Assistive speech tool wins pitch contest. At age 39, Martin Bedouret was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS. He quickly discovered that tools to assist with speech issues were expensive, inaccessible and only available in a handful of languages. From there, Cboard was born. It’s an open-source platform that helps people with speech impairments communicate using pictograms. With the $10k he won at the 2GI pitch night, Bedouret plans to continue expanding.  “Winning this competition is a big deal for us,” he said, “and shows that our mission matters.”

Maryland ICONs, from Bmore to North Bethesda. While I was at the Greater Baltimore Committee’s event in Sparrows Point, I know, from your glamorous LinkedIn posts, that many of you went down to North Bethesda to see our state’s tech tapestry shine at the Maryland Tech Council’s latest ICON Awards ceremony. For those who didn’t attend, some of the Baltimore area’s notable winners included Delali Dzirasa, CEO of Fearless (which, full disclosure, is a Technical.ly client) and Digital Harbor Foundation CEO Andrew Coy. This year’s ceremony was also the first to feature the Pava LaPere Young Innovator Award. That honor went to EcoMap Technologies, the company the late LaPere cofounded in Baltimore

AI, plasma and photon innovations nab UMD awards. Anybody following the tech coming out of the University of Maryland system, especially its flagship College Park campus, knows it especially excels in life sciences, quantum computing and information sciences. UMD researchers earned special recognition for their inventions in these fields during the recent Invention of the Year awards. Winners include a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer, a photon counter with more capabilities than its predecessors, environmentally safe plasma and an AI-generated text detection project