Philly Tech Week 2017 presented by Comcast drew 15,000 attendees

We tried some new things this year for the seventh annual Philly Tech Week, the annual open calendar of events around technology, entrepreneurship and innovation that we at Technical.ly organized with the support of dozens of community partners, event organizers and sponsors, including our title sponsor Comcast. 

The photo albums tell a great story and so does this story book from our buddies at Grue & Bleen who also followed our reporter Roberto Torres on the first ever PTW Innovation Crawl (peep the video below), a new thing we tried this year to avoid a rained-out kickoff, which has been the story of our lives every year, of course, except this year.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=262XN9xOyiY]

There were eight themed stops and over 1,000 people crawled in and out of some of the city’s coolest offices and coworking spaces checking out new technology, playing with locally created video games and of course: eating, drinking and making merry.

This year we also had the opportunity to further introduce the audience (which often overlaps or intersects) of our sister site, Generocity to tech tools during the week to enhance the digital impact of nonprofits in Philly through a pilot program supported by Knight Foundation that we called Tech In The Commons.

The first “tech tools bootcamp” in the series of four, kicked off during the crawl and every Tuesday following tech leaders skill shared with nonprofit leaders a thing or two about AR/VR, Data storytelling, Live video and Social Communications. It was grand to be empowered to bring these two communities together during PTW this year.

Did you sign up for the PTW17 text hotline? Then you already know. If not, we sent a dozen fun messages to close to 300 people signed up to find out about secret, ‘off the menu’ events happening during the week (often late night dance parties) that you’d only know about if you joined by texting us. It was fun and confirmed what we already thought: you guys love to party. (Shoutout to REC Philly for a supercool afterparty following our Signature Event!)

To celebrate the launch of our new hiring platform, Technically Talent we gave away free posts on our jobs board for two weeks. We watched as over 70 jobs popped up on our site within 72 hours of announcing the deal.  Our weekly hiring column, On the Market reflected this spike in recruitment traffic and we sure hope you all took advantage of it!

(BTW, did you get a gig during Philly Tech Week? We’d love to know so drop us a line here: philly@technical.ly.)

The Sciences Track was officially added to our line up after a soft launch last year during our Civic Conference in 2016. A curated group of entrepreneurs, investors, policy makers, academics and leaders were invited to discuss plans for Philadelphia’s life sciences future and steps to get there.

This year we also landed a quick but meaningful presence from State government. Gov. Tom Wolf, flanked by his innovation team, sat down before an audience of technologists at our Dev Conference to field questions about the state’s push to raise its national profile. There, he encouraged the statewide tech community to keep pushing forward and to not shy away from singing its own praises.

Had a great time @PhillyTechWeek Wednesday learning from Philly’s amazing tech talent. Thank you to @TechnicallyPHL for having me. #PTW17 pic.twitter.com/tcEcVVHijk

— Governor Josh Shapiro (@GovernorShapiro) May 5, 2017

As we look back on seven years of PTW, it becomes ever more clear: not one of these landmarks would have been possible without the support of our beloved tech community. So here’s to all you attendees and organizers and sponsors who were as much a part of this as we at Technical.ly. Here’s to another PTW worth smiling upon.

And with that, the press hits:

• Forbes
• PhillyVoice
• Metro
• Metro
• Philly.com
• Philly.com
• Philly.com
• Philly.com
• Philadelphia Sun
• CBS Philly
• CBS Philly
• CBS Philly
• Philly Mag
• Philly Mag
• Philly Mag
• Philadelphia Business Journal
• Penn Current
• Main Line Times
• Keystone Edge
• OZY
• Delco Times
• Delco Times
• Med City News
• Nibletz
• Clearvision
• Clearvision
• LEADx [VIDEO]
• Delphic Digital
• Ippolito Media Arts [VIDEO]
• Community Legal Services of Philadelphia [VIDEO]
• #follownews
• SpotHero blog
• Delphic Digital: (Editor’s note: this one’s very good.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDgrbYZfD1M

Gov. Wolf visit:

• CBS Philly
• CBS Philly
• Temple News
• PennLive