Philly Tech Week Kickoff Postponed To Saturday, Due To Weather
By KYW tech editor Ian Bush
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) - Think of it as a giant 'open house' for the city's tech community: the start of the fifth annual Philly Tech Week.
Among the 150+ events, there's almost certainly something that will appeal to you.
"We want Philly Tech Week to be welcome to anyone to wants to first taste and touch technology in Philadelphia," says Christopher Wink, co-founder and editorial director of Technical.ly, the tech news site that organizes Philly Tech Week, presented this year by Comcast.
How better to kick things off than Arcade @ Dilworth Park -- originally scheduled for tonight, from 6 to 9pm, outside City Hall, but postponed to the same time on Saturday evening because of Friday's inclement weather.
"We'll have thousands of people coming to play with locally-made video games," Wink explains. "There will be robots and mobile apps and startups and civic tech products and a ton of technology to play with. There will also be a beer garden -- why not?"
Guide To Philly Tech Week 2015
There's also a different kind of enlightenment.
"There's a Buddhist meditation night, where a lot of software developers who are caught in a digital culture and want to push beyond the rat race of the web are looking at really traditional ways of doing that," says Wink.
The programming is designed for geeks and Luddites, the experts and inexperienced alike.
"You'll see very serious dev events focused on programming languages, through to how do you update your LinkedIn profile," Wink notes. "The Free Library has some tremendous programming for adult learners, people who are non-native to digital culture, trying to expose them to the world."
Philly Tech Week also tackles topics like improving access across racial, educational, and financial lines.
"Any industry you're a part of," Wink says, "there's a conversation for you -- food, art, healthcare, education, robotics, engineering, the arts, design..."
There's everything from hackathons and how-tos for social media to stories from entrepreneurs who've recovered from failure, and a podcasting workshop.
See the full schedule here.
