AccelerateBaltimore’s first class presents at Demo Day

The first class of startups to enter AccelerateBaltimore presented on Wednesday to a crowd of more than 70 at Demo Day, according to the Baltimore Sun. AccelerateBaltimore, launched by the Emerging Technology Center in December 2011 with $110,000 in seed money from the Abell Foundation, “targets companies that are creating pioneering technologies,” and works to make sure companies have a marketable product within three months,  according to a news release.
Each of the four companies accepted into AccelerateBaltimore received $25,000 in funding. Presenting on Wednesday were:

1. NewsUp (entered the accelerator as Flying Pig Digital), a mobile app we’ve covered that makes a game out of reading the news, awarding points to users for reading personalized stories and sharing news items with friends.
2. Kithly (entered the accelerator as Hooopla), a mobile social networking app that, in conjunction with importing users’ calendar schedules, combs through users’ contacts and figures out who among them is available for an in-person meeting.
3. NoBadGift.com, a website and soon-to-be mobile app we’ve also covered that allows users’ to assemble wish lists of stuff they want, and then ask friends and family members to contribute dollars to those items. In August, co-founder McKeever Conwell will shove off to San Francisco for 12 weeks as part of the NewME Accelerator program.
4. Unbound Concepts, an algorithm that reads literature and then assigns different reading levels to texts.