PhillyDeals: Old Spectrum hand sells off building's souvenirs

Lou Scheinfeld coined the name Spectrum. He worked there as Ed Snider's vice president in 1967, when the South Philly arena opened.

Now Snider's Comcast Spectacor L.P. has brought Scheinfeld out of retirement to take the place apart.

"I've been overseeing the sale of the seats and other assets," Scheinfeld told me. "We've been selling pairs of seats for $395. We've sold several thousand."

"They'll take them home, put them in the rec room, sit in them when they watch Flyers games. One guy took a pair to Florida and put it in what he called his 'man-cave.' Another guy married a girl he met here at a Rolling Stones concert, he went looking for [her] seat. There's a lot of memories."

And not just seats. "We're selling plaques made from wood from the Sixers' floor. We melted ice from that last Flyers' hockey game, shipped it out to Chicago, they put it into coasters, you can freeze 'em and keep your drink cold."

Scheinfeld posted a catalog at the Remember the Spectrum Web site. He'll add "everything from lockers to speakers to signage and emergency generators, artwork and the scoreboard." A quarter of the proceeds are supposed to go to charity. "The rest offsets the $3 million cost to take the building down," Scheinfeld said.

Evan Britton, the Plymouth-Whitemarsh High School and Pitt graduate who made his money brokering Web addresses, via his SiteLauncher.com, says he's getting traction with Sency.com, which sorts Twitter posts "to tell you what people are talking about in real time."

Citing data posted by Amazon.com's www.alexa.com, Britton says visits jumped from 10,000 last October to 150,000 in January. "I need 1 million hits a month to be scalable," attracting enough Web advertising to pay for expansion, he told me. "We'll be there this year if we just keep feeding the stove." He's working on smartphone apps.

Sency's in "a very tight race," says Charles S. Knight, the Radnor High School and UVA graduate who writes the AltSearchEngines.com and TheNextWeb.com/search Web sites.

He counts Sency as one of at least 10 firms jockeying to dominate free real-time searches: "Topsy.com, OneRiot.com, Collecta.com, Wowd.com. . . . It's all about, who gets to the million [hits-a-month] mark soonest, who learns to monetize it first, and who gets bought by Google or Microsoft Bing first."

How valuable is this? "Tweeters are ordinary people. A lot of the time they're saying nonsense," Knight said. "If I want news, I get a feed from the New York Times."

Knight likes Sency's focus on smartphones, whose proprietary data applications threaten to fragment the Web into what some users call a "Splinternet" of subnetworks you have to pay to use.

And here's another thing impressing Knight: "Siri.com, which isn't just a 'search' engine, it's a 'do' engine. You tell it [via voice-recognition software] what you want it to search for - 'I need two reservations to the Knicks and a nice French restaurant and a cab home,' - and it already knows who you are, where you are, what you need. Soon, you won't have to search anymore."

Knight is also attracted to simplified search engines like Gabriel Weinberg's Valley Forge-based DuckDuckGo.com. "It's Google Light," says Weinberg. "They strip out all the garbage - video, ads. And it's intelligent. You search for 'wolf,' it'll ask, 'What wolf do you mean?' and list some choices."

DuckDuckGo.com is the brainchild of Weinberg, a twentysomething graduate of MIT who sold his Web site, NamesDatabase, to Classmates Online Inc. in 2006, and retired to raise his child and invest in new companies with his wife, a GlaxoSmithKline P.L.C. statistician, in 2006.

"Around M.I.T., we had a lot of people starting companies," he said. "We started this group, Hackathon."

His Philly chapter "is growing slowly over time," with help from people at the LiquidHub consulting group, among others. They meet every month, sometimes in an office at Cira Centre, sometimes at the Bear Rock Cafe in King of Prussia. "There's random people making sites," he explained. "We try to put them together."