9 Cool Events to Do at Philly Tech Week

Today marks the start of Philly Tech Week. We've come up with an awesome event to do each day.

Philly Tech Week is upon us! It certainly has come a long way in five years. Just look how dated this website from the first one looks! It would still be functional now, but it’s nowhere near as nice as the fancy, sponsored-by-Comcast look of this year. Plus, Christopher Wink and Brian James Kirk got their own profile here in Philadelphia magazine this year.

Right: Philly Tech Week is bigger than ever. That means there are even more cool events to go to this year than in previous years. Here are nine event picks for Philly Tech Week, one for each day.

Friday: Philly Startup Crawl
4pm-8pm, Various Locations
Twelve Philly startups — everything from SnipSnap to SquareKnot to TicketLeap to other CamelCase companies — will open their doors for interested parties who want to talk about the local startup scene.

Saturday: Arcade @ Dilworth
6pm-9pm, Dilworth Park (next to City Hall)
Postponed from Friday due to rain, the Arcade @ Dilworth will feature live performances by Pixel8ter and Dj CUTMAN as well as various apps and games from local makers. Hive76 is bringing giant Connect Four again. From past experience, the Philly Tech Week kickoff is always a fun event even if you don’t play any games.

Sunday: Game of Thrones/Silicon Valley viewing party
8pm-11pm, Frankford Hall, 1210 Frankford Ave.
Don’t have an HBO subscription? Somehow don’t have a friend’s HBOGO password?! Well, you’re in luck: Frankford Hall will be showing both Game of Thrones and Nerd Entourage Silicon Valley on Sunday night. Yes, there will be opportunities to network.

Monday: Philly Robotics Expo
8am-3pm, Singh Nanotechnology Center at Penn,
At this event, you get to play with robots. In case I missed it, here it is again: At this event, you get to play with robots. This is geared toward children — Central High School’s RoboLancers will be on hand — so if you want to be the coolest parent ever, take your kid to this.

Tuesday: Retro Gaming Night
7pm-11pm, Hive 76, 915 Spring Garden St.
You can relive your youth playing Atari, Commodore64, Nintendo Entertainment System and Super NES. You can also feel incredibly old now that N64, Dreamcast and 3DO are considered retro gaming systems.

Wednesday: GeoPhilly Balloon Mapping Launch
9am-12pm, Riverside of Independence Seaport Museum, Penn’s Landing
Have you ever wanted to take aerial photos? Well, per the listing, “balloon mapping is a low-cost, easy, and safe way to capture aerial images and stitch them together into a high resolution map.” If you like maps, GeoPhilly is always holding cool events.

Thursday: Query Quizzo
4pm-6pm, National Mechanics, 22 S. 3rd St.
This is a quizzo where you’ll need to delve into data sets provided by the School District of Philadelphia to come up with answers. Yes, this is finally your chance to do quizzo with your laptop.

Friday, April 24th: Philly Tech Week Signature Event
7:30pm-10pm, Comcast Center, 1701 JFK Blvd.
The signature event is essentially a cocktail reception with a ton of cool tech toys to try out and learn about — and cool people in the Philly tech scene to meet.

Saturday, April 25th: Bring.Your.Own.Beamer Philly IV
8pm-11pm, Little Berlin, 2430 Coral St
Are you an artist with a projector? You can bring it to this event and show off your work. Or you can show up and enjoy the work of multiple artists who have brought their projectors. Even when DIY-type art events are underwhelming