MindGrub -- Feeding the Beast One App At a Time

Even within the super competitive world of technology Baltimore's Todd Marks has an impressive resume. His client list includes names like Motorola and A&E. And while being a Flash guru is among his accomplishments, his company's most recent success writing applications for mobile devices like iPhones isn't an overnight success story.

In fact, his company, Mindgrub Technologies, is still located in the basement office he built in his home on weekends while working remotely for a New York firm . New digs can't be far in the future, however, given that there's only one free desk left.

Marks, president and CEO of Mindgrub, likes to talk about his passion for technology. He first became interested in computer science while teaching at a high school in Howard County. His students' enthusiasm for computers inspired him to try to set up his own development company.

Like many tech-savvy entrepreneurs during the dotcom boom, Marks started an online enterprise with some partners called Digital Organism. "We saw where things were going as far as digital signage and interactive media and display and wanted to be involved," he explains.

However, following the tragedy of 9/11 and a few different iterations of the company, business began to slow.

Unvanquished, Marks began teaching at the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) and running other smaller businesses on the side. That's when he founded Mindgrub Technologies and took a contracting position to do the digital signs for BWI.

"I didn't know how to grow the company into more than just one person doing work, so I ended up taking a job with a media division, mediaEdge," Marks recalls. His family was growing, and he was forced to make the tough decision to return to work with a company that wasn't his own.

An Entrepreneur at Heart

It was at mediaEdge that Marks was able to lay the foundation for the future of Mindgrub. He was able to gain the experience he'd been lacking in his first few business ventures, growing his division to include 50 top-notch employees and overseeing everything from HR to new projects during a three year period.

Marks admits, "I was green. I had the technological skills and good ideas, but I needed to know how to run a business and grow it, getting the investors you need and everything."

His time at mediaEdge came to an end due to what he describes as a "pretty brutal intellectual property agreement," which fueled his entrepreneurial yearnings all over again. "There's nothing more flattering or infuriating than being told that your ideas are so good they belong to the company you work for," he notes. 

Early on, Marks saw where the Web was going in terms of mapping, "My business partners and I were thinking that the next level of mapping will be on a micro level closer to Tom Cruise's experiences in Minority Report, only without the privacy concerns."

While the idea of having your iPhone being bombarded by coupons when you walk past the Gap --whether they know your name or not-- doesn't sound that appealing, Marks' educational ideas for such applications do. viaPlace had been a side project of Marks' for some time. A location-based services company, viaPlace obtained patents for mobile device applications.

Apps to Go Go

Mindgrub now wholly owns viaPlace, and their applications for mobile phones generate about 50 percent of the business. Marks' almost prescient ability to foresee this consumer need is fascinating in and of itself, but when compared with his Sci-Fi vision of the future, it seems tame. His plan? To make applications that are so smart and user friendly that a student could direct their own schoolwork depending on their interests, or a car owner could perform a tune-up with no prior knowledge of repair by simply walking up to it and tapping a mobile phone.

Marks' interest in learning applications is rooted in part in his childhood. "My father's a physician, so education was always really important in my family. Mindgrub's mission is to facilitate instant information travel�to be able to share knowledge faster." As the popularity of mobile applications and social networking platforms including Facebook continue to grow, Mindgrub's egalitarian aims finally seem like real possibilities.

If It Can Happen Here...

With classrooms full of plugged-in teens dancing in his head, Marks is clearly no luddite, and eagerly espouses a more progressive approach to learning and technology. "We've been educating the same way, with the same methods for so many years that maybe it's time for a new approach," he says. As an instructor and technology enthusiast, Marks' interest in revolutionizing education might hit a snag as school systems face both budgetary and administrative challenges.

This doesn't seem to deter him, "if we can get semantic searches to pick up Harry Truman when you enter the words 'president' and 'Parkinson's', we should be able to make searching about asking good questions and getting good answers the first time." Tailoring the educational system to the student may not happen overnight, but Marks believes that Baltimore is the answer to getting it to happen sooner rather than later.

"The Baltimore/D.C. area has the No. 2 density of IT professionals," Marks points out, explaining that the reason the area doesn't get the recognition of, say, Silicon Valley is because IT professionals in the region work across so many different industries. And, more often than not, "local companies refer larger projects to New York firms when the talent is here."

Marks is optimistic and envisions an exciting future for Baltimore's technology sector "It's a city that has [everything] to offer, we can do work for Fortune 500 companies here at a fraction of the cost as in the Valley or the Alley." Given the recent recession, this is a serious selling point, he adds.

Perhaps Silicon Valley and the Big Apple's Alley aren't shaking in their shoes over Charm City just yet, but Mindgrub's work with applications and Flash should at least give competing companies in those cities pause. With local competitiveness dwindling in the face of a greater attempt for the technology sector to work together, Baltimore is poised for growth. As Mindgrub breaks out of the basement and begins hiring recent adds from Mapquest and other well-known companies, the area is beginning to be put on the map of innovation. 


Molly O'Donnell is a freelance writer and editor, currently working on her Ph.D. in Las Vegas.