Maryland TechCrawl from ETC Baltimore on Vimeo.

There's a good chance that if you've stayed in a hotel or eaten at a restaurant, your reservation or food order was completed with the help of a MICROS system working in the background.

It's a company that's had steady growth in revenues and profits since the early 1990s, and now sits on $525 million in cash reserves.

So, in short: Giannopoulos and his people are working hard. Which is why I was recently surprised to see Giannopoulos's work phone number, cell phone number and email address at the bottom of the homepage of MICROS's Website.

"Is this for real?" I thought. The thought of dealing with the public riff-raff usually causes many CEOs to writhe like vampires in the sunlight. Here's one who sorta welcomes it.

So I called the cell one afternoon last week. I left a voicemail where I introduced myself and said I'd be interested in meeting with him to talk about his company.

The next morning, I had a message from an assistant who was ready to set up a time to meet.

That time turned out to be today. In a conference room with him earlier this morning, I asked him (among other questions) why he puts his contact information out there so publicly and if it's really his cell phone.

He insisted it was, and that he'll sometimes take calls from MICROS customers at 3 a.m. (Now I know when to call him.)

But it got me thinking: How many CEOs of large companies put themselves out there so publicly? Sure, we're seeing CEO and corporate leaders dipping their toes in the Twitter and Facebook waters, but how many are authentic about it?

Just a few weeks ago, Giannopoulos said he got a call at 1:30 a.m. from a hotel employee, who told him she called the first number she could find on the Website for support. He helped her by connecting her to right support hotline.

For Giannopoulos, putting his contact information out there is a deliberate tactic he employs to get close to any problems his customers may be having. It's an end-run around the command-and-control hierachy that MICROS, like any corporation, builds for information to flow from the bottom up to its leadership team.

"My staff don't want me to have the phone number, but what better tool to find out about problems," Giannopoulos told me. "It's a very nice vehicle to find out what you're organization is doing."

Most of the calls, though, are on the positive side, he said, and the public phone number also generates sales leads, believe it or not. An interested business owner called his cell two weeks ago, and a conversation with Giannopoulos led to a new deal for MICROS.

All because of a cellphone number and a Webpage.

Researchers at Towson University and the National Federation of the Blind, based here in Baltimore, have come up with a new and more accessible twist on the CAPTCHA services -- you know, those squiggly, hard-to-read letters us humans are forced to enter in a Web application to verify that we're human and not malicious bots.

CAPTCHA technology has been around for more than 10 years and its history has been a sort of arms race between security geeks and hackers. New types of CAPTCHAs are devised, but hackers can write programs that can "read" the letters and numbers. Meanwhile, people with disabilities can struggle with trying to get past the CAPTCHA security, because they have trouble seeing or hearing the CAPTCHA codes.

Computer viruses have an easier time than people with disabilities in getting past some CAPTCHA systems, according to Towson professor Jonathan Lazar, who worked on the new system with the NFB.

"Unfortunately what happens is it becomes very often not a test of if you're human, but a test of whether you can see," Lazar said. "Basically, computer viruses are twice as successful as blind people on the old captchas. It's a problem, and that's why we've been working on building this."

Here's how the Towson system works: The user is shown both a picture and a sound of an easy to identify object. In the case above, we see birds, drums, lion.

Corresponding sounds for each object are then played for the user, who types in what she hears. Lazar said their algorithms can accept variations of the user input, such as plurals, i.e. bird/birds, drum/drums, lion/lions. This type of security approach works because humans are still far better than computers at recognizing sounds and putting names to them, according to Lazar.

The Towson researchers recently filed a patent application for their system, which they call HIPUU (Human Interacting Proof Universally Usable.)

Who knows -- maybe sometime soon this will become the new standard.

The plot was carried out a year ago. It's a good read:

http://www.fbi.gov/page2/nov09/atm_111609.html

Their thinking: Why not look at cargo ships the way we look at rail cars and tractor trailers? Rail cars get decoupled from their engines and trailers get decoupled from the tractors that pull them. Why can't ships' hulls -- in a similar fashion -- be decoupled from the superstructures (wheelhouses) that house the crew?

Their vision is a port that cuts down dramatically on wait times for ships to unload their cargo, and is turning around crew quickly and putting ships out to sail in a matter of hours, not days.

Watch a video animation of their idea here.

This year, Elizondo got a patent for the idea, and he and Robert formed a company called Never Ship Empty. They're about to start pitching it to leaders in the industry. And they're embarking on a feasibility study with the University of Houston to test out how efficient the new process could be for a port.

They'll have to persuade a lot of skeptics. But if the numbers and efficiencies hold up, we may be looking at a possible new way that the cargo shipping industry can go about its business -- thanks to these two guys from Maryland and their audacious idea.

Last week's news that Google was buying mobile advertiser AdMob for $750 million probably didn't cause venture capitalists to throw money at Millennial (such deals usually take more than a week to put together), but it also probably didn't hurt the growing little firm.

The conventional wisdom now is that Google's purchase of AdMob "validates" the nascent mobile advertising industry. When a big company like Google drops a ton of dough on a small company in a still-emerging market, you know that will attract many more serious investors and players to the industry.

According to eMarketer stats via the Interactive Advertising Bureau, here's what the mobile ad market looks like:  

I'm gonna bet that the Google-AdMob acquisition, though the first big one in the mobile ad space, won't be the last. My guess is we may be a few months, perhaps even weeks, away from similar acquisitions of smaller mobile ad firms by big Google-esque-like competitors. What do you think?

In this case, I'm talking about the Life Sciences Institute, which opened its doors at the University of Maryland's BioPark on the west side of Baltimore.

The LSI is run by the Baltimore City Community College, though its new home is in the University of Maryland Baltimore's research park.

UMB wants to make the BioPark a "one-stop shop" for the biotech industry. Bringing in a program such as BCCC's LSI that could train a workforce of biotech workers was instrumental to UMB's long-term goal of offering it all -- from startup companies to research labs to students in training -- under one large roof.

On a recent tour, I saw earnest students working in labs and sitting in lectures in classrooms on the floor of the LSI.

There are jobs to be had in this field, and companies and research facilities are constantly soaking up trained and competent workers in the region, I was told by the LSI's director, Dr. Kathleen Kennedy Norris.

For more, check out my story today on the program and some of the people in it.

The formation of new businesses, in the form of corporations and limited liability companies, has been in decline in recent years, according to state figures.

New corporate charters were at a five-year high, back in fiscal 2005, with 16,127 filings, but have declined to 10,882 through fiscal 2009. (The fiscal year starts July 1 and ends June 30.)

New limited liability companies (LLCs) climbed to more than 29,000 in 2006 through 2008, but declined to 25,442 in fiscal 2009, the statistics show. The LLC is the preferred type of business entity in Maryland by filers.

These figures, which come from the state Department of Assessments and Taxation, show the impact that the recession has had on the formation of new businesses in Maryland.

Some may argue that the figures help prove the oft-mentioned point that Maryland has an anti-business climate. But the LLC figures, which reflect the preferred type of entity for business owners, really just took a dive in the last year after cresting the previous three years. 

What do you think?

UPDATE: I'm still unearthing similar new-business data from other neighboring states, which don't appear to offer such information on their websites. So, it's taking some phone calls. For Maryland, I got 2008 and 2009 via a telephone conversation with an SDAT official, and 2005-07 figures from the SDAT annual report, which is available online.

Update 2: Here's a link to some Virginia data that I did find online, for years 2007 and 2008: http://www.scc.state.va.us/comm/anrept/2008_AR.pdf