Prosper Lehigh Valley

The future of the Lehigh Valley’s housing avaliability is not only a salient issue, but one that ultimately impacts our region’s quality of life for all residents. The Building a Fair and Affordable Lehigh Valley Summit on April 26th will attract all sectors of the housing industry, government and public. The group will examine issues such as zoning, fair housing for people with disabilities, lending, planning and zoning  for inclusive communities. Event: Fair Housing Summit: Building a Fair and Affordable Lehigh Valley Time: 9:30 a.m. through 3:45 p.m. Date: Thursday, April 26 Location: The Holiday Inn, Ninth and Hamilton streets, Allentown This summit is the result of the combined efforts of the cities of Allentown, Easton, Bethlehem, Northampton County, North Penn Legal Services, KNTB Bank and various other interested individuals.  The seminar features Jane Vincent, Regional Administrator for the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Philadelphia Region and Michael Allen, Esq. a civil rights expert.  For more information and registration click here.

GoodSemester is a company on the move. The Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation’s Keystone Innovation Zone client is the brainchild of CEO Jason Rappaport, an ambitious and innovative Lehigh University student, who has used his own ingenuity to expand upon tradition. GoodSemester developed a new class of learning software built from the ground up around the collaborative web. Its aim is simple: Improve education at colleges and universities everywhere across the fruited plain and the world by creating an academic social network that uses the latest technology to enhance learning. Rappaport along with lead developer Scott Smallback and Vice President of Sales David Gritz are helping universities operate more effectively by creating a one-stop virtual community for professors to hold discussions, review coursework and issue grades. By creating an organized and searchable knowledge repository for course notes and student projects to enable a more productive use of academic resources as an economic resource, GoodSemester has moved to the top of the class. The latest development is the unveiling of the company’s new API (application programming interface) at the first-ever Lehigh Valley Hack 2012, which kicks off March 30that Ben Franklin Tech Ventures. API is something that will allow anyone to easily create apps that utilize GoodSemester’s core features. It will let anyone build powerful education services quickly, using the same tools used by GoodSemester. “The Lehigh Valley Hack 2012 is our first foray into API development,” Rappaport says. “For the first time ever, developers will be able to rapidly create incredible apps for education that utilize the powerful features we’ve developed forGoodSemester.” It represents a turning point for the company. “We’re not just a service companyanymore,” he adds. “Now we’re a platform. We’re finally going to be the operating system for education and help people easily create amazing new services that transform the classroom. That’s huge.” The Lehigh Valley Economic Development Corporation’s KIZ program helped GoodSemester in its formative stages with a grant that enabled Rappaport to attend his first trade show and build their first and only promotional video. The video proved indispensible in promoting the product. “Without the KIZ grant, there might not have been any means to marketing GoodSemester,” he notes. At the hack event, Rappaport will unveil the developer preview of their API. They’ll demonstrate how you can incorporate GoodSemester services into their own education apps to make them more interactive or build their own education services wholesale, using nothing but GoodSemester technology and a little good old-fashioned ingenuity. For more information about the Lehigh Valley Hack 2012 event, please click here.