HDScores, HobbyBuddy win popular poll at Tech Cocktail startup mixer

Technologists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, startup junkies: all gathered at Mother’s in Federal Hill on Tuesday night for Tech Cocktail’s Baltimore Mixer and Startup Showcase.
The point of these mixers, as Tech Cocktail puts it, is to provide a small group of startups the chance “to show off in an expo-style to the rest of the Baltimore entrepreneurial community for free.” (Attendees pay $15 for the chance to hear and get two free drinks.)

While nine startups had reserved table space at the event, missing among them were Course Canary and MZAC LLC. Two of the seven startups present were voted as favorites by attendees: HDScores, which corrals together health department sanitation scores of restaurants in more than 3,200 jurisdictions across the U.S. and Canada, and HobbyBuddy, an online tool that helps users create or find events (pick-up basketball games, yoga classes, tech startup mixers) to participate in.
The other startups at Tech Cocktail’s October mixer:

• Dormify: Makers of dorm-room and other college accessories. While much of the merchandise is tailored to coeds, there are a few items guys might use in their dorm rooms.
• NewsUp: A game for reading the news, as Technically Baltimore has reported here and here.
• Offer ‘n Buy: The eBay for college students. If you’re a senior and you have a couch you need to sell (because it’s not fitting in the trunk of your Honda Civic), this is the startup made for you.
• decisionaire: Its website, from the looks of it, is still getting up to snuff, but the premise here is one of easy decision-making. By creating surveys and using the Internet (i.e. the people using it), the hope is no longer will anyone be stuck on whether pizza or burgers is the better dinner food.
• Solar System Express: Developers of astronaut-assisting hardware and software for the commercial space industry, because Earth is getting too claustrophobic. Repeat after us: M-A-R-S. Mars. That is where we are going. Red rocks!