A favorite activity of the Maryland Chamber of Commerce is highlighting the successes of entrepreneurs and business leaders who not only are successful in their firms but are inspirational community leaders. Just last week, the Maryland Chamber inducted three such Marylanders into its Business Hall of Fame.

Born and raised in Prince George’s County, Betty Buck took over Buck Distributing Co., Inc. in Upper Marlboro when her father Irwin Buck passed away. Under her direction, the company has expanded beyond Prince George’s County into Anne Arundel, Charles, St. Mary’s and Calvert counties and is now one of the largest Miller beer distributorships in the country. Betty’s company also distributes a wide variety of imported and micro brews on the Eastern Shore. Buck Distributing employs more than 100 people and has annual sales of more than $49 million.

As a woman in a male-dominated industry, Betty’s tenacity and leadership have won her numerous honors and awards, including serving as the first woman chair the boards of the Maryland Chamber and the National Beer Wholesalers Association. In April 2007, she received the “Miller Legend” award for her industry.

Another native Marylander, Bill Roberts, hails from Talbot County and recently retired as Verizon’s regional president for Maryland and Washington, D.C. Bill began his career with C&P Telephone in Washington as a business office manager and rose through the ranks in operations, human resources, marketing, public affairs and government affairs. He was named president of Verizon Maryland in 2000, and promoted to regional president in 2007.

Bill’s commitment to community is exceptional. In addition to serving as the first African American chairman of the Maryland Chamber board, Bill serves on the boards of many organizations such as Kennedy-Krieger Institute, MedStar Health and Morgan State University. He has actively worked with a homeless men’s group in Washington for more than a decade and continues to reach out and help those in need.

One of the most prominent business leaders in Montgomery County is Larry Shulman, founding partner of Shulman, Rogers, Gandal, Pordy & Ecker, P.A. Larry never planned to be an attorney, hoping instead to succeed as a business man. But, upon graduating from Georgetown law school, he delved into his career in law and has enjoyed great success over the years. He vision and leadership are renowned in his home county, particularly with the Construction Trades initiative of the Montgomery County Schools, Leadership Montgomery and Leadership Maryland. A former member and president of the Maryland State Board of Education, Larry played a key mediation role in the final resolution of the long-lasting desegregation case involving the Prince George’s County Public Schools.

Videos produced by Comcast for the Maryland Chamber. For more information, contact Kathy Snyder, President/CEO, Maryland Chamber of Commerce.

The online social networking sphere is a crowded one. Silicon Valley titans make billion-dollar acquisitions to spar with one another and tighten their holds on users’ attention spans.

But Devin Partlow, has something up his sleeve — a social networking app that forces, or encourages, its users to interact the old fashioned way.

Online communication, “that’s nothing if we don’t come face to face, and kind of break the ice between us and develop a relationship,” said Partlow.

Kithly, the second iteration of a company founded by Partlow a little more than a year ago, is meant for people very much like Partlow himself — entrepreneurs and working professionals who need a nudge to maintain the relationships that are so critical to their success.

“It was always about building relationships. Me, personally, I’m kind of a bad friend,” Partlow explains, with a smile and a laugh. “I work and then I have these things I do after hours and man, it’s like ‘I can’t really hang out.’”

Kithly integrates information from a user’s calendar and contacts to find who’s around and available for a cup of coffee or a sit-down lunch.

Partlow describes it as an extension of exchanging business cards at a conference or trade show.

Connect on Kithly and let the app on an iPhone or Android phone find a time that works and a location that’s most convenient for both parties to reconnect.

Kithly is also intended to maintain long-standing connections.

Say you’re in Virginia for a meeting that wraps up early.

“You know there’s no way you’re getting back up to Maryland because of 495 at 3 o’clock,” Partlow says. “Why not see which of my connections are in the area? Let’s catch up.”

The app will also give priority to those connections that have languished the longest to help a user maintain all the strands of his or her social web.

The company, which takes its name from “kith,” meaning friends and acquaintances, was accepted into the Emerging Technology Center’s accelerator program earlier this year, and moved into the Canton incubator in April.

In the last few months, the company has changed its name — it used to be “Hooopla” — and picked up three partners, including two whom Partlow met through another Maryland startup, the CoFoundersLab.

Kithly has a beta release scheduled for June and plans to roll out the app to the public around July 11, when Partlow is slated to demo the product at the accelerator.

A native of northeast Baltimore and Morgan State University graduate, Partlow began developing the app in late 2010. He made it his full-time job in April 2011 and said he saw interest pick up at the start of this year.

Appropriately enough, he said he measures Kithly’s success through his network of friends and acquaintances as the app moves toward a wider release.

“It’s more how many people get excited when they hear the idea,” he said. “You can tell someone gets excited because you can see it in their eyes. How many of them, their eyes are lightin’ up? How many say ‘This is a cool idea?’ How many say ‘I’ll help you along.’ Because they can see the potential. That’s my measure of success right now.”

GlycoMimetics Inc. has launched a partnership to develop a new AIDS vaccine, the Gaithersburg life sciences company announced Wednesday.

GlycoMimetics will work with the nonprofit International AIDS Vaccine Initiative and Glycosensors and Diagnostics LLC on the vaccine that will use compounds that mimic carbohydrates, called glycomimetics.

“We are excited to have the opportunity to work with [IAVI] and [G&D head Robert Woods] on this pivotal project,” said John Magnani, vice president and chief scientific officer of GlycoMimetics. “This provides an excellent opportunity to apply our specialized chemistry expertise to help address current unmet needs in the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS.”

IAVI will fund the project through its Innovation Fund, a program that bankrolls unconventional approaches to designing and developing AIDS vaccines.

GlycoMimetics brings to the table specialized design capabilities the company has honed developing small molecule drugs and G&D has a novel biomolecular simulation technology. Oxford University researcher Chris Scanlan will also be involved in the effort.

The partners hope to develop carbohydrate immunogens that stimulate the creation antibodies capable of fighting HIV.

“This effort combines the advanced technology and expertise from four diverse partners to address a major challenge in HIV vaccine design — the design of HIV vaccines that target the carbohydrate layer that shields the virus from the immune system,” said Hansi Dean, director of new alliances at IAVI.

Founded in 2003, GlycoMimetics is focused on developing treatments for inflammation, cancer and other infectious diseases. The company entered a partnership with Pfizer Inc. in October on its lead product, GMI-1070, a sickle cell therapy.

Space suits, moon missions, augmented reality glasses and tennis rackets — Juxtopia has a new take on them all.

The 10-year-old company spun out of Morgan State University has evolved from its biomedical information technology roots and is a new resident of the Emerging Technology Center in the renovated former Eastern High School building. There, Juxtopia professionals, Johns Hopkins University students and city high school students are engineering software and hardware that cuts to the company’s core goal — improving human performance.

“Juxtopia has four companies, including itself, collaborating in one space, each doing its own type of innovative technology product development that has commercial potential,” said Jayfus Doswell, Juxtopia’s founder, president and CEO.

The product furthest along the Juxtopia pipeline is the company’s line of augmented reality glasses.

Google recently turned the spotlight on the technology by unveiling a conceptual demonstration of its own augmented reality glasses that would send text messages, take pictures, map routes to destinations and perform other smartphone-like tasks.

Juxtopia’s product is a blue-collar, hard-working cousin, intended for use in war zones, operating rooms, classrooms and factories. Funded by a Small Business Technology Transfer grant from the National Science Foundation, the company has been conducting research on context-aware augmented reality hardware and software since 2005.

Juxtopia plans to manufacture the goggles in Baltimore.

Doswell said there are applications in the medical field, manufacturing, education and sports, among others.

“So imagine there’s a combat medic on the battlefield, 19 years old,” Doswell says.

“He needs to provide a life-saving procedure, very fast, within 60 seconds. That medic puts on the goggles and voice retrieves the task,” he says. “Sometimes that 19-year-old medic on the battlefield, getting shot at, may not be able to [recall] the task fast enough. The goggles provide that assistance.”

The goggles would give the medic step-by-step instructions and allow him or her to document the procedure as it unfolds.

Another Juxtopia company is working on technology to embed sensors in tennis racquets that would feed data back to coaches and players.

And then there are the Juxtopia team members who hope their work here on the ground pays dividends in space.

The Solar Systems Express subsidiary is developing a new spacesuit for the commercial space industry. A sister company is working on an autonomous service vehicle that would zip from satellite to satellite to refuel and repair them, a sort of outer space AAA.

Juxtopia also has a team competing for the Google Lunar X Prize — $30 million for the first privately funded group to land a robot safely on the Moon.

Juxtopia’s team is working on a system of worm-like robots they say will be able to traverse the Moon’s surface more easily than traditional vehicles, as well as an airbag landing system.

With the airbags, spacecraft will be able to bounce on to the lunar surface at 60 miles per hour, rather than the softer 1 or 2 mph required by legacy system. The Juxtopia method is cheaper, lighter and simpler, said Blaze Sanders, a mechanical engineering graduate student at Hopkins.

“Scientists around the world will be able to more cheaply explore the entire solar system with a system that doesn’t have to worry about accurately landing,” Sanders said.

Landover-based 2tor Inc. announced yet another partnership with a major university on Tuesday, rounding out a spring that has seen the educational technology company expand its nationwide reach and stir more interest from outside investors.

Washington University School of Law in St. Louis will begin offering its online Master of Laws — dubbed @WashULaw — in January 2013.

It will be the sixth such partnership for 2tor, which revealed in March plans to add 100 employees to its payroll in the coming year, most of them at its new Prince George’s County headquarters. The company now employs about 370, the bulk of them in Landover.

“We’re thrilled to be working with a school that is pioneering a law program for the 21st century and one that is primed for an increasingly globalized world,” said Chip Paucek, CEO and cofounder of 2tor.

The @WashULaw program is targeted at international lawyers. They will be able to earn a Master of Laws in U.S. Law for Foreign Lawyers degree from home, without leaving their practices or even moving to the United States.

The program will integrate live classroom sessions, streaming video and content consumed at the student’s own pace.

Michael B. Horn, an advisor to @WashULaw and education director of the Innosight Institute, a non-profit think tank, called the new program “exciting.”

“Washington University’s partnership with 2tor is a clear signal that the field of online learning is being invigorated and transformed by top-flight entrants,” he said.

2tor was founded in 2008 and was named one of the 10 most innovative companies in education by Fast Company in 2012. Prior to this year, it had developed four online degree programs: a Master of Arts in Teaching and Master of Social Work from the University of Southern California; Master’s in Nursing from Georgetown University and a Master of Business Administration from UNC.

Along with the jobs announcement in March, 2tor announced it would partner with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on an online Master of Public Administration program. About a week later, the company closed a $26 million financing round, bringing 2tor’s total venture capital investments to $96 million.

Behind the red “QUARANTINE” placards on row after row of industrial freezers, Brian Frederick sees opportunity.

The president and managing partner of Quality Solutions, Frederick moved the company into the University of Maryland BioPark in West Baltimore in October. The 10-year-old business with clients here and across the globe occupies a niche formed by the growth in the life sciences field in Maryland, in other states and abroad.

“Every drug that comes out, there’s always a new [U.S. Food and Drug Administration] regulation, there’s changes in regulations, changes in science and so forth,” Frederick said during a recent interview.

Quality Solutions doesn’t cut through the red tape so much as find the quickest path through the maze that starts at discovery and ends with a new drug on the market.

The company, which has 10 employees, was founded as a compliance consulting business.

Now, however, it does nearly everything but process the actual drugs. Quality Solutions assists in designing manufacturing facilities to meet FDA regulations, consults with hospital pharmacies on federal regulations, tests and monitors sterile workspaces, and tests and calibrates equipment to keep it up to snuff.

“It costs a lot for large companies, even small companies, to have our expertise in-house,” Frederick said. “We can share our expertise among multiple clients, which makes it a little more cost-effective.”

In the 10 to 15 years it can take to bring a drug from discovery to market, Frederick estimates Quality Solutions can shave several months to a year from each clinical phase.

Quality Solutions has also partnered with Product Support Inc., a precision manufacturer in Jessup, to develop sterile manufacturing products.

“It could be 20 percent of our revenue over the next year,” said Frederick. “It’s a pretty significant partnership in that it enhances our core.”

Three years ago, the company added another arm, called Vigilant Bioservices. That’s where the industrial freezers come in.

Vigilant stores research materials, patient samples, cell- and tissue-based products and other materials at temperatures as low as -135 degrees Celsius and in an FDA-compliant way.

Quality Solutions has 6,000 square feet in the BioPark and plans to double that footprint to add some office space, a clean room and more freezers marked “QUARANTINE” for Vigilant to fill.

“Vigilant, we’re looking at growing 100 to 200 percent a year, year over year,” said Frederick.

The movie boasts a cast that includes Olivia Wilde (“House M.D.”, “Tron: Legacy”), Ray Liotta (“Goodfellas”, “Date Night”), Sam Rockwell (“Moon”, “Cowboys and Aliens”) and Michelle Monaghan (“Mission Impossible 3”, “Source Code”).

The state estimates the production could spur more than $7 million in spending in Maryland and creation of 340 jobs for local crew, cast and extras.

“We look forward to welcoming the cast of ‘Better Living Thru Chemistry’ to Maryland,” said Gov. Martin O’Malley. “This film, and the many film projects that have chosen Maryland recently, help create hundreds of jobs and generate new business for the local companies that support this industry.”

Netflix series “House of Cards” began shooting last month and the independent film “Jamesy Boy” recently wrapped production. HBO’s feature film “Game Change” premiered in March and the cable network’s series “VEEP” premiered in April.

According to the Maryland Film Office, the Film Production Employment Act of 2011 helped land the “Better Living Through Chemistry” production for the state. The tax credit program sets aside $7.5 million every year to offset local production expenditures and encourages producers to use local film crews.

The Maryland Biotechnology Center delivered $600,000 in commercialization and research grants to three companies on Wednesday following the award of another $800,000 in an earlier round in December.

The seven total recipients are developing cancer therapies, malaria treatments, environmental and food testing biosensors and other products.

In its three years, the Biotechnology Development Awards program has handed out $4.5 million to Maryland biotech companies. The grants are designed to spur commercialization of technology developed at academic institutions and take promising products to market.

In the program’s first year, there were 30 applicants for the awards, said Dr. Judy Britz, executive director of the biotech center, a division of the Department of Business and Economic Development. Last year, she said, there were 60. And this year, 90.

“This grant is really going to help us make the transition from academia to ‘Here is the product that we’re going to put into a human being,’” said Kenneth C. Carter, CEO of NexImmune.

NexImmune, Beta Cat Pharmaceuticals, GrayBug and PathSensors Inc. were all announced as recipients in December. They were joined Wednesday by Leukosight Inc., Sanaria Inc., and SuperNova Diagnostics Inc.

All received grants of about $200,000.

Leukosight, of College Park, develops therapies for patients with autoimmune and inflammatory diseases.

Sanaria, of Rockville, is dedicated to malaria vaccine development, and plans to conduct 14 clinical trials in eight countries on three continents in the next year.

SuperNova, of Germantown, has developed a proprietary tool to do molecular diagnostics and amino acid assays.

NexImmune and Beta Cat are both located in Gaithersburg and are focused on cancer therapies.

GrayBug was spun out of Johns Hopkins University and is developing drug-delivery technology for patients with diseases that affect their vision. Justin Hanes, CEO of the Baltimore company, said the grant would help GrayBug take its long-lasting Age-Related Macular Degeneration therapy to human clinical trials in the next year or two.

“When we get to that stage, we expect our company to go through a period of substantial growth” Hanes said.

PathSensors, an environmental and food testing company, will use the grant in its development of a Campylobacter detector product for use in the poultry industry.

“Our technology, as quick as it is, I firmly believe we’re going to revolutionize the poultry industry,” said Ted Olsen, CEO of PathSensors, located in Baltimore. “Our competitor just put out a press release that they have a test that will turn around results in 27 hours. We can do the same thing in a couple minutes.”

Maryland has the foundation on which it can grow a robust environment of high-tech, innovative start-ups, but needs a stronger angel and venture capital network, more support for entrepreneurs and better programs to nurture young, creative minds, a group of business leaders said Tuesday.

“There’s no reason Maryland can’t be an entrepreneurial hotbed like Austin or Boston or Silicon Valley,” said John M. Wasilisin, executive vice president of the Maryland Technology Development Corporation (TEDCO). “We have our challenges, but our assets are off the charts, our education system and our quality of life, our access to federal facilities.”

Wasilisin was addressing the Maryland Economic Development Association’s conference in Cambridge. He was joined by entrepreneurs and others who work with start-ups.

“We need to feed the beast. We have to help these guys and gals out there who are super smart and have great ideas. We need to help them to get to the next level,” said Timothy A. Hodge Jr., head of the corporate and emerging business practice at Miles & Stockbridge.

Richard A. Kohr Jr., CEO of Evergreen Advisors, an investment banking firm, said he has seen more energy in the angel investment community in the last year. And Hodge, who was echoed by others on the panel, said there has been an uptick in entrepreneurial activity in the last six to nine months.

“Things are happening,” he said. “The next one to five years, things are going to pop.”

Seth Goldman’s business has already popped.

He founded Honest Tea in his kitchen in Bethesda in 1998 and made the first organic bottled tea ever in 1999. The company was sold to The Coca-Cola Co. in March 2011.

“We’re still expanding dramatically,” said Goldman, Honest Tea’s “TeaEO.”

He acknowledged the importance of beefing up math, science, technology and engineering curricula in schools, but said they should not overshadow music, athletics, business plan competitions and other pursuits that teach students how to work hard and be creative.

Goldman pointed to two recent Maryland success stories — his own, at Honest Tea, and Baltimore’s Under Armour.

“Those are brands fueled by creativity and competition,” he said.

Wasilisin said the region needs more early stage investment capital for it to churn out more companies.

The state raised $84 million in March to make venture capital investments in high-tech companies through the InvestMaryland program. And the General Assembly approved the complementary Innovate Maryland this spring, which will spur commercialization of technologies developed at university labs with about $6 million.

TEDCO has launched a venture capital fund of its own, but the market needs more, Wasilisin said.

“If we’re fortunate enough to do $50 million, we’re still just scratching the surface,” he said. “Our research tells us we could invest $400 million.”

Businesses looking for new digs in Maryland have a new tool to comb the 1,800 commercial and industrial buildings and sites available from Ocean City to Accident.

Today, the Department of Business and Economic Development launched Maryland Business Properties, a searchable, map-able online database of business properties.

 “Maryland Business Properties is the latest in a suite of interactive free tools that DBED introduced this year to give our citizens, businesses and economic development partners improved access to information and research, which helps to spur economic activity and create jobs,” said DBED Secretary Christian S. Johansson. 

Users can search based on the size of the building, the height of its ceilings, zoning limits, rail access and other features. In addition to basic information on the sites, the database includes other facts, including the nearest major highway, airport, port and rail line, tax information, available incentive programs, traffic counts and demographic profiles, among others. Users can also overlay maps that show colleges and universities, hospitals, trade schools, airports, the 100-year flood plain and other information.

DBED plans to add more data layers this year, including a feature that will allow users to search for different types of businesses around a given site, allowing them to look for competitors, restaurants and others.

The database now holds about 1,800 properties. It replaced a custom DBED program built more than a decade ago.

The new system will be operated by Location One Information Systems, of Kansas City. LOIS runs databases in 18 states and Maryland’s will be tied into that network, meaning businesses and their site selection consultants will be able to search for Maryland properties from the central LOIS site.

Maryland counties and Baltimore City will also be able to host their own LOIS portals that tap into the state’s database.

“Real estate is often a major driver of economic development projects,” said Dave Ryan, executive director of Salisbury-Wicomico Economic Development Inc. The new DBED system “provides quick and informative results when searching for properties throughout Maryland.”

The properties database, unveiled for the first time this week at the Maryland Economic Development Association conference in Cambridge, is part of a suite of free online tools developed by DBED.

Maryland Business Map allows users to search for major employers, education assets, tax incentive zones and dozens of other locations on an interactive map. And Maryland Business Calendar lists business events around the state.