Innovators from all over the Boston area converged on Waltham for November's Mass Innovation Nights event, #MIN104, at
Dassault Systemes/SOLIDWORKS.There was a good crowd and a good crop of new software and hardware products for us to check out. There were tours of Dassault's
3DExperience with demos of robots and 3D printers.
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| Crowd Checking Out the Tables |
Once again the variety of products was impressive, ranging from a wind turbine to a lab on a chip to a smart lamp and more. Some tables were drawing big crowds right from the start. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was the crowd surrounding Obvia's table. It's nice to see so many people excited about a new and efficient turbine blade design. The table was seriously mobbed. I couldn't get close enough to totally figure out the concept. Check out
their video for a good explanation.
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| Obvia's Wind Turbine Blade was Popular |
It was great to see
Vocoli again. Veterans of
MIN75,
MIN62 and
PINSMASS001,
the platform keeps getting better and the need for a good employee feedback system just keeps growing.
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| Vocoli |
The four presenters chosen for the evening by online voting ahead of the event were:
Kaiburr's table was also very popular. The buzz word description for it is "DevOps as a service". Basically it's software for what's called application orchestration. Orchestration refers to the automated arrangement, coordination, and management of computer services (hope I understood that right). Kaiburr automates application deployment across components like infrastructure, network, and security as well as coordination across all your data centers. The idea is to reduce the time it takes to set up and migrate applications. (Didn't manage to get a decent photo of their table or presentation - sigh.)
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| Presenting Fluid-Screen |
Fluid-Screen was by far my favorite product of MIN104 and I was not at all surprised that it won grand prize in the audience favorite voting. Imagine how many outbreaks of illness caused by bacterial contamination could be nipped in the bud with a system that speeds up lab testing so you can identify the contaminant within 30 minutes -- no growing a culture in Petri dish and waiting days for results. Real-time bacteria capture and identification is beyond cool. Fluid-Screen uses the electrical properties of bacteria to sort and identify bacteria in a lab-on-a-chip. Very cool. The presentation included a real time demo. Really most sincerely cool.
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| Fluid-Screen |
I met Christina at
MIN103 last month as she was checking out what a MIN event would be like and after chatting with her I'd been looking forward to hearing about her product, so was happy to see PeopleProductive won one of the chosen presenters' slots for MIN104!
PeopleProductive is a software platform that aims to reduce employee turnover, empower employees, and improve organizational culture. It uses
a systematic data analytics approach along with a holistic approach to assess company culture and implement change. This definitely seems like a more coherent approach to managing human resources. Oh, and she gave me a nifty flashlight for tweeting about PeopleProductive.
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| Christina Describing PeopleProductive |
MoodAnalyzer from
MagniFact uses predictive analytics and custom algorithms to provide customer sentiment information in real time based on the language used by customers. The cool part of it is how it uses natural language processing to analyze social media, email, and other sources of customer data and turn the data into information that you can act on.
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| MoodAnalyzer |
Coalesce is an artificial intelligence search engine that uses machine learning to improve research and decision making for businesses. It has loads of potential for improving customer service, investment research, work flow automation, and all kinds of business processes.
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| Coalesce |
Beacon Smart Lamp from E-Green lets you adjust the brightness and direction of the light from your smartphone or a remote control. I think I want one.
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| Describing Smart Lamp |
Makerchip is an online environment for developing integrated circuits. You can code, compile, simulate, and debug Verilog designs from your browser. Check out their website for more description.
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| Makerchip |
The
iseeBell Video Doorbell lets you see, hear and speak with visitors at your door from your smartphone or tablet anywhere. Do you ever wish your doorbell had a wide-angle camera and could communicate with you over Wi-Fi? I never thought about it until I saw iseeBell, but now I'm thinking about it.
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| iseeBell |
The Audience Choice prize packages went to:
None of those surprised me based on the traffic around the tables. Congrats to the winners, who received prizes provided by WeWork and Dassault.
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| The Winners |
This MIN exhibitor cohort didn't feature many teams with matching T-shirts, so I'm not designating a Best Costume this month. The Expert Corner was busy as usual and I'll close with the traditional Expert Looking Expert photo. Jeff Schantz from
EYP is expert in so many things that I can't help but feature him as the Expert Looking Expert.
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| Expert Looking Expert |
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