#MIN40

Mass Innovation Night was back at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham for its 40th event. 40. Wow.

IBM Lab Looking Awesome

The four chosen presenters for the night were:

• AnniesBid.com -- an online auction site that raises money for national and international charities in a game-like auction format.

  

  AnniesBid.com Presenting

  
  

• Azigo -- turns dealing with hundreds of emails and maintaining account relationships with your favorite companies into a fast, visual, enjoyable experience.

• Honest Discounts -- a mobile app that tells you not only where the nearest pharmacy is but also which pharmacy has the best price for your prescription.



Honest Discounts Ready to Take on High Prescription Prices

• Klypper -- a mobile app that makes it easy to create and combine video, text, drawings and emoticons for capturing those multimedia, multidimensional moments of your life.

Klypper CEO Presenting

All of the presenters were excellent and finished within 5 minutes. It was a great crowd.

Joszef wanted to know if I was photographing for the New York Times. I wish.

I caught up with some of the other participating companies after the presentations. Njabini Apparel was introducing a new scarf but also had lots of other beautiful stuff made by handicapped mothers in central Kenya. I love how local is global these days.

Njabini Apparel

Apptegic is a cloud-based analytics service that tells you how engaged each of your customers is with your business. I almost gave them Best Costume because the white board was wearing one of their t-shirts.

Apptegic T-shirt

I enjoyed talking with the folks from Orbeus about  computer vision and about the great Chicago fire. Their goal is to help computers see like human beings. Their visual recognition engine combines facial, product, scene and text recognition. I asked them if they could identify trees by species by viewing a forest from overhead (one of my fantasies for computer vision), but they don't have enough data about trees/forests to do that. What they do is take visual media content (video and images) as input and put  metadata around that content. Very cool and definitely useful for social networks and advertisers even if it's not the answer to my particular fantasy.

Team Orbeus

I think this is the first time I have ever watched a chemical reaction that didn't involve cooking at a Mass Innovation Nights event. The folks from Family Safe System were demonstrating a solution for a problem I never knew existed.  They sell devices and services to help chemotherapy patients protect their families, homes and everyone's water from the dangerous drugs that pass through their bodies intact in the 2-5 days after infusions.

Family Safe System Doing Chemistry

As usual, I tried to check out as many of the participating companies as possible. I missed a few this time. The ones I missed sounded interesting too:

• FairSetup -- provides a web-based performance management suite that allows companies to connect impact to compensation. Compensation according to one's impact, that defines fair compensation.
• CoachUp -- an online platform that connects people with private coaches in sports.
•  Boston Landlord Reviews--a free Internet site that allows prospective tenants to rate and review properties. Prospective tenants will be able to view valuable landlord information from current and previous tenants. That should come in handy during the upcoming student migration season.

Many of the usual suspects were there and there were lots of new people too. There was also a new wrinkle, lightning job postings. Folks who are hiring had a minute to pitch their job openings.

Pitching a Job

 

Entrepreneurs

Usual Suspects

Didn't get any photos of experts looking expert this time, but you're all experts and innovators anyway.

On the way back to the garage, I met the same people I had met when I arrived. It was their first time at MIN and they had a great time. They'll definitely be back.