Friday, January 10, 2014

Mass Innovation Nights Kicks Off 2014 #MIN58

Great Crowd for #MIN58
Progress Software in Bedford hosted the first Mass Innovation Night of 2014 in fine style with a great space, food, and a good crowd. Thank you, Progress Software!
Just Some of the Delicious Food our Hosts Provided

The Crowd Networking, Checking Out the Products, Tweeting

The product mix at MIN is always eclectic and MIN58 was no exception with everything from beer pong tables to motivational cards for health.

Beer pong tables? Yup. Pro Pong Tables from BeerPongDepot.com are designed to be convenient and portable.
Beer Pong Table from Beer Pong Depot

It was great to see Gary from ProDiagrams again. I met him at a Merrimack Valley Sandbox event last fall. He's fine tuned his pitch and the product looks way more mature. Oh, and he gave away boxes of chocolate covered cherries to anyone who tweeted about ProDiagrams!

ProDiagrams Gave Chocolate Covered Cherries to Anyone Who Tweeted about Them

A ProDiagram for How to Get Chocolates!
It was a tight competition for Best Prop between ProDiagrams' chocolates and HomeBinder's stack of papers, but chocolate won out.

Best Prop of #MIN58
HomeBinder is a great way to organize all that home owner info like contractors, paint colors, expense receipts, appliance warranties and manuals, and so on. No giant mountain of paper, only some of which is still relevant. With HomeBinder's software you'll never lose important household information again.

Those Papers Are Heavy! You Need HomeBinder
Cognii did a great job presenting their intelligent learning assessment tool -- kind of a "Siri for Education" as they described it. They use natural language processing technology to assess students' essay type answers to questions, which makes learning more active for the students and saves time for the teachers who don't have to spend so much time grading papers and quizzes.
Checking Out Cognii
The team from ArtistBomb rocked matching shirts and cool pennants to promote their cool service that connects fans of live music with bands they'll love at no cost to either. It simplifies booking and promotion for the venues and the band. Oh yeah, they totally won Best Costume.
Team ArtistBomb Wins Best Costume of #MIN58
Health Axioms is a deck of cards from Involution Studios. The beautifully designed cards present practical and inspiring tips to improve your health and well-being.The poster sized versions at their table were attracting a good crowd.

Health Axioms
The folks from projectLUCE showcased their QT1 table lamp, part of the Qubit line of products, with a beautiful table scape. Their light fixtures are gorgeously designed and live up to the "designer's manifesto" as units of design.
ProjectLUCE with Merrimack Valley Sandbox
Gopinion makes it easy for businesses to get customer feedback with their simple mobile application. Give feedback, earn rewards. That's it!

gopinion
I had a great conversation about optimizing office space with Michael from Rifiniti. Knowing which space is really being used and which isn't could definitely reduce facilities costs. Rifiniti Optimo is software as a service that gives you real time insight into space usage.
Rifiniti
The Experts Corner was buzzing. It was nice to see folks taking advantage of all the expertise. Marina from Vision Framework took a moment to pose for my traditional Expert Looking Expert shot. Thank you, Marina!

Expert Looking Expert