If it's the first Wednesday of the month, this must be another fabulous
Mass Innovation Night. An amazing number of innovators, entrepreneurs, networkers, bloggers, tweeters, and Steampunk fans braved the December cold and the traffic on 128 (what up with 128 -- 2 hours from North Andover to Waltham???!!!???) to gather at the Charles River Museum of Industry and Innovation.
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| Steam Punk Writer's Workstation -- I would totally be more productive writing about Session Border Controllers on this thing! |
Once I finally got to Waltham, I took a few minutes to visit Alex at
Back Pages Books so I could drop off some used books for him to sell, find out if he has the new James Prosek book about eels in yet (it'll be in Friday), and recommend that he check out Mass Innovation Nights and the Friday morning breakfasts.
So the museum was already humming with innovator activity when I got there. Downstairs, people were getting name tags amidst the museum's regular exhibits and checking out the Steampunk exhibit.
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| Getting Name Tags at the Check-in Desk |
Up on the mezzanine, the experts corner -- experts mezzanine this time, I guess --- was buzzing with conversation.
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| Experts Mezzanine |
The demo tables in the main room all seemed to be attracting lots of attention. I made sure to visit all four companies who were presenting:
Coloci,
Media Armor,
TenMarks and
Cambridge Semantics. I had a great conversation with Steve from Cambridge Semantics about databases and semantics. We got kind of geeky. I love a good technical conversation.
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| Cambridge Semantics |
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| LockerNotes |
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| Coloci |
I was impressed with Media Armor's take on analytics, TenMarks' take on math homework,
LockerNotes' take on reminding your Dad to buy bananas and pancakes, and Coloci's take on using our always on cyber-connectedness for connecting with friends in the real world.
Folks were packed into the alcove off the main room for the presentations. TenMarks had the best presentation with an excellent video. It's about time somebody made it easy and fun to learn math. America needs better math education.
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| Packed House for the Presentations |
Coloci had the best slide with their cool display showing where your friends are in relation to where you are.
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| Coloci's Friend Radar |
After the presentations, I spent some more time checking out the Steampunk exhibit. You can see my Steampunk photos on Flickr, along with some photos of the regular museum items, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/captain_peleg/sets/72157625564219026/.
By the time I got home last night, a former co-worker who'd seen my tweet about TenMarks (via my Facebook status) was asking for the link for her 4th grader. That's the power of Mass Innovation Night!
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