Wow, it's Mass Innovation Night, it's not snowing, and the traffic on 128 is moving freely. Perfect conditions for a great turnout at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham. There's a great crowd with lots of enthusiasm, the demos and presentations are exciting, and there's pizza. What else could you possibly need for a good time?
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| check-in desk -- get your name tag here |
The chosen presenters for this month were:
- CloudJolt – Socially responsible web hosting
- Buzub – Visual URLs
- FiveSpark – SaaS mobile application builder
- Personal Remedies – Personalized nutrition advisor
We also got to hear from
MyPaperlessBills, who got snowed out last month.
I made the rounds of the Hall of Innovators and the conference rooms to check out as many innovators as possible before and after the presentations.
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| Buzub |
The concept of a visual URL intrigued me and I had a great conversation with Bill from
Buzub about representing yourself with a unique string of icons. Since he was wearing his visual URL on his T-shirt, we quickly got into a discussion about hockey. This winter has brought back so many childhood memories of genuine "pond hockey" played on backyard rinks, ponds, and in my case, on the Charles River. Hmm, see what you can get from a visual URL? :-)
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| CloudJolt |
CloudJolt's approach to web hosting impressed me with their comprehensive approach to support for entrepreneurs and social consciousness. They provide the total package, not only reasonably priced hosting packages and tools for creating your site, but also services like "Ask an Entrepreneur" that help overcome the hurdles of starting a business. These guys are the real deal.
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| Personal Remedies |
"Personalized nutrition advisor" doesn't even begin to cover what the
Personal Remedies application and knowledge base does for you. Name what ails you and this can tell you what foods are best to eat, and why. Mory crowd-sourced a hypothetical sick person for his presentation and his knowledgebase handled the odd collection of illnesses quite well. Nice idea having the audience participate like that.
I loved
Fivespark's approach to empowering businesses to develop their own mobile apps and deploy them to all the mobile devices their employees have. Point and click HTML5 mobile app development is one of my dream products.
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| Biba Rehydration Drink |
I met Sean from Biba outside the Hall of Innovators and after determining that despite his resemblance to one of my cousins, we are not related I checked out Biba. I loved the drink and felt instantly rehydrated without that caffeine jolt. Over in the Experts Corner, I got Sean and first time MIN attendee, Jack, to pose with a can of Biba. The Experts Corner was just starting to get busy. The Experts were all looking very expert.
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| Experts Corner |
My former co-worker Matt and his brother Kyle gave a great live demo of
Blogcastr. It does just what it says – broadcasts your blog live.
Their blog of #MIN23 is of course already up, while I'm sitting here writing and uploading pictures afterwards. They came in 5th in the voting, so didn't get to present, but still got a lot of buzz at their demo table.
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| Blogcastr |
Speaking of buzz, the buzz-free cable from
Gig-FX is the real thing. No annoying buzz when you plug it into the guitar. He also demo'd his guitar effects pedals. Talk about cool demos!
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Folks from the Boston Globe, Your Town and “Forever 128″ column redefining coverage of local news
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After the presentations I got to schmooze with some of the great folks who tweet about Mass Innovation Nights and match real people to their Twitter handles. It was a great night with a great crowd of great people (have I said great enough?). Huge thanks to IBM for hosting.
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| the crowd listening |
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