Meet the Baltimoreans speaking at our Builders Conference

Newsletter for April 25, 2024

It's been an exciting week for local tech, from a bombshell announcement at Baltimore Peninsula to battling bots at last night's Beer-N-Bots event (thanks to Ed Mullin for organizing) to some truly outlandish news about a school employee impersonating his principal with AI — and getting arrested for it.

Below, we look forward to the Baltimoreans coming to Philly next month for our Builders Conference, as well as a new esports lab further south in PG County.

— Sameer, Technical.ly editor for Baltimore and DC

This week’s newsletter is brought to you by the Morgan Lewis Startup & Accelerate webinar series, providing entrepreneurs knowledge and tools to grow their businesses and offering investors assurance their investments are on the right track. Check out the spring schedule here.

No, the Os aren't taking on the Phils or anything like that. Instead, some of Charm City's leading startup and economic development figureheads will head up I-95 to speak at our very own Builders Conference.

Expect panels, lightning talks and more from the likes of UpSurge Baltimore's Kory Bailey, FemEquity's Adeola Ajani and EcoMap Technologies' Sherrod Davis, among other innovators from throughout Technical.ly's markets.

➡️ See the full agenda and speaker list before buying your tix here

The southernmost of Maryland's four public HBCUs recently invested in students' STEAM education by creating a new esports lab for its students — and its esports team.

The facility is one of several moves Bowie State leaders made to build tech, gamification and entrepreneurship into the student experience. Others highlighted by Maurice Taylor, the school's vice president of IT, include a makerspace, an app to gamify studying and food delivery robots.

➡️ Learn about the esports lab and more in Alanah Nichole Davis' new article here

• We've got a new editor on our team! Experienced tech journalist Katie Malone joins us to oversee our coverage in Philly, Delaware and Pittsburgh. [Technical.ly]

• Authorities in Baltimore County arrested ex-Pikesville High School athletic director Dahzon Darien at BWI Airport as he was about to board a flight to Houston. Darien's been charged with using artificial intelligence to impersonate school's principal in a recording with anti-Black and anti-Jewish comments. [Baltimore Banner]

• The StarTUp Accelerator at Towson University announced the 16 companies in its sixth cohort, making products ranging from a basketball-aiding wearable device to a lost-and-found app. [Towson University]

• Johns Hopkins spinout EpiWatch named Teresa Prego its new CEO amid plans to bring its app, which allows an Apple Watch to detect seizures, to market. [Baltimore Business Journal]

• A new shipping channel allowed some vessels to leave the Port of Baltimore after the Key Bridge collapse left them trapped. The Dali, whose collision with the bridge led to the infrastructural disaster, remains stuck in the Patapsco River. [Baltimore Sun]