements Consent Decree (Comcast Voices/Official Comcast Blog)

Critics Slam SpectrumCo Approval
Say Conditions Not Enough to Protect Consumers (Multichannel News)


NBCUniversal can count its sprawling, multi-platform Olympics coverage as a win (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Is Apple's iTV television plan in trouble? (Computerworld Blogs)

Philly Fed factory activity shrinks for fourth month in August (Reuters)
But slightly improved from last month.
Philly Fed Press Release

Braintree expands mobile payment ambitions; acquires Venmo (Gigaom)
Venmo started in Philly, received backing from Accel Ventures, and moved to New York last year. Braintree is paying $26.2 million for it. Accel is also an investor in Braintree.

IMS Health Acquires Philly-based TTC, Strengthening Pharma R&D Services Capabilities
Delivers Industry-Leading Clinical Trial Cost Benchmarking Solutions (Business Wire)
This is the second deal IMS Health has announced this week, the first being UK-based PharmaVentures Ltd, which maintains a database of Pharma industry transactions. While IMS Health's global headquarters are in Parsippany NJ, its US unit is based in Collegeville.

A New Day at Quewey (Quewey Blog)
Philly-based Q&A site pivots.

Peco suspends smart-meter installations after Bucks fire (Philadelphia Inquirer)



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Philly Tech News VentureWatch 6/7/2012: Philly Startup Leaders, General Assembly, First Round Capital & more

Tom Paine

Venture Capitalist Bill Trenchard has joined First Round Capital, at least for the summer, Fortune's Dan Primack reports. Trenchard will spend his summer working out of FRC's West Coast office. Trenchard has most recently been working with Founder Collective, where he remains listed as a founder partner. In an email to Primack, Trenchard wrote "Just to clarify, I have not left my position as a Founder Partner at Founder Collective. I am continuing in the role at FC, while working in residence at First Round Capital this Summer. I have been closely involved with both funds since their inception and have collaborated with both funds actively over the past few years. I look forward to finding more opportunities to deepen the relationship between Founder Collective and First Round Capital through my current efforts".
I can see at least two investments from Josh Kopelman's early Midas Capital fund in which Trenchard was involved: LiveOps, which he ran, and IronPort, a deal he managed that was later a Cicso acquisition.

Thomas Charlton, whom I profiled late last year, recently departed as CEO of Center City-based PHD Virtual Technologies. The company announced in May that James Legg would be its new CEO. I asked PHD Virtual what was behind the change, since by all accounts things had been going well there. A company spokesperson told me by email: "Thomas moved on to devote his full attention to running his own company" (Conshohocken-based Goliath Technologies). "This was a smooth transition and not unexpected. Furthermore, Thomas was at the company transition meeting and helped introduce Jim Legg to the PHD Team".
Charlton has long been associated with Insight Venture Partners, which is an investor in PHD Virtual; he previously ran another Insight-backed Center City company, Shunra Systems. In fact, Charlton moved both companies to Philly; Shunra from New York, and PHD Virtual from New Jersey.

As Technically Philly initially reported late last month, Philly Startup Leaders President Bob Moul announced the organization had added Josh Kopelman and DuckDuckGo founder and angel investor Gabriel Weinberg to its board of directors. The other members are Moul and Chris Cera, with one open seat remaining to be filled. PSL also approved a new mission statement with three main areas of focus: resources (where to find space, talent, capital, mentors /advisors etc.), education (PSL University), and connectivity (circles, events, clubs, partnerships etc.). PSL also worked to bring Philly Uncubed, a startup-oriented job fair, to World Cafe Live on June 21. The Uncubed job fairs are a creation of Wakefield, a New York-based daily email newsletter on the startup scene.
Hopefully, the new structure of PSL will lead to a stronger, more stable organization with access to the resources needed to accomplish more.

New York-based General Assembly, which describes itself as "a campus for educational programming, space, and support to facilitate collaborative practices and learning opportunities" in the entrepreneurial community, is sticking its toe in the water in a few other geographical areas, and Philadelphia is one of them. GA held its first Philly event on May 30-"The Art of Business Development: An Interview with TicketLeap and Lokalty". It has bought on Sunny Shah, a Wharton & engineering student at UPenn, for the summer to start exploring the Philly market. It doesn't appear to have concrete plans right now, only to look at offering some courses and events. GA has opened campuses in London and Berlin, is also reported to be expanding into Boston, and may be looking at the Bay area.


A Baltimore tech entrepreneur named Ron Schmelzer has been holding monthly "Baltimore TechBreakfasts", and they been drawing quite a crowd, the Baltimore Sun's Gus Sentementes reports. Schmelzer says the breakfast meetings, which feature area tech startups, are getting up to 150 attendees, some from as far away as the DC area. He hopes to draw from the Philly area as well. Of course, in the Philly area Novotorium's Mike Krupit has started organizing monthly "Bootstrappers Breakfast" sessions.

Quewey, the Philly-based business-oriented Q&A startup that I wrote about when it launched in March, has produced an infographic that shows how to use it, and its really not that complex.





The University Science Center's QED Proof of Concept Program is opening it fifth round with an additional area of emphasis: a special track focusing on digital health technology. As many as sixteen projects will be supported in this round, up from 10 in the past. A new Independence Blue Cross program announced yesterday may also provide additional opportunities for digital healthcare startups in the Philly area.

At the urging of Philly area entrepreneur Anthony Coombs (SoLoMo app Interact), TechCrunch will be holding what it calls a "mini-meetup" at the Field House in Philadelphia on June 19. TechCrunch says it will also hold office hours on the 19th at the nearby Caribou Cafe, the exact time of which will be announced. A Mashable Meetup/Social Media Day is also on tap for the evening of June 30 at Morgan's Pier on N Columbus Blvd.

Sad to see Canada closing its consulate in Philly. The office had helped sponsor a number of interesting activities promoting trade and events in the tech and healthcare IT areas. I would have thought that with all of its oil and gas revenues, Canada would be in relatively better shape then we are.



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Daily Links 4/19/2012: Workday taps managers for IPO, enhances products aimed at SAP, Oracle

Amazon launches cloud app store (and eats ecosystem?) (Gigaom)

Workday taps Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley for IPO (Reuters)

Workday Update Pushes It Deeper Into Oracle, SAP's Turf (PC World)

Workday launches mobile HTML5 apps to help HR pros on the go (Venturebeat)

Startup America Lands in PA to Galvanize State's Entrepreneurs (Keystone Edge)

Startup utilizes Philadelphia roots, taps into Penn network
Quewey founders looking for Penn students to intern at the startup (Daily Pennsylvanian)

Verizon Sees Sales, Profits Climb from Year-ago Levels on Wireless Growth (All Things D)
Added 193,000 net new FiOS Internet connections and 180,000 net new FiOS Video connections in quarter.

Verizon FiOS Gains In Q1 Offset Chronic DSL, Phone Declines
Telco Nets 180,000 Video and 193,000 FiOS Internet Subs (Multichannel News)

Philadelphia City Council To Hold Hearing On Verizon’s Alleged FiOS Delays (CBS Philly)


Philly Fed manufacturing index falls in April
Companies in region still expanding but at slower pace; hiring is up (MarketWatch)
April 2012 Business Outlook Survey (Philly Fed)

Monetate’s Record Growth in Q1 Fueled by Drive for the Ultimate Online Experience (PR Web)
Few specifics.



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Highlights: Last week on Philly Tech News (3/12/2012 to 3/18/2012)

I profiled the launch of Quewey, a Philly-based business oriented Q&A site.

The Allentown Morning Call reported on the demise of Lehigh Valley-based International Battery, a startup with high hopes for making it big with rechargeable lithium-ion cells and batteries. It went through tens of millions of venture capital funding and leaves Pennsylvania on the hook for millions.

A UK publication reported that Exton-based iPipeline was in talks to acquire Assureweb, a financial services quotation portal backed by several large insurers there. When it received $71.4 million in venture funding in January, iPipeline had indicated international expansion could be one use of the funds.

Philadelphia Media Network reduced staff at the Inquirer, Daily News and Philly.com by about 40 people through a combination of buyouts and layoffs; guild management for the papers issued a letter ripping the management of Publisher Greg Osberg.

In a presentation at a forum held by the Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) in Phialdelphia, Comcast SVP of strategic planning Mark Coblitz emphasized the need for cable operators and their suppliers to take energy efficiency into account in the early stages of designing processes and equipment.

The witness list is set for the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee hearings on Verizon Wireless' spectrum/joint marketing agreement with a coalition of cable companies, including Comcast. The hearings are scheduled for this Wednesday afternoon.

SAP AG continued to rollout its HANA product on many fronts, including an announcement scheduled for April 10 on its database software plans. Meanwhile, some industry analysts are becoming increasingly concerned about Oracle's weaknesses. Oracle announces its quarterly earnings tomorrow (the 20th).

Philadelphia-based software firm Ascentive agreed to pay a $9.6 million settlement of a class action lawsuit for its alleged "scareware" tactics, although the company did not admit to wrongdoing.


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Philly-based business Q&A site Quewey launches in private beta

Tom Paine


Philadelphia-based Quewey, a business-oriented Q&A site, has launched in private beta. Invitations are available to the first 1,000 qualified users who sign up at www.quewey.com

Quewey 's starting point, and a key difference from other Q&A sites, is that it uses the LinkedIn API to ensure the professional standing of its contributors. Queway also recently acquired Zebek, a startup that describes its core competency as "advanced virtual-graph based search and matching". Zebek's technology will be the engine behind Quewey's back-end development, matching the people asking questions to the most relevant experts and providing algorithms ranking trending topics and thought leaders among users. Zebek's co-founder and CTO, Anshu Aggarwal, has joined Quewey as CTO.



Quewey's founder is Matthew Safaii (right), a Wharton MBA who serves as Managing Director at ICG, working mostly on the acquisitions side. Safaii will remain at ICG so he will not be running the company on a day-to-day basis, but will be a "very actively involved non-executive founder", he said in a phone interview with Philly Tech News. Someone else will be brought on as CEO. To be clear, ICG is not an investor in Quewey. The company has raised $300,00 in funding to date, mostly from angel investors, and has an open filing to raise more if it needs to.


Queway's closest competitors who come to mind are Quora and Joel Spolsky's Stack Exchange , which started out being programming-specific but has since expanded to covering numerous subjects. Quewey is different, though, in significant ways. One will be the ability of community members to monetize their expertise by offering one-on-one advice as followups when answer-seekers want more details, through a per minute charge. Safaii envisions Quewey's service as being much more acessable and affordable than a site like Gearson Lehman. Quewey says its Personal Consulting Platform will manage the entire consulting work flow, from lead generation and scheduling, to call logistics, payment processing and client review.

Quora was reported last month to be looking for a valuation in excess of $300 million in its next round. Fortune had a good recent article profiling major players in the Q & A market. And other new entrants are emerging.

Quewey has offices in the Rittenhouse Square area.







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