As more devices, ranging from kitchen appliances to streetlights, become connected to the Internet, the threat of malicious hacking has reached new levels.
Eric Fiterman, CEO of Baltimore-based cybersecurity company Spotkick, recently explained how hackers are using the search engine Shodan to reveal systems’ security weaknesses. Spotkick is part of the bwtech@UMBC research and technology incubator group.
Watch his interview with CNNMoney here or embedded below.
Cortix Systems is an InvestMaryland finalist.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is Cortix Systems, based in Alexandria, Virginia. To find out a little more about this innovative pharmaceutical company, we spoke with Matt Piekarczyk, company president.
Q. What does Cortix Systems do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
A. It’s primarily a platform that you can think of as a mix between Siri and Google. Effectively, what we do is provide answers to user questions out of the documents, databases and services which already exist within organizations. The user provides a query, just like they would in Google, except that instead of returning a zillion documents they may or may not find interesting, we actually return the data they’re looking for. So, if you put in the question, “How many patients have been coming into my office?” within a certain date range, to answer that question, you would have to scan several documents and systems and maybe create a Web search. Our system combines all of that to allow you to get the answer to your question. Any answer that can be arrived at by combining many different sources of information—that’s what our system does.
Maryland legislators are reviewing a cybersecurity investment bill.
A landmark bill—expected to appear before the Maryland Senate Budget and Taxation Committee on Tuesday, April 2—is slated to significantly incentivize investment in Maryland’s job-creating cybersecurity industry.
But while the Maryland House of Delegates passed the Cybersecurity Investment Incentive Tax Credit bill on March 24, amendments changed key provisions that would have allowed investors outside of Maryland to take advantage of valuable tax credit incentives.
A broader investment base not only creates jobs, industry leaders say, but helps ensure that successful companies stay and grow in Maryland.
Nearly two years after setting up shop in its first data center in Maryland, Silver Spring’s ByteGrid is eyeing expansion.
“We’re positioned to do very well and be very successful here,” Don Goodwin, ByteGrid’s executive vice president of leasing and marketing, said in a recent interview. “Maryland continues to be our flagship market and where we see our predominant focus as a company.”
As companies look to offload private data centers, ByteGrid snatches them up and leases the server space out to corporate and government clients. The company bought its first data center in Silver Spring in May 2011 from a major financial institution that remains the anchor tenant at the facility.
Tenants’ equipment sits in server rooms that cover more than 90,000 square feet — about the size of two professional football fields, minus the end zones — and are protected from intruders and blackouts by rings of security fencing, biometric locks, massive generators and redundant power supplies.
Advanced Concepts Research Group offers secure mouses and keyboards.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is Advanced Concepts Research Group, based in Gainesville,Virginia and Aberdeen, Maryland, founded in 2010. To find out a little more about this high-tech company, we spoke with President and CEO Yasuko Carr and Executive Vice President and CIO Chadd Carr, who also describe themselves as a “dynamic husband and wife duo.”
Q. What does Advanced Concepts Research Group do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
Yasuko: We are a certified minority and woman-owned small business. ACRG offers expertise in information technology research and development and formal test and evaluation of information and intelligence-based systems. Our goal is to provide a broader range and more robust set of cyber threat intelligence tools essential for building a more secure cyberspace. ACRG’s Security Sciences Laboratory seeks to reduce future cyber security issues through the research of root causes of modern cyber security deficiencies, fostering open collaboration and integration of emerging knowledge, and expediting time-to-market of technologies, standards, and requirements.
VisiSonics offers 3D sound.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is College Park-based VisiSonics, founded in 2010. To find out a little more about this high-tech company, we spoke with President and CEO of VisiSonics Ramani Duraiswami.
Q. What does VisiSonics do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
A. Our product presents sound as naturally as if you’re listening to something on the scene. When you listen to music on headphones it sounds a lot different than how you would have experienced the music at the concert. If you see a movie at a high-end theater with a very high-end sound system, it sounds quite a bit different from the way a movie sounds when you watch it on your iPad or tablet. So our software makes that sounds as natural as being present at the real scene. We hope it will have a major impact on the way people consume media, such as games, movies and music on mobile devices.
ClickMedix is an InvestMaryland finalist.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is Gaithersburg-based ClickMedix, founded in 2008. To find out a little more about this innovative company, we spoke with founder and CEO Ting Shih.
Q. What does ClickMedix do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
A. ClickMedix is a telemedicine solution, so that both patients and doctors can connect to each other more easily.
Baltimore area businesses attended the Local U conference in White Marsh.
Nearly anything is better than nothing when it comes to Internet marketing for small businesses, online marketing expert Aaron Weiche said during Friday’s Local University: Baltimore conference at the Hilton Garden Inn in White Marsh.
“If you understand what [online marketing] is, you’re much more likely to do something. Actionable takeaways is one of the main reasons we do this. We need to take it away from a tech sort of thing and show people that it’s just an extension of how you do business,” said Weiche, one of several presenters during the Google-sponsored conference.
What if you could print off a battery using material similar to the lead inside a No. 2 pencil?
Jessup-based Vorbeck Materials has recently gained national attention for doing just that. Their revolutionary new product, Vor-ink, is a conductive ink made of graphene, a carbon material that comes from graphite, CNNMoney reports.
The Maryland Department of Business & Economic Development has worked closely with Vorbeck Materials and invested $490,000 into the company through the Maryland Venture Fund program.
Baltimore-based Staq is competing in the InvestMaryland Challenge.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is Baltimore-based Staq, founded in 2012. To find out a little more about this innovative company, we spoke with CEO and co-founder James Curran.
Q. What does Staq do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
A. Advertisers and publishers on the Internet use a great deal of different technologies for business. We aggregate all of these technologies together into one unified dashboard. We are like the Mint.com for web advertising. We work with an advertiser or publisher, let’s say it’s BaltimoreSun.com. They have a login account with their ad server, they also have a login account with Google, they have one with Facebook, they have one with AOL’s Advertising.com, they have one with Millennial Media and the list goes on and on and on. We connect all of them together like Mint.com would.
Mercaris is a finalist in the InvestMaryland Challenge.
Check back for Q&A profiles on all the competition finalists.
The first-ever InvestMaryland Challenge is down to its final round with just 33 companies competing for more than $300,000 in grants and business services. The final winners will be announced during the Governor’s Cup Awards Ceremony on April 15.
One of the companies, selected out of more than 250 applicants, is Silver Spring-based Mercaris. To find out a little more about this new company, founded in 2012, we spoke with Founder and CEO Kellee James.
Q. What does Mercaris do, and how would you explain it to the average person?
A. Mercaris is a market data service and also an online trading platform for organic and non-GMO commodities. Organic foods are very hot items. A lot of consumers would prefer to buy foods that are grown without chemical pesticides fertilizers or growth hormones, and organic foods have become a separate category of food commodity. Mercaris allows those within the organic food sector to track prices and supply and demand data for those organic and non-GMO food ingredients, just like Bloomberg lets you track stocks or bonds. The second thing we are is a trading platform and so we provide a way to actually physically trade those commodities, sort of like an eBay or a Chicago Board of Trade.
