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This year’s TechNite, an annual event sponsored by the Greater Baltimore Tech Council (GBTC) was held at Ram’s Head Live in downtown Baltimore on October 11th, 2011. The event had a great turnout and it always reminds me of how great “Smalltimore” (Baltimore+ Small City) can be for fostering successful business partnerships. The support for tech in the Baltimore area has grown over the last few years. Connecting emerging companies with those who have a strong foothold in niche digital markets is paramount to growing the startup sector in Baltimore.

Mindgrub Technologies has been selected by the Catonsville Chamber of Commerce to receive the Chamber’s 2011 award for “Innovative Technology.” The Catonsville Chamber of Commerce recognizes businesses that have contributed innovative products, services and technology; broadened society; and promoted economic growth both within and beyond the Catonsville community. The award will be presented at the Chamber’s awards dinner on October 12, 2011.

If you didn’t read Part 1 of this post, you can find it here about my review of Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Crush It!”

Part 2: The Thank You Economy

The default collections in Foundation are great and just what you need 99% of the time. However, none of the collections actually guarantee the underlying structure of the class you’re using. Anyone with a computer science background knows that an array should always yield constant time ( O(1) ) access to an object given the index, however the CFArray documentation clearly states:

The access time for a value in the array is guaranteed to be at worst O(log N) for any implementation, current and future, but will often be O(1)

LLVM has posted about the new automatic reference counting feature coming in (I assume) future versions of the compiler. I have a hard time thinking of this as a helpful improvement in dealing with memory in objective-c in a non garbage collected environment:

Huge props to Mike Brenner for doing a great job this morning spearheading a phenomenal startup event (Startup Breakfast) through his community building organization called Startup Baltimore. As an entrepreneur in the area, it was great taking time out of my day to meet with others in a similar situation as me with interest in our growing tech community, in such a collaborative and welcoming environment.

One of the best and hardest things about being an entrepreneur is that you have no one telling you what you need to be doing. This requires an incredible amount of internal motivation. Everything you do is because you decide it needs to get done, and it gets finished when you decide it needs to get done. This means everything an entrepreneur spends their time doing has to become a math problem, whether they want to admit it or not.

I simply couldn’t take the suspense, so I installed Lion yesterday. I know there’s no shortage of reviews out there, but I wanted to list my impressions of the OS so far:

The Good: