HDScores wins audience vote at Tech Cocktail pitch event

With the remainder of the Orioles’ regular season a mere formality, Baltimore’s most important Thursday night pitches were arguably being tossed a few neighborhoods over from Camden Yards in Federal Hill.
After all, that’s where the drone was parked.
At tech entrepreneurship hub Betamore, principals from five area startups took the stage, pitching their latest and greatest to a lively crowd.
For a group that’s used to laying out their business plan with the clock ticking, the organizers at tech news and events site Tech Cocktail sweetened the pot: A trip to Vegas hung in the balance.
The mixer and startup showcase marked Tech Cocktail’s return to Baltimore for the first time in more than a year, and doubled as one of the numerous chances for networking offered by Baltimore Innovation Week, which runs through Sept. 20.
The five companies each represented different fields, including energy, crowdfunding and even restaurant scores. Here’s a one-sentence sample from each pitch:

• Bcause, LLC, on Bitcoin trading: “Our trading platform allows overstocked.com to trade risk, and allows you to do so as well.
• Cake Fundraising, on hosting Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s campaign: “We provide an economic value for their business sponsors.”
• DroneShield: “We’re seeing examples of drones being used for bad, so we’ve developed a drone detector.”
• HIS Energy, LLC: “We take multiple forms of energy, store it, and use it to power censors.”
• HDScores: “We tell you how clean the restaurants you’re about to eat in are.”

Proving once again that people vote with their forks, the audience voted HDScores as the winner.
The free app, which is set to be launched in about two weeks, aggregates open source health department data from municipal governments, showing consumers any potential inspection violations before sit down to a meal.
“We take all that data in near real time,” CEO Matthew Eierman said.
While Eierman was quickly surrounded by onlookers hoping for a demo after the win, there was equal buzz from the other side of the room.

DroneShield’s Brian Hearing brought his drone along, and took the opportunity to demonstrate his company’s detection technology, which picks up potentially unfriendly drones through a device that analyzes ambient sounds.
After a few moments of hovering above the conference table, the drone descended safely back toward the carpeted floor. Several onlookers put down their phones, and went back to mingling.