Startup Roundup: Wharton-backed NearVerse raises $1 million in funding, Viddler developing for HTML5

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

NearVerse, which develops LoKast [iTunes] a proximity-based social network with Wharton talent backing it, has raised $1 million from Meakem Becker Venture Capital, TechCrunch reports. The funds will be used to look beyond wireless 3G and 4G network connectivity.

MIGHT BE WORTH YOUR TIME

Viddler has announced that it will support HTML5 in an upcoming version of the video player after spending the last several months developing the compatibility in anticipation of Apple’s iPad. Viddler is a few months behind some of its video platform competitors, like YouTube, understandably so, and Vimeo. Initially, the service will only be available to partner and business accounts.
PlaySay let us know that the language learning startup has been selected to participate in the DEMO tour that’s made its way to Washington, D.C. this morning. The group will present before and shmooze with investors and other startups. Last week we reported that CalendarFly was out in the Valley to present their goods at DEMO, the historic startup event.

GIVE A GLANCE

Web design firm P’unk Ave celebrated its fifth birthday last week on the 1st of the month and to mark the occasion, the crew announced that it has reshuffled its internal roles, and is porting its Apostrophe platform over to Drupal—we might have been more apt to believe the news had we read the post on April Fool’s Day. But c’mon guys, we’d predict a shift to Blogger before .NET.
Oh, and don’t miss this piece on what a pianist can teach you about entrepreneurism.
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.