Startup Roundup: Lots of love for local entrepreneurship

Introducing Technically Philly’s Startup Roundup. Here, we’ll parse out the small pieces that make our greater Startup ecosystem thrive. We want to keep you in touch with the innovations that we can’t quite get to covering, but that deserve highlight. Follow along with the Startup Roundup’s dedicated RSS feed. If you’ve got news to share, get in touch.

DEFINITE READS

USA Today highlights Temple entrepreneurship after university officials noticed that self-employment in the 2009 class is at an all-time high. Northeast Philadelphia news website NEast Philly was highlighted prominently, along with Shawn Geller, who founded CollegeClipper.com, which helps retailers connect with college students using coupon offers. [Full Disclosure: The TP staff graduated from Temple and we’re buds with NEastPhilly.com’s McDonald]
Update, 10:19 a.m.: The winner of Temple’s $65,000 Be Your Own Boss entrepreneurship contest was also announced this morning. Next Engineering, which designs an automated suspension system for motorcycles that uses sensors and fluid-based absorbers to provide more control and safety, took home the prize.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

The Wharton Business Plan Competition saw a handful of new startups vying for the $20,000 grand prize. As we reported yesterday, life sciences ran the show, but there were several local startups that also nabbed some of the lower-hanging prizes. Most notably, Penn’s Jason Halpern won $5,000 in an undergraduate award offering for his PowerFlower agricultural solar solution. And Penn student Aymeric de Hemptinne received the $3,000 People’s Choice Award for Kembrel.com, a campus-centric private shopping community that helps connect brands with students.
Mobile payment platform XIPWIRE has been active in the local news lately after officially announcing last week. Let us count the ways (in which a press release works):

• Inquirer
• Daily News
• Philadelphia Business Journal
• 6ABC
• KYW
• City Paper
• NBCPhiladelphia

And we’re just giving you legacy guys a hard time. A press release also worked back in January when we first covered the mobile platform.

GIVE A GLANCE

RazorFish, Microsoft’s creative agency opened an online healthcare marketing branch Razorfish Health two months ago and already the company has laid off 5-10 staffers, AgencySpy reports.
Startup Roundup will post weekly on Wednesdays until there’s not a Philly startup story left to link to on the Internet. See others here.