Baltimore Tech Breakfast organizer Ron Schmelzer to expand to Columbia, plans for more

The organizer of Baltimore Tech Breakfast, the popular monthly morning local startup demo affair, has expansion plans.
The latest Baltimore installment last week drew more than 150 to its latest location — the DLA Piper building in the Mt. Washington Conference Center — and served as a fine example for why local organizer and Bizelo CEO Ron Schmelzer is planning on launching a new tech breakfast in Columbia, starting Aug. 16.

Insufficient parking for the mass of attendees for the Baltimore version was why the tech breakfast—which started out one year ago with just a dozen people in an ETC conference room—switched venues from the AOL/Advertising.com building in Tide Point, says Schmelzer. On the Columbia front, no venue has been selected yet, although Schmelzer is presently eyeing the Maryland Center for Entrepreneurship, as well as some colleges in the region, which include Loyola University Maryland’s graduate campus and Howard County Community College.
“I don’t want it to cannibalize [from Baltimore’s TechBreakfast],” Schmelzer says. “But I think both will fill up. There’s a big appetite for this thing.”
Schmelzer, who’s a bit reluctant to brand the TechBreakfast as merely a Baltimore event, eventually wants to continue expanding into Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia. “
“From D.C. to Philadelphia is our Silicon Valley,” he says. “We have to integrate as a region and have a free interchange of people, news, money, events, and resources.”
The next TechBreakfast at DLA Piper takes place July 25. Six members of the local tech scene are given seven minutes each to talk about their companies in what Schmelzer jokingly refers to as a “show and tell for adults,” followed by three minutes of questions and critiques from the audience.
We’ve posted a round-up below of the six presenters, along with the first portion of the complete video, from June’s TechBreakfast.
MacroMoltek CEO Monica Berrondo discussed how her company helps scientists develop new antibody therapeutic drugs with computational tools, which averages savings between $80 million and $100 million.
Hahler founder K.C. Hopson lifted his flask to the crowd while explaining Hahler, a social network for proud drinkers, with an online database of more than 80,000 users.
Authntk CEO and co-founder Len Ostroff thinks video is the new texting, which is why his company tries to make video testimonials generated by consumers of products as easy as possible.
TeamGantt co-founder Nathan Gilmore presented his company’s web-based Gantt chart system, which will forever make you happy that organizationally-minded folks found a way to make a Dropbox for getting your life together.
Firejack Technologies CEO Ben Miller walked through his company’s Open Flame Platform, which is something of a WYSIWYG custom software creation tool for businesses.
Cowtrip.com founder Terrance MacGregor related how he drove two hours a day while spending, on average, just thirty minutes with his kids. This wasn’t good enough. So he created on online tool to help people evaluate the cost-benefit analysis of their daily commutes. And he used a cow to get us to say, “Aww.”