Open mouth, insert foot. Poor Mark Squilla had no idea he would get so much flack from the local music scene when he proposed the Special Assembly Occupancies bill back in January, a bill which would have required venue owners to collect names, addresses and phone numbers in a police-maintained registry of musicians, DJs, rappers and other performers. A petition circulated as soon as the music scene caught wind of it, ending up with just a little under 16,000 signatures all together.

Delaware drone boosters were there in force. Here's why they think the First State is sitting on a golden opportunity. There are economic drivers that Delaware can take advantage of, especially in the lower parts of the state. Judging the Delaware presence at the conference, I wouldn’t be surprised if the drone industry in Delaware started to bloom in the next year or two. And you know, the term “Delaware drone industry” does have a nice ring to it.

The Phoenixville native’s passion to do more eventually pushed her in a different direction. In her final months with the chemical giant, Banks took a personal-development role to support fellow engineers. That small taste of teaching others has led to Girls Auto Clinic, a unique female-focused shop that’s scheduled to open this fall in Upper Darby. “DuPont really set me up nicely,” says the 35-year-old Banks. “I wanted to fix things, solve problems, look for resources. That’s what engineers do.”

When I walked into Youma (Facebook page), a new African restaurant at 4519 Baltimore Ave., I was glad to finally get to spend some time with owner Youma Ba. When I met with her, she was covering for a server who was out sick. It was somewhat of a homecoming for Youma, since this very location was where she got her start as a server in Philly back in 2001, when it was known as La Calebasse. She left there to open Kilimanjaro on Walnut St.

Those walking by the Science Center building on 37th and Market street can see colorful displays on the first floor windows, but little do most know that those colorful displays belong to an innovation tech camp called The Hacktory. The name was created to describe two goals the group set out to accomplish: find solutions and create products. An early inception of the organization was created in 2007, which met on a monthly basis to celebrate do-it-yourself efforts in engineering and technology

Imagine being in the business of making learning into a game. That’s exactly what Scott Shaw does. He created and currently chairs the Game Design and Development program at Wilmington University. After running his own game design firm in the late ’90s and early 2000s, he didn’t exactly envision teaching as a potential career path back then. He just wanted to make games. Shaw talked to us about his first job, and why he picked up Pokémon to get closer to his son.

Aksum is among the finer dining options on Baltimore Ave, it’s actually one of my favorites to take out-of-towners to when they come to visit. Owner Saba Tedla has held her restaurant to a high standard, plans to continue with her new restaurant, Booker’s Restaurant and Bar. The new 2,400-square-foot space opened last month just a few blocks away – on the 5000 block of Baltimore.

The intersection of 40th and Chestnut Streets has seen some restaurant changes as of late, with Dim Sum House and Ekta opening a couple of months ago. Now, a brightly colored Xi’an Sizzling Woks BYOB has found a sprightly colored yellow, blue and red home on the southwest corner of the intersection where Saigon Cuisine used to be.

It’s Saturday morning and the weather’s beautiful so you have your windows open. You’re rolling out of bed and you hear music coming in from the streets. It’s a lazy morning but you walk outside anyway because the weather’s perfect. You notice scattered clusters of crowds listening to music around a porch here and a porch there. A man comes out of his house with a pastry and a coffee, he’s sitting on his porch while enjoying a live band playing on his neighbor’s porch.

After working as a server in Philadelphia for many years, Guo ‘Sunni’ Tang was done. “As a server, you work 12 hours a day and don’t make much money,” she explained. “I want to make more money to improve life for my parents.” Driven by a goal of supporting her aging parents and the desire to provide a wider selection of food for the University of the Sciences student population and the area surrounding it, Tang decided to open a dumpling and bubble tea spot.

We all have friends who have suffered from a Candy Crush addiction. Studies show that people spend around three billion hours a week playing online games. To 26-year-old Aradhya Malhotra, that always seemed like time that could have been better spent volunteering or forwarding a social cause. So the Drexel graduate, along with co-founders Chris Bennett and Oleks Levtchenko at Skyless Games, figured out how to cut into those hours by “gamifying” social causes. “Our approach to video games is gen

She moved to Delaware to work for DuPont in 1995 upon coming out of grad school at MIT. A physicist by training, she was what DuPont called a Research Investigator: she experimented on different materials, learned about their properties and figured out how she could purpose them for an end product. After the shakeup at DuPont about a year ago, Reynolds decided to stay in Delaware because of all the usual suspects: it’s small and quiet but still close to major U.S. cities.

Ryan Media Lab is a company based out of Lewes that has many clients in the drone industry. Formed in 2013, this startup is family owned and operated. Mark Ryan is the founder and CEO of the company, while his son Kyle Ryan, 25, is his main business partner. Mark’s wife, Rana Ryan, takes care of customer relations and business development while Isabella Ryan, 21, currently focuses on logistics and business administration while wrapping up her last year at the University of Delaware.

Prominence is a new app that launched just a couple of months ago that gamifies social media. Imagine, kinda, if Foursquare/Swarm and Klout mated. Harrison Leavitt and business partner Niall Paterson have worked across continents to create the app. Leavitt just completed his junior year at the University of Delaware (he’s a business major). Paterson just completed his junior year as well; however, he’s at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and does most of the coding.

Michael Hollander was living the dream. He was a software engineer, with a cushy, well-paid job in California, the tech center of America, something he’d worked towards for years. Still, Hollander felt like something fundamental was missing—doing good for the world. He tried to fill the void with a series of volunteer projects, like painting schools, building homes and cleaning neighborhoods. But it wasn’t enough.

Zip Code Wilmington has a new leader, but she’s no stranger to the access-minded coding program. Melanie Augustin has been with the nonprofit since October 2015. She previously served as Director of Corporate Partnerships and was recently promoted to Head of School as a result of Anthony Pisapia’s departure.

Until recently, Carvertise has been focused on campaigns within the region (Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New Jersey). The rolling-billboard startup has landed clients such as the ShopRite and Thomas Jefferson Hospital. But now, as part of the company’s biggest campaign to date, Carvertise has 45 cars on the road some 1,600 miles across the country … in North Dakota. Between the five states, Carvertise now has 200 ad-wrapped cars on the road.

About 40 percent of food in the United States is never eaten, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s tough to point fingers when there is no one to blame. We’ve all bought meat or produce that has gone bad before we have gotten around to preparing it. The EAT (Everyone At the Table) Café, a nonprofit subsidiary of the Center for Hunger-free Communities at Drexel University, aims to approach food resources a little differently to reduce waste and make access to healthy food more

Jeri Lynne Johnson fell in love with classical music when she was four years old at music camp. She dreamed of becoming a conductor by age seven. She won an international conducting prize while still a student at University of Chicago, and then secured an assistant conducting job at the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, while looking for a company to lead herself.

If you live in West Philly, chances are you or someone you know has a porch where you’ve spent time drinking your beverage of choice on a warm summer day. Porch sitting is a neighborhood activity that people have engaged in as a way of exchanging ideas and bonding with neighbors for years, and the organizers of West Philly Porchfest (WPPF), which will be held on Saturday, June 4, would like to harness that energy to build stronger connections within the West Philly music scene.