Maybe tiny Delaware really can make a comeback in the auto-assembly industry, thanks to technology and tax dollars.

A Bellevue, Wash., company that has developed hybrid electric vehicle technology was in Dover, Del., giving rides in its prototypes to state officials, including Gov. Jack Markell.

AFS Trinity Power Corp. calls its vehicle, which is a reconfigured Saturn VUE SUV, the XH150. It first showed off the prototypes at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit in January 2008 and brought them to Philadelphia that April.

AFS Trinity CEO Edward W. Furia, a Philadelphia native, said the company made the trip east to meet with Markell on the suggestion of attorney Stephen M. Goodman, a partner in the Philadelphia office of Morgan Lewis & Bockius.

In the last two years, Delaware lost two huge auto-assembly factories when Chrysler and General Motors closed them. But last fall, the California-based Fisker Automotive announced plans to build its electric cars at GM’s shuttered Wilmington plant. And as PhillyDeals reported last week, AutoPort Inc. was picked by the U.S. Postal Service to build prototype electric vehicles in Wilmington.

Furia said he views Delaware’s idled factories and able workforce as a viable option to produce AFS Trinity’s hybrid, which has an all-electric range of 40 miles on a single charge. But the privately held company is not close to picking a location.

While Markell was test-driving AFS Trinity’s XH150, GM said it would invest about $246 million in its Baltimore Transmission factory to build electric motors, creating 200 jobs in Maryland. GM was able to do so, in part, with funding from the U.S. Energy Department.

AFS Trinity didn’t apply for any of the billions offered by the Energy Department in 2009, Furia said, because “the regulations were not friendly to small business.” I’ve heard other alternative-energy entrepreneurs make the same complaint.

To be chasing his electric car dream after 20 years, Furia had convince lots of people to take a chance of him. Furia said John Andrews “Jay” Harris IV, of Berwyn, who died Dec. 29, had supplied critical funding that enabled him to build the prototypes that spent Tuesday tooling around Dover.

My, how the business “beauty pageant” is changing. Attendees of Mobile Monday Mid-Atlantic’s Demo Night today will vote on the best presentations, not by a show of hands or secret ballot, but with a touch on their mobile devices.

Would you expect anything else from a group that proselytizes the virtues of the wireless smart phone? Got to work the app, if you talk the talk.

There is a growing local community of entrepreneurs developing all sorts of applications and tools for the iPhone and smart phones marketed by Verizon, Sprint and others.

Ron Braunfeld, who’s on the board of the local chapter of Mobile Monday, said meetings now attract more than 200 people, up from 50 where they started two years ago.

At the event at the Hub in the Cira Centre near 30th Street Station starting at 5:30 p.m., 10 companies from this region will each get five minutes to tell their stories. Then, those in attendance will rate each presentation using software being developed by another local company called Yorn L.L.C.

After the last presentation is done and all the votes have been cast, the top three will be shown to the audience as a PowerPoint slide. Each presenting company will learn instantly how it fared via a private data transmission to their mobile devices.

Among the presenters is AirClic Inc., which quite possibly is the granddaddy of the region’s mobile-related entrepreneurial community. AirClic, of Trevose, was founded in 2000.

To Braunfeld, who is the vice president of business development for Boston’s ULocate, the frenzy of the mobile business reminds him of 1998 when everybody had to get Web pages, but no one really knew what to do with them.

Today, lots of people know what they want to do using their phone. But the lack of open systems means developers have to design their tools for separate phone makers and networks. Still, that’s not deterring an explosion of development.

Braunfeld said a big aim of the Mobile Monday chapter is to encourage those developers locally, help them network and yes, allow them to show off.

Earnings

Tuesday: AmerisourceBergen, Ametek, Carpenter Technology, CSS Industries, DuPont, Sunoco Logistics Partners

Wednesday: Amerigas Partners, Innovative Solutions & Support, SAP, Tyco Electronics

Thursday: Abington Bancorp, Airgas, Bryn Mawr Bank, Destination Maternity, Dollar Financial, Kensey Nash, National Penn Bancshares, SEI Investments, TF Financial, UGI

Friday: Parke Bancorp, Wilmington Trust.

Readers called and e-mailed, convinced I’d made a mistake Thursday in identifying Unisys Corp. as the local stock whose price rose the most in 2009.

Some were Unisys shareholders who’ve seen the stock lose half of its value over the last three years. Hadn’t I overlooked the 1-for-10 reverse stock split that the Blue Bell company declared Oct. 6?

No, I hadn’t, but the reverse split had no effect on the percentage change in its stock price between Dec. 31, 2008, and Dec. 31, 2009.

In a reverse split, a company raises its stock price by reducing the number of shares outstanding.

At Unisys’ May annual meeting, shareholders authorized the board to pursue a reverse stock split of between 1 for 5 and 1 for 20. On Oct. 6, the board announced a 1-for-10 reverse split, effective Oct. 26. That meant shareholders received 1 share for every 10 they owned.

Presplit, Unisys shares closed at $2.62 on Friday, Oct. 23. At the end of the trading day the following Monday, Unisys closed at $27.17, adjusted for the split.

To readers, that’s where my math had gone wrong.

However, following such a split, Bloomberg and other data providers adjust historical prices to reflect the split. So Unisys’ Oct. 23 closing price became $26.20 on a split-adjusted basis.

Unisys shares finished the year at $38.56 compared with a split-adjusted $8.50 on Dec. 31, 2008. That’s a 354 percent increase in a year when the company reported its first profit in four years.

What bears watching is what happens to Unisys’ stock price from here on out. BusinessWeeklast spring wrote about a 2008 study in the journal Financial Management that looked at the performance of more than 1,600 companies that had executed reverse stock splits from 1962 to 2001. The study found that the stocks recorded negative investment returns over the three-year period after the month of the reverse split.

It makes sense because companies that do reverse splits tend to be performing poorly. That’s why their stock is so low. A reverse split disguises that.

Stock exchanges move to delist companies when share prices are too low for too long. And many institutional investors cannot own stocks at prices below $5.

“Save your receipts” may be the rule in the workplace for getting reimbursed for expenses, but those slips of paper are just so much trash to a college student.

That’s what Drexel University student Bradley Ericson pondered as he observed transactions at the checkout counter at campus dining halls.

Students have a meal plan and tap it electronically by using their student identification card. But the cashier still hands over a printed piece of thermal paper. Soon after, that receipt winds up on the floor or counter.

A freshman at Drexel’s LeBow College of Business in the fall of 2008, Ericson thought a digital receipt would be more convenient for the consumer. Digital receipts would also save money for the dining hall, which would not need to buy rolls of paper. That sounded to him like it could be the start of a business plan.

“The convenience factor is the most important,” Ericson said. “I want to make my daily activities easier.”

Today, Ericson has a company, called 3SecondReceipts L.L.C., that tested its software on Drexel servers this fall. (The name came from his research, which found a thermal-paper receipt has an “average life span” of only 3 seconds before it gets wadded up and tossed.)

It works like this: When the student’s ID card gets swiped, it enables the dining hall to debit his or her meal plan tied to the student’s identification number. Ericson’s software hooks into the point-of-sale system and creates a digital receipt of the transaction that gets sent to buyer and seller. Students can log in to their campus accounts to see how much they spent and what they spent it on.

Ericson said he thought the digital receipt functionality would go “live” campuswide at Drexel in three or four months. If it performs for more than 21,000 students as well as he hopes, Ericson’s next calls will be to Temple, Penn, and other area colleges.

Last spring, he became the first freshman to place in the Laurence A. Baiada Center’s Business Plan Competition at Drexel. He didn’t win it, but he came away with $1,000 as a finalist.

Losing that competition bothered him. He learned that while he had a good idea, that didn’t make it a good business prospect. Ericson didn’t go home to Fair Lawn, N.J., for summer break, but stayed in Philadelphia to work on his business plan.

Meanwhile, a different set of judges in another competition this week singled him out over many other entrepreneurs on campuses across the United States. Entrepreneur magazine Thursday named the Drexel sophomore its 2009 College Entrepreneur of the Year.

The designation provides 3SecondReceipts with $5,000 in seed capital and it gives Ericson some bragging rights with his three siblings.

After all, his brother Timothy started a firm in November 2007 when he was at Drexel. Today, CityRyde L.L.C. is a consulting firm in Philadelphia that helps universities and municipalities design and implement bike-sharing programs.

At 19, Bradley Ericson and his start-up story have already been featured on ABC News and in Forbes magazine. It will get retold in Entrepreneur magazine next month.
 

For the first time in nearly 30 years, Kulicke & Soffa Industries Inc. will be looking for a chief executive officer.

C. Scott Kulicke told the board of the Fort Washington maker of semiconductor-assembly equipment that he intended to retire at the end of June 2011, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Kulicke, 60, has been CEO since 1980. If that sounds like a long time to helm just about any organization, let me put it this way: The Philadelphia Phillies have had 11 managers since then.

Shares of Kulicke & Soffa didn’t react much to the news last week. The stock closed at $5.10, down 2 cents on Friday.

But its shares have risen 259 percent over last 52 weeks, thanks to an improving business climate.

Like other manufacturers, Kulicke & Soffa experienced a steep decline in business during the recent global recession. Its fortunes depend on the health of computer-chip makers, who in turn were battered by weak business and consumer spending.

To conserve cash last winter, the company reduced the base salaries of its employees, including Scott Kulicke and the rest of management. Following an improvement in business conditions, the board restored the base salaries companywide as of September.

The clearest sign of that improvement came last month, when Kulicke & Soffa reported net income of $5.8 million, or 8 cents per share, for its fourth quarter ended Oct. 3 compared with a net loss of $4.6 million, or 9 cents per share, for the fourth quarter ended Sept. 27, 2008.

Quarterly revenue also rose for the first time in 11 quarters, to $110.5 million from $61.2 million.

What’s interesting is where its customers are. About 96 percent of net revenue for its fiscal year ended Sept. 27, 2008, were from shipments to technology companies located in the Asia/Pacific region and elsewhere outside the United States.

The company said the board will “promptly begin to identify possible successors,” including internal and external candidates.

Scott Kulicke’s father, Fred, started Kulicke & Soffa Manufacturing Co. with Al Soffa in Philadelphia in 1951 with $500 and a borrowed 1948 Plymouth Coupe, according to a history on the company’s Web site. (Fred Kulicke died Nov. 13; he was 91. Soffa was 84 when he died in 2005.)

Hearing an expert say, “Soon any hospital in the U.S. will be able to pull up your medical history” reminds me of the picture phone that AT&T demonstrated at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Let’s just say it wasn’t the next big thing.

There’s been no breakthrough in technology for electronic medical records. Unless Google has been quietly digitizing everyone’s medical files, there’s been no killer app.

But thanks to the Obama administration’s economic stimulus plan, there’s a killer pot of money aimed at encouraging new health information technology.

Of the $45 billion appropriated, about $17 billion would go to state Medicaid programs for electronic records that can be transmitted through health information exchanges, like one now being proposed in Pennsylvania.

On Monday, the Governor’s Office of Health Care Reform issued its draft strategic plan for the Pennsylvania Health Information Exchange. This state-led effort that would enable hospitals and other health-care providers to access patient records electronically. Read the 135-page plan here.

The draft states that 84 percent of acute-care hospitals in Pennsylvania use some type of electronic health records. But only 2.4 percent of hospitals have a system that covers all clinical areas, and only about 20 percent of physician practices had EHR or EMR software as of 2007.

Naturally, there are lots of companies hoping to capitalize on the stimulus-fueled push for health information technology. One of them is Quality Systems Inc., of Irvine, Calif., which bought a local electronic medical records software developer called Clinitec in May 1996.

I mention it because last week the co-founder of Clinitec, Patrick Cline, was named president and chief strategy officer of the company that bought his start-up for $12.8 million. Steven T. Plohocki remains chief executive officer of Quality Systems.

Cline had been in charge of what is called the NextGen Healthcare Information Systems division in Horsham, where it employs about 350 people. It’s grown a lot in recent years, organically and by acquisition. NextGen accounted for 94 percent of Quality Systems’ annual revenue of $245.5 million last year.
 

Entrepreneurs like to say they spend every waking moment thinking about their businesses.

On Thursday, several serial entrepreneurs from the region spent several hours critiquing and encouraging other people’s businesses at the 2nd Founder Factory event, sponsored by Philly Startup Leaders.

The Founder Factory is the arena-rock version of what the bar-band Philly Startup Leaders has been doing for the last few years: Stitching together a start-up network through a no-frills organization by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs.

Three start-ups were featured in “fishbowl” sessions. KidZillions, RevZilla Motorsports L.L.C. and PlaySay Inc. all took their turns onstage at World Cafe Live, presenting their business plans to a panel of experts as well as a live studio audience.

I caught the talk by Ryan Meinzer, founder of PlaySay, a digital “flashcard” method for learning Japanese, Mandarin and Spanish. Meinzer, who’d worked in Japan, said he had no time to sit at a computer absorbing the grammar and words needed to learn Japanese. He wrote up paper flashcards to learn on the go.

The cards worked fine, but he knew something digital would be better. With some funding from a PayPal executive, he hired language experts and a programmer to create digital flashcards that could be downloaded to a cell phone or computer.

“I was blessed with a business that fell into my lap,” Meinzer said.

Then, the members of the expert panel went to work on that blessing.

While impressed by the profitability generated after only three months, they worried that Meinzer hadn’t created a product he could really defend. What’s to prevent a major textbook publisher from creating its own digital flashcards?

Panel member Gil Beyda, managing partner of Genacast Ventures, said Meinzer should pump more cash into marketing, not IT. ClickEquations CEO Lucinda Holt suggested more spending on Google AdWords keywords to target other niche markets.

Tweets posted from the sessions made it clear many in the audience thought the advice was golden.

There are many days when people trying to get their businesses going feel very much alone. Thursday was not one of those days.

Listening to the rhetoric about how the federal government needs to spend big to make sure the U.S. stays on technology’s cutting edge, I wonder if big carrots are better than baby ones.

Over the last 26 years, Pennsylvania’s Ben Franklin Technology Partners program has done a lot with a little state money. Mark Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, recently praised the program, which provides young technology firms with small investments to nudge them ahead to where a venture capital firm may want to invest.

Other states who’d rushed to copy Ben Franklin when it was created in 1983 tended to shut down their programs when the governorship changed, Heesen said. Not Pennsylvania, which has continued to nurture home-grown tech firms. Ben Franklin has survived three Republican and two Democratic administrations even as its funding has expanded or contracted during budgetary feasts or famines.

This year, the four nonprofit centers that receive Ben Franklin funds, including one based at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, saw their total allocation cut to $16 million from $27.6 million last year. That may not be famine, but some technology companies will go hungry this year.

So we’ll see fewer announcements like Monday’s in which Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania said it invested a total of $950,000 in five companies. I wrote about one of them two weeks ago - Innova Materials L.L.C., an advanced materials company based in West Philadelphia, which got $225,000.

Ben Franklin invested in two firms in the “cleantech” sector, which has nothing to do with killing germs, but rather energy efficiency. CogniPower L.L.C. , of Malvern, received $200,000, to develop its method of monitoring current in power converters. BuLogic Inc., of Philadelphia, received $150,000 to work on wireless control systems for energy conservation.

Fort Washington-based ListenLogic L.L.C. got $250,000 to follow $125,000 that Ben Franklin injected earlier this year. The firm tracks tweets, blogs, and other online forums to let businesses know what’s being said about them.

Finally, Snipi Inc., of Center City, which is using a social media platform to try to make online shopping easier, received $125,000.

Last year around this time, those connected with the Philadelphia area's venture capital industry were worried along with the rest of us.

Markets were falling. The federal government was rescuing major financial institutions. The economy was teetering.

KPMG L.L.P., which conducts a survey with the annual Mid-Atlantic Capital Conference in Philadelphia, found a very dark mood. Venture firms, which always want to fund the growth and expansion of new companies, were instead planning to cut costs at those companies, said Brian Hughes, a KPMG partner based in Philadelphia.

Just as two straight quarters of positive gross domestic product growth in 2009 have indicated contraction has ended, so too this year's KPMG survey shows a brighter outlook by the venture capital world.

The survey of about 300 Philadelphia-area venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and professional advisors found that 87 percent of respondents expect total venture capital investment to increase in 2010, up from 32 percent last year.

For the second straight year, the No. 1 industry sector to put money to work is expected to be "cleantech," which encompasses companies involved in areas such as energy efficiency and alternative fuels. Perhaps that should come as no surprise because that's an emphasis of the Obama administration's economic stimulus effort as well.

Venture firms are profit-making enterprises out to put their money to work in what they hope will be fast-growing businesses. They raise money mainly from institutional investors, such as pension funds and endowments.

While everyone loves a good success story of venture-backed home runs like Google, eBay and even Staples, more common are the singles and doubles - companies that may get acquired or go public but never reach household-name status.

In fact, that's how venture firms make money for their limited partners. They have to "exit" with an initial public offering or engineer the sale of an investment. And that's been a problem for nearly two years.

Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, said last week that he's very concerned about the state of the industry. A shakeup has been underway as those venture firms that were formed during the dot-com bubble era are reaching a point in their development where they need to be finding ways to return capital to their limited partners.

A healthy equity market produces 85 to 100 IPOs a year, according to Heesen. Only six venture-backed companies went public in 2008, and there've been just 10 venture-backed IPOs so far this year.

The KPMG survey asked about the barriers to going public, and Hughes said the biggest hurdle is lack of investor appetite for IPOs. With the M&A activity beginning to pick up, that alternative has been more attractive to venture firms.

Still 88 percent of those surveyed predict GDP growth of between 0 and 5 percent in 2010, compared with the negative GDP predictions of last year, said Hughes, who is co-leader of KPMG's venture capital practice.

Meanwhile, 53 percent of the respondents are now looking to inject new capital into companies as they begin to hire and plan for expansion in 2010, Hughes said.

After a year of watching business run for cover, consider these signs that 2010 may be a little better those trying to build and grow companies.