Philsquare news

We’ve received some feedback recently: no one thinks there are actually two people named Phil Martinez working at Philsquare. There really are two of them (see our employee page) and here’s the story.

Philsquare is not named because there are two Phils working for the company (of four employees total) as some may believe. It is named because Phil Martinez (founder of the company) started developing a Foursquare-like service a few years ago back when Foursquare, Gowalla, and BrightKite were all brand new baby location based services. He wanted his name within the name of the service, thus Philsquare. 

Phil didn’t end up pursuing his location-based service but held on to philsquare.com. When he started his own web development company in the second half of 2010, Philsquare seemed to fit and he still owned the domain.

A few months after the creation of the company, I helped create and build some social media channels for the company and started writing entries for the blog about our clients and projects. Phil and I decided to see where the company was in terms of Google searches with all this online activity. We wanted to see what anyone else would see when researching Phil or the company so we searched for ‘Phil Martinez’ and ‘Philsquare’. We came across philmartinezdesign.com. How weird, we thought, another Phil Martinez (this one in Pennsylvania) doing design and some web development. Kansas Phil (where Philsquare is based) was impressed with Pennsylvania Phil’s design chops after browsing his website and web portfolio.

A couple months later, Pennsylvania Phil found the Philsquare site and emailed Kansas Phil (are you keeping up with this?!) How weird, Penn Phil told Kansas Phil, we have the same name and we’re in the same business - wouldn’t it be funny if we worked together (I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist). The Phils ended up talking on the phone for over an hour and a partnership was born. Kansas Phil brought Penn Phil on board with some work when he didn’t have time for the design work or needed a fresh perspective.

Towards the end of 2011, Penn Phil was working on the majority of Philsquare projects and was in touch with the home Philsquare office everyday. It was decided that 2012 would bring Philsquare its third full-time employee. And we’re thrilled to have Penn Phil on board. Not only has the team become proficient at Skype and screen sharing but we also have an employee who brings fresh ideas, hard work and the ability to learn lightning fast to the table. We couldn’t be more excited! (Even if we haven’t been able to convince Penn Phil that he needs to move to Kansas!)

Read more about Penn Phil on our about page and see his personal site at PhilMartinezDesign.com.