Warren V. Musser, chairman and CEO/the Musser Group of Wayne, Pa., received the Yitzhak Rabin Public Service Award from the America-Israel Chamber of Commerce

“My whole life is entrepreneurship, so I’m pleased to be associated with a country that is all about entrepreneurship and survives because of entrepreneurship,” he said at the event. “I feel that the ideas that come out of Israel, because of its creativity, and that are brought to the Philadelphia region through AICC, are marvelous opportunities for U.S. businesses of all sizes, including several of our companies that have taken advantage of those opportunities.

“I think of Israel coming to us as a business opportunity more than 50 years ago, with its resilient, determined, resourceful people. That’s what Israel had then and still has today,”

Named for Israel’s peace-pursuing prime minister, assassinated in Tel Aviv on Nov. 4, 1995, the annual award is given to a Philadelphia-area business leader recognized for having worked tirelessly and well in the spirit of peaceful cooperation to advance business interests in Israel and the Delaware Valley.

Read the whole story on Jewish Exponent

Dave Speers is an online marketing consultant and blogger that has worked with a wide variety of Philadelphia Start-Ups . Dave spends most his time annoying really smart people at Indy Hall co-working collaborative.

Just two weeks after Philadelphia City Council held an open hearing on the Creative Economy at City Hall, Innovation Philadelphia awarded $150,000 through it’s Creative Economy Investment Fund to two Philly start ups; DreamIt Ventures($100,000) and Brown Partners($50,000).

According to IP’s press release, DreamIt and Brown won because they “were a for-profit creative industry business; facilitate or enhance the growth of the Greater Philadelphia Region’s Creative Economy; [are] headquartered or have important operations and jobs in the Greater Philadelphia Region; [are] a privately held company; generate new jobs and increase tax revenue; add value to Innovation Philadelphia’s investment portfolio; and have a strong management team and business plan where success is achievable.”

Since the unveiling of Mayor Nutter’s budget in February and the noticeable absence of funding from the city for the non-profit economic development organization, IP has been working to make it’s case for renewed funding. After attending the Creative Economy hearing at the beginning of the month Mike Armstrong, the Inquirer’s business columnist and PhillyInc blogger, observed “the event struck me as an effort by the city-funded Innovation Philadelphia organization to make a case for why the Nutter administration should provide funding for it.” Whether it was planned or mere coincidence, the timing of the Creative Economy Investment Fund Awards in conjunction with the recent Creative Economy City Council hearing works to Innovation Philadelphia’s advantage in continuing their case with the Nutter administration.

Dave Speers is an online marketing consultant and blogger that has worked with a wide variety of Philadelphia Start-Ups . Dave spends most his time annoying really smart people at Indy Hall co-working collaborative.

The concept is so simple it’s almost a no-brainer: Connect the big brand dollars of major companies like Budweiser with the best and brightest of the creative and cost effective independent film/video community. For the web 2.0 savvy, XLNTads is to online video what Threadless is to T-shirts. The quality of the submissions are surprisingly good and have a definite Indy edge to them that typically do really well online. See for yourself: XLNTads Bud Light Submission(be patient, the third party Brightcove player takes a couple seconds to load the first time)

XLNTads in their own words:

XLNTads connects brands with the exciting emerging voices of the video generation. Our platform allows independent creative talent to collaborate with major consumer brands. The result: opportunities for a new generation of videographers and ads for a new generation of consumers - authentic ads capable of breaking through the clutter, contrivance and cynicism that pervades traditional media.

I had the pleasure of chatting with Mark Schoneveld, Community Manager of XLNTads.com, and asked him a couple questions about this young Philadelphia company.

With the proliferation of cheaper video technology, the emergence of more and more independent video talent and the seemingly universal obsession with the elusive ‘Viral Video’, XLNTads has positioned itself into a potentially lucrative niche, and it’s not alone. With Atlanta based Vitrue and the Italian company Zoopa, XLNTads is taking the modern reality of “quantity equals affordable quality” to it’s next logical step; video advertising. Offer up a generous prize and collect large quantities of videos to find that nugget of gold, i.e. that viral video that spreads like wild fire (hopefully) over the endless connection points of the web. The brilliant part for advertisers is that for the price of one prize you get ten to twenty videos, all carrying your brand and message to every nook and cranny of online video sites.

The real challenge for this young company is having to simultaneously attract the creative community that will produce the ads while courting the companies that will foot the prize money, resources and subject matter for the videos. For XLNTads to be a huge success they need to build a solid and devoted community of independent film/video talent and a track record for massive amounts of impressions to attract the big brands.

In the end, if they can keep both of these very different groups happy and coming back for more, there is potential to cause a serious paradigm shift in the way companies approach online video. Here’s to the success of our fellow Phillypreneurs XLNTads!

Dave Speers is an online marketing consultant and blogger that has worked with a wide variety of Philadelphia Start-Ups . Dave spends most his time annoying really smart people at Indy Hall co-working collaborative.