CoTweet: San Francisco scene has “distinct” advantage over Philadelphia

It’s nothing personal, Philadelphia.
When we reported last month that once Central Pennsylvania-based CoTweet, a team-oriented, business-focused Twitter client, was moving West for greener pastures and bluer waters, we admittedly felt some Phillinferiority complex [Editor’s note: We apologize for this unnecessary Philly pun].
But the company chose San Francisco not because it felt under-served by the Greater Philadelphia region, but because it wanted to be as close to its parent platform as possible, CoTweet co-founder Jesse Engle tells Technically Philly.
“There’s something to be said for being surrounded by other companies that are going through the same thing and are potential partners,” he says. “There’s a distinct and unique advantage that a place like that has.”
It also helps that all of its investors are located in the Bay Area, Engle tells us. Though Conshocken-based First Round Capital had a hand in $1.1 million in venture capital that the company recently raised, the well-known firm has office space in San Francisco.
One could wonder whether the move offered validity to rumors that Twitter had considered acquiring CoTweet, according to confidential Twitter documents obtained by TechCrunch last month. Engle declined to comment on the possibility of an acquisition.
“As a policy we don’t talk about ongoing conversations with companies. Twitter is a great partner for us and were eager to continue to build that relationship,” he says.
CoTweet was conspicuously absent from Twitter’s recently launched business guide, Twitter 101, prompting VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha to wonder if Twitter left out CoTweet and services like it because the micro-blogging company is planning its own business-oriented offering. Engle says he understands why his company was excluded.
“They probably wanted to remain agnostic to the applications in the ecosystem,” he says. “I think they wanted to focus on the opportunity and results that early [business] users of Twitter are experiencing.”
Engle flew to new digs at Pier 38�where startups GigaOM, WordPress, SocialMedia and others are located�in the SOMA district Saturday to catch-up with fellow co-founders Kyle Sollenberger and Aaron Gotwalt.
Engle, who attended Wharton in the early 90s, offered a few parting words to the Philadelphia region. “I love Philadelphia and it’s clear that there’s a burgeoning Internet community there, and that it’s become very, very supportive of startups,” he says.
“Like it or not, [Silicon Valley] is the center of the tech world.”
[Full Disclosure: Technically Philly uses CoTweet for forward-dated Twitter posts]