Philly ranked No. 10 on Dice's most recent list of the top metro areas for tech jobs and it appears to be getting larger. Fueling some of this growth is the emerging N3RD Street tech corridor in Philly's Old City North Third Street neighborhood Currently, N3RD Street ("Nerd" Street, get it?) has 21 tech companies. A central force is Independents Hall, a co-working space described as a talent pool for many of the companies and a fusing element of the community through game nights, software user-group meet-ups, and theme parties. Independents Hall co-founder Alex Hillman told Technically Philly:

"The end result of [talent density] is success, ultimately in the fact that it’s really easy to find people who are not just physically proximal to each other but are also increasingly well-connected individuals. People are here to form relationships, not just sit next to each other."

These startups are small, with Weblinc offering the only IT jobs at the moment. Weblinc currently has 11 openings, including iOS team lead, two positions in front-end development and dev jobs for JavaScript, .NET and Coldfusion. Independents Hall tenants include:

•  Web marketing business I-Site
• SEO powerhouse SEER Interactive
• E-commerce platform vendor WebLinc
• Web tools developer Wildbit
• Software development shop DmgCtrl
• Drink Nation, which operates a growing array of city-specific websites devoted to – yeah, you guessed it – drinking.

The  N3RD Street corridor also includes companies that feature some Web component like its 13 design studios, 17 marketing agencies, 18 architectural and engineering firms, and 13 photo, video, and commercial art businesses, according to Philly.com. It further notes the area is equal "biking" distance from South Philadelphia, West Philadelphia and the Fishtown neighborhoods. Philly overall has a booming tech scene, including the six-person team at Google search challenger DuckDuckGo, which is expected to double its staff this year in suburban Paoli. It just hosted a "Quack and Hack" event to teach developers the programming language Perl. And surely, now that the budget has been approved, someone can get the City Council's desktop Web speeds to something "post-1960," as Councilman Brian O'Neill asked.

Related Links

• A bubbling of tech firms in Philadelphia's Old City [Philly.com]
• N3rd Street: a cluster of tech businesses claim a corridor from Old City to Northern Liberties [Technically Philly]
• Search challenger DuckDuckGo expands to new office in Paoli, hiring [Keystone Edge]
• City Council increases its own budget, partly for “Internet-technology upgrades,” Councilman says desktop speeds are stuck in the 60s [Technically Philly]