Recap: MD Tech Crawl

Jimmy Gardner December 18, 2009 Tweet

This past Wednesday I had the “pleasure” of battling the traffic heading north from DC to Baltimore to attend the MD Tech Crawl hosted at the Emerging Technology Center.  The ETC is a great coworking space in which many of the local Baltimore startups have offices.  Anyhow, you may be asking yourself just what is a Tech Crawl ?  So before we go any

further lets review.  Basically scattered around the office space of the ETC there were 21 local companies set up at tables with demos and intro material.  You can see an in depth list of the companies HERE.  In essence as folks walked around to the various booths they stepped up and got a 60 second dedicated “elevator” pitch about the the company and their product.  It really was a great idea.  I got there  bit early, so I had some good quality one on one with the various companies.  A little later I noticed it had sort of changed a bit, as the groups got larger at the tables, but no worries, the companies did great.

So at the same time scattered amongst the crowd was a group of judges listening to the pitches and in the end consulted and gave the winner a $500 grand prize.  I did not get the opportunity to see all the pitches, but did get some video of several I want to share with you.  I visited Otherinbox, AwayFind, Salar, and Vesta Mobile Solutions.

Overall it was a great event.  I loved the concept, it really lent itself to learning so much more about the companies and their products.  In the end the winner was Direct Dimensions whose product ShapeShot™ is the 3D version of a photographic snapshot. Now for the first time, proprietary software and commercial off-the-shelf digital cameras combine to take amazing split-second ShapeShotsTM with impressive high definition color enabling ShapeShot™ “apps” for entertainment, consumer, security, and medical markets.

We look forward to more of these type events in the near future !