Recapping EforAll Lowell Lawrence Winter Accelerator Awards Celebration

Crowd Beginning to Arrive at Everett Mills -- Such a Beautiful Space

On Thursday, March 15 (two whole days after the blizzard) Everett Mills hosted the EforAll Lowell Lawrence event celebrating the completion of the winter accelerator program. It never ceases to amaze me how beautiful this historic mill is with its old wooden floors and big windows. It also never ceases to amaze me how much entrepreneurial energy there is in the Merrimack Valley. Thank you to Marianne Paley Nadel for hosting such a wonderful celebration of local entrepreneurship in this historic building.

Marianne Paley Nadel Welcoming Us to Everett Mills

A showcase of the businesses in this cohort, tasty food from El Taller and Cafe Azteca, an inspiring keynote speaker, a wonderful class speaker, the traditional one-minute pitches, and the awarding of $15,000 in prize money made for a great evening. I love going to these awards celebrations because I get to catch up with entrepreneurs that I met at the pitch contests and hear about their experience of the accelerator program. Everyone I asked used the word "amazing" to describe it.

Nate McNiff -- The Wandering Stage

I enjoyed catching up with Nate McNiff whose idea for a mobile theater was my favorite at the All Ideas Pitch Contest back in October. He's changed the name of the project to The Wandering Stage (it was Mobile Entertainment Theater back in October) and made great progress in lining up funding and starting to get some bookings.

Michaela Quigley of Shine Magazine with Mentor Todd Smith

Michaela Quigley started Shine, an online publication for teens and young adults with disabilities, so that young people would have a place where they can celebrate their abilities. It's a general interest magazine, not a magazine that's only about disabilities.

Kim Mahady -- TLC Autism Parent Community

TLC Autism Parent Community supports the needs of parents with children on the autism spectrum. There are lots of services for kids with autism, but not so much for their parents. Kim Mahady and Andrea Magnell have been scheduling events to connect with parents to discuss what they need. 

Cindy Ngin -- Sugar Dust

Sugar Dust is a bakery specializing in custom cakes and French macarons. My mouth started to water at the thought of macarons.

Heather DeBerio -- Powerhouse Juice

Powerhouse Juice showcased some of the juices and an article about them from the Globe Magazine. Powerhouse provides cold pressed juices and farm to table catering all over Massachusetts.

Kim BeBe's Table

Kim BeBe is a small batch manufacturing facility that caters to fashion designers. Manufacturing fashion and accessories locally is a growing trend, you could even say it's a movement. Kim's one minute pitch emphasized the importance of bringing manufacturing back to the USA.

Angel Hernandez -- FocusedPT

FocusedPT provides customized personal training and health coaching emphasizing the client's individual needs and goals. Check out Angel's EforAll Lowell-Lawrence post on their Medium blog for a glimpse into his EforAll accelerator experience.

Chris Janowski--WakeMe and Yetta Procope--Yettaz Studioz

WakeMe is a social video alarm clock that plays short, personalized videos from your friends and family on your smart phone to wake you up. Making waking up a social experience gets you engaged in your day immediately. It's a much more pleasant awakening than an alarm clock -- you might even start to look forward to waking up.

Yettaz Studioz is a custom designed clothing company that combines modern fashion and traditional Senegalese fabrics.

As I made the rounds of the tables, the theme I kept hearing from the entrepreneurs is how they have formed a strong bond during the accelerator program and how much they value that connection. I could feel that in the air and see it in practice as they interacted throughout the evening, sharing insights and experiences and supporting each other.

Keynote Speaker Mary Guerrero

Lawrence entrepreneur, Mary Guerrero co-owner of Cafe Azteca and El Taller, gave an inspiring keynote address emphasizing the role of businesses in building community. One insight she gleaned from running restaurants really resonated with the crowd: "I've come to realize that restaurants aren't just restaurants, they're places where people come together."  She convinced us that it's not just restaurants and coffee shops that build community. She had the audience talk with each other about businesses they remembered that had been important in their lives. I was surprised to find myself talking about The Barn, a shoe store in my home town, which also sold sporting goods. I bought my first baseball glove there. It's the sort of place that people remember long after they've moved away. I've actually shared memories of buying shoes at The Barn with people I didn't even know when I was a kid -- a different generation. Thinking about that along with my favorite coffee shops and restaurants and the people I've met through them really brought home what she said about the power of small local businesses:  "Your businesses are going to be much bigger than yourself. They will be apart of a community, and help people feel like they belong. They have the power to transform."

Class Speaker Nate McNiff

Class Speaker Nate McNiff's talk addressed community also -- the community of the EforAll Winter Accelerator cohort. He said he looked up the origin of the term cohort and found out it referred to an ancient Roman military unit and that struck him as very appropriate for the group of entrepreneurs in the accelerator.  The thought that stood out for me was  "We are going to rise together, just like a group of warriors, we're going to have each other's backs."(Hope I got that right.) I could see the spirit of the group in the way they listened to each other doing the one minute pitches and cheered for each other as the awards were presented.

Cohort Lined Up for the One Minute Pitches

One Minute Pitches -- Kim BeBe

Kravant Boutique is a Khmer specialty boutique in Lowell focused on renting, buying, and selling high end dresses. I remembered Bora Chiemruon from the October pitch contest when she pitched it as Jewell by BC.

One Minute Pitches -- Kravant Boutique

 I appreciated hearing the one minute pitches because I somehow didn't manage to talk with each entrepreneur one-on-one and I like to include at least a summary of each one in the write-up. Here are the ones I didn't get to:

• The Leap Network is an umbrella company for professional services ranging from recruiting and career advisory/coaching to social networking.
• My Playground Spanish Academy is a for profit bilingual preschool that will expose children to Spanish.
• Crose Nest Collective, LLC is modern botanica offering locally sourced herbal, holistic, and hand-crafted artisan goods.

Yetta Procope Listening to the One Minute Pitches

The Cohort with Lianna Kushi and Joey Banh

After the one minute pitches, the cohort received their certificates and class gift. Then it was time for the awards. The award money went to:

1. The Wandering Stage - $5,000
2. Del Sur - $4,000  A maker of all natural empanadas sold at farmers’ markets, catering, and specialized retail
3. Sugar Dust - $3,000
4. WakeMe - $1,500
5. KimBeBe - Christina Hamilton Award - $500

The Wandering Stage with the $5,000 Check

Del Sur with the $4,000 Check

Sugar Dust with the $3,000 Check

Innovation Thriving at Brandeis -- Recapping #MIN108

Standing Room Only Crowd at Brandeis for MIN108

Brandeis University's Gosman Sports and Convocation Center was the setting for Mass Innovation Nights 108 last Wednesday. On the day after a blizzard, the third in a series of northeast storms that has plagued Massachusetts this month, the turnout was amazing. The Gosman Center was buzzing and it was standing room only for the presentations. Brandeis is a hotbed of innovation and all the companies showcasing products were led by students, alumni, or faculty of Brandeis. Innovation is definitely thriving at Brandeis.

People Checking out the Tables

There was pizza and pie and whoopie pies to celebrate Pi Day and product tables to check out along with a busy Experts Corner. I found it a bit of a stretch to check out every product before the presentations, so I don't have photos of everybody, but I certainly learned a lot. As I made the rounds, I kept thinking that the Girl Scientists (a biochemist and a physicist -- my family grows science geeks) would be excited by some of these products.  Anyway, I had a blast learning what I could learn.

BobbieC Telling Us MIN is Nine Years Old

Rebecca Menapace, Associate Provost for Innovation, welcomed us to Brandeis, told us a bit about all the innovative stuff going on there, and asked us to raise our hands if it was the first time we'd ever set foot on the Brandeis campus.  I was surprised at how many people raised their hands. For the record, it was definitely not my first time on the campus but it has been a long time since I've been there and the university has grown a lot since then.

Then it was time for the presentations. The four chosen presenters for the night were:

• GreenScore from GreenChoice
• RC Survey 2.0 from from  Relational Coordination Analytics, Inc.
• ThermaGenix 
• WorkAround

GreenChoice presented GreenScore, a software tool (essentially a browser extension as I understood it) to help you assess the healthiness and sustainability of the food products you buy online. GreenScore uses artificial intelligence to aggregate and synthesize information on companies and products to score food products (on a 1 to 100 scale) for things like freshness, nutritional value, health and safety, animal welfare practices, and sustainability. They seem to have a good grasp of their target market: millennials who shop online. 

Green Choice Presenting

RC Survey 2.0 from  Relational Coordination Analytics, Inc. uses a simple survey to analyze complex communication patterns in organizations that have a lot of interdependence along with time constraints and uncertainty -- think health care or airline travel. The goal is to find where such an organization can reinforce strengths and improve weaknesses  for smoother, more coordinated interaction and happier, more engaged workers.

Relational Coordination Analytics

ThermaGenix makes reagents that improve the product yield and specificity in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) amplifications (that's biochemist-speak for making lots of copies of a segment of DNA -- told you the family biochemist would dig this). This sounds like a big improvement for use in the world of DNA and RNA sequencing.  That's about as much as I understood about it, but I was pretty impressed.

ThermaGenix

WorkAround described themselves as an impact sourcing provider helping companies get more done for less, while giving jobs to refugees. The name "workaround" really says it all. The basic concept is to use the Internet to take advantage of work that can be done remotely and entirely online so that refugees who can't get work permits in the countries where they have taken refuge can find jobs.

Workaround

Tranquilo Mat had one of the busiest tables. The portable, vibrating mat soothes your baby in the crib, the stroller, or wherever you go. The mat mimics a mom’s heartbeat and womb-type motions through gentle vibrations and soft sounds to calm the crying baby.

Tranqilo Mat

Articulate Biosciences showcased their ABX product family of injectable viscoelastic gels for lubricating and cushioning diseased soft tissues. I enjoyed talking with them about their first product offering, which is intended to relieve pain and increase mobility for people with osteoarthritis. I love this idea. They got my audience choice vote. Not surprisingly, they won the grand prize in the voting. I'm definitely going to keep track of their progress. As I was sitting down to write this on Friday, they were in Lowell participating in the ribbon cutting for their move into the M2D2 incubator space at the UML Innovation Hub.

Articulate Biosciences

Vata Verks has developed a smart water usage sensor for buildings. It takes advantage of the fluctuating magnetic fields inside a building’s utility meters, so you don't have to call a plumber to cut pipes to install it. The sensor just  straps on so customers can take advantage of the data stream to detect leaks, track costs, and analyze building performance simply and cheaply.

Vata Verks

ModiBrace is a modifiable back brace designed to improve scoliosis treatment. The brace can be  adjusted easily and quickly to precisely target and correct curvature in the spine. Made for children and adolescents diagnosed with scoliosis, it can grow along with them.

Sclervey  maps the shape of the sclera for the creation of specialty scleral contact lenses. It projects points of light onto the surface of the eye and does views from multiple cameras for precise 3D modeling. That should make for better fitting lenses for sure.

Busy Tables

Cryo-cell is a freezable fluid cell for cryo-electron microscopy. Cryo-electron microscopy is currently emerging as the preferred method to determine 3D protein structures in biomedical research and drug discovery. This technique requires that proteins be frozen in a thin film of water before imaging. Cryo-cell uses a nanofabricated fluid cell to improve on the current freezing technology and to  reduce the amount of protein needed.

Winners of the audience choice vote were:
ABX Viscoelastics (Grand prize)
WorkAround
Greenscore

ThermaGenix

The Winners Posing with BobbieC and Rebecca Menapace

For this month's  Expert Looking Expert photo, here's Rebecca Menapace representing all of the Brandeis expertise at MIN108

Expert Looking Expert