As some of you may be aware, last week I put out a public Google spreadsheet and started asking Maryland tech companies to contribute their contact information. This is going extremely well -- nearly 50 companies have added their info.

My next step is to build a map of these tech companies.

There are some benefits for undertaking this modest effort. One, I'm learning about a lot of new tech companies that I had never heard of before. Two, the tech community -- I hope -- will benefit from a good open/crowdsourced list of companies across the state, with contact info such as names and Twitter addresses. And three, I suck at keeping track of contacts and business cards and names and phone numbers, so if I can have one cool spot on the web for this stuff, I benefit -- and hopefully you do, too.

Regarding the map you see below: I dumped the Google Spreadsheet into Google Fusion Tables. If you have any ideas on how to better serve and present this information, I'm all ears. For one, I'd like companies to add their logos to the spreadsheet, because I can incorporate them into the map. So, I'm open to more ideas -- just keep it simple and hopefully Google-y -- I'm not a programmer!