fun, fortunes, and big news at #MIN 44

View of Boston from 10th Floor

With everything from hailing a taxi cab to telling your fortune on the agenda, a Big News announcement, and a cool venue high above Kendall Square, #MIN44 set the bar high. Once again an innovative good time was had by all. Diversity of products and people, great views of Boston across the river, and fun hosts established a great vibe from the start.

Darth Potato Head

VMWare proved gracious hosts with free food, beverages, and Star Wars themed Mr. Potato Head toys decorating the lobby. The Experts were set up in conference rooms along the outer wall -- more of an Experts Row than an Experts Corner. The demo tables occupied hallways surrounding the main presentation area.

USpin

This month's presenters were:

• Prospective Plus -- a Common Job Application for recruiting entry level employees. Developed by a Northeastern student entrepreneur, it's similar to the Common App used for college admissions.
• SmartBooks -- your Virtual Finance Department. Bookkeeping and finance services in the cloud for startups and small businesses. 
• Hailo -- a free smartphone app that lets you  hail a safe and reliable Boston cab from wherever you are.
• Justellus -- replaces all those customer surveys with a cool way to submit feedback to companies in seconds, earn rewards, and support great causes.
• USpin -- a way to find, plan, and reserve awesome activities for your diverse group of friends.

Yes, you counted right, there were five. All of them were good. Hailo had an impressive video. Prospective Plus represented well for Northeastern (alma mater of one of my girl scientist nieces :-)) and had great energy

I had even more fun that usual checking out the demo tables because the placement of Jibunu next to Tell a Fortune tickled my geeky sense of humor. Jibunu answers questions using custom data collection and analysis. Tell a Fortune answers questions using a card reading/astrological app. Both invited me to ask questions. I figured "what is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything" was too easy so I tried to formulate a question about the future of technical communication. I got a good laugh from the Jibunu representative and a prediction about my strength and determination from the fortune telling app.

Jibunu

Both enjoyed posing for photos. Oh by the way, 42 is the answer to life, the universe and everything for the 2 or 3 readers unfamiliar with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  And while we're on big data and predicting the future, how is it that not one big data startup has named themselves Seldon Foundation? OK, enough geekery for now. :-)

Fortune Telling

Justellus has the answer for getting feedback from "fans to brands". No navigating company web sites to find out how to give feedback, no endless surveys (if certain brands survey me one more time, they're going to lose me), no sitting on hold to talk to an offshore call center, just enter your feedback and it goes to the brand's employee who is encouraged to listen or to take action. It's that easy. 

Justellus

Living out here off the edge of the universe, I don't often have to hail cabs in Boston. If I did, I would definitely want Hailo on my smartphone. No flailing around in the rain trying to catch the driver's attention, no futzing around with payment, no worries. Just; two taps on your smartphone and pay by card, with no charges above the meter. That's it. Team Hailo had the best matching T-shirts so I awarded them Best Costume of MIN44.

Best Costume

SmartBooks had the greatest number of clouds on their slides. Their virtual bookkeeping and accounting services leverage cloud technology and integration with QuickBooks to make it easy for startups and small businesses to access their information and reports from any computer anytime and submit expenses and pay bills from their mobile phones. It's like having a finance department in your pocket.

SmartBooks

Best Hat of MIN44 goes to Osmium Apparel. They were there to launch the Mobius Belt, which is very cool -- the buckle is separate from the belt, very customizable. As cool as the belt was, I found I had to try on a hat. Mark from Osmium assured me I looked very Left Bank-- just like in my high school fantasy of hanging out at Les Deux Magots with Simone deBeauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

Best Hat

BRIGHTdriver, creator of  interactive audio games, had the best table location right next to the door of the presentation area. They describe the intent of their product as a way for drivers to be able use their smartphone to have all the fun of social gaming without the dangers of texting. Personally, I think I would find audio gaming distracting too.

BRIGHTdriver

Yes, there was indeed big news.

Big News

Big News: Mass Innovation Nights has a new sponsor, American Airlines. This is an awesome partnership. Paul from American described the awesome MIN perks: All exhibtors can participate, 5000 Business ExtrAA points for the first place winner, and 2000 Business ExtrAA points for the next three. So all four presenters end up with some air travel -- very useful for startups.

Paul from American Airlines

I had some great conversations with folks in the Experts Corner -- or Experts Row -- about what people are looking for when they come to Mass Innovation Nights, how to tap into innovative ideas, and a little about what current innovators might be able to learn from those of us who were working at startups when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Is that a potato masher in his hand?

The crowd was an excellent mix of regulars and newcomers and I saw lots of connections being made. That's what people come to MIN for -- connection.

As is traditional, I'll close with an Expert looking expert, in this case Mike the Sharepoint expert doing his best "expert look" and kind of reminiscent of NBC's Chuck Todd on election night.

Expert Looking Expert

(Updated to correct the number of Business ExtrAA points for the 3 runners up)

MIN43 @ Verizon Innovation Center

Great Big Beautiful Space

Wow! The Verizon Innovation Center hosted Mass Innovation Nights in a beautifully designed space full of cool toys and innovations. Plus, they provided food! Great hosts.

Innovators Mingling (Yes, that guy is wearing a giant book bag.)

As always, the range of products at MIN was amazing. Everything from underwater robots to speaking out against domestic violence made the evening diverse and intensely interesting. It's not everyday you meet a guy wearing a giant book bag or a company with a cardboard mascot named Dominic.

Raising a Reader

The guy wearing the red book bag was from Raising A Reader promoting their Red Bag Program. The Red Bag Program circulates bright red bags filled with high quality, culturally appropriate children’s books through families’ homes so that children get to experience the culture of reading with their families. I can't think of a better way to show appreciation for the reading life than to help support bringing that life to kids who would otherwise miss out.

Market Me Suite

MarketMeSuite gives small businesses the ability to manage their social marketing just like they mange their email inbox. It's about time somebody made it easier for small businesses to take advantage of the huge variety of social media.

Aquabotix

OK, I have to admit my favorite of the presenters was Aquabotix. For years I've fantasized about building a remote controlled underwater vehicle with a camera so I could study the underwater feeding habits of diving ducks. HydroView is that underwater vehicle with an HD video camera and connection to your iPad or laptop. They weren't thinking of my obsession with diving ducks, of course. What HydroView does is let you see fish, scope out dive locations, look for underwater treasures, find stuff that fell off a dock or a boat, check the bottom of your boat for damage, find out what's tangled in your propeller, and all sorts of things fishermen and boaters need to do.

re:covers

I enjoyed talking with the folks from re:covers about their fashionable covers for orthopedic walking boots, casts and braces. Brilliant! They protect the site of the injury and add a stylish boost to your recovery. How cool is that?

Voices Against Violence

Voices Against Violence is a non-profit that empowers domestic violence victims and survivors to help themselves. Domestic violence is hard to talk about. It's complex. We need to talk about it more. A lot more. Maybe if people felt more empowered to talk about it and get help, more tragedies could be prevented.

namefind

NameFind helps find the perfect brand name for your business, secure the domain names, social media handles and trademarks, and does it all in one place. Plus they have a cool mascot.

Cool Mascot for namefind

Mystery Gift Machine makes gift giving as much fun and as surprising as receiving the gift. A robot descends from space, takes inputs, picks and ships the best gift. OK, it's not really from space, but it is fun. 

Mystery Gift Machine

The History List is a cool idea too. I didn't make it to the rest of the tables. There was just so much cool stuff to look at in the Verizon Innovation Center that I couldn't take all that in, let alone all the products/organizations and experts. That's when you know you're having a good Mass Innovation Night.

The Crowd

The space was awesome. Did I say that already? What with a car, a connected bike, cool touch screen games, Lego ... and more ...

Connected Bike in the Experts Corner

Bobbie and Robert

I got Bobbie C and Robert Gray from At-Hand Apps to pose for a "Bobs" portrait. And, as usual, I'll close with an Expert Looking Expert shot.

Expert Looking Expert from Constant Contact

the disconnect

Cable = Most Important Word in the Merrimack Valley

It's been a couple of weeks now since "the disconnect" and the post-disconnect analysis is in full swing.Today's Eagle Tribune has an article about the aftermath: "Something that valuable has to be secured." The Town of North Andover is reflecting on what happened and planning for how to cope with the next great disconnect. So here I am finally getting around to finishing the post I started about it.

For a few days at the end of August I had no Internet, phone, or TV here at the edge of the universe. Turns out lots of people in Lawrence and North Andover were in the same boat. A homeless man’s mattress caught on fire. The flaming mattress was under a bridge over the Merrimack River -- the bridge where Verizon's conduits, packed with copper wires and fiber optic cables, also cross the Merrimack. The burning mattress took down the backbone of Verizon’s network for this region. The outage mainly affected the Merrimack Valley, but it even touched cities as far away as Gloucester.

NECN Truck Covering the Story

Yes folks, the Interwebz still depends on wires. Yes, ATMs and credit card processors and frequent buyer rewards points at Panera Bread and a whole host of other services we take for granted depend on wires. Melted plastic conduits under a bridge disconnected thousands of people. Everybody from Good Day Cafe to the Lowell Spinners felt the effects. This outage shut down the Registry of Motor Vehicles in Lawrence and Wilmington. The Eagle Tribune had an article asking "How vulnerable are we?" 

Verizon Trucks Lined Up Along the North Canal

The answer, I'm afraid, is that we're way more vulnerable than we think we are. Most of us never think about the infrastructure that supports communications.  We tend not to think of the Internet as a physical thing. What few people using their smart phones, WiFi, and their computers realize is that their calls and data still travels through wires - copper cables and fiber cables. Yup, there's still a lot of copper cable out there. Many members of the Connected Generation (OK, and their elders too maybe -- if they're not techies or telecoms people) think their voice or data travels through the air to a cell tower and  then through air to another cell phone. The towers are connected by wires -- either copper or fiber cable.  And yes, the great disconnect affected cellular coverage too.

More Verizon Trucks Along the North Canal

I had recently started reading Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by Andrew Blum, so found both synchronicity and irony in the great disconnect. Blum talks about how he hadn't really thought about the Internet infrastructure until a squirrel chewed through the wires at his Brooklyn apartment and his WiFi went out. A squirrel inspired him to explore where the Internet cable outside his house actually goes.

Well, now I know that the FiOS cable to/from my house crosses the Merrimack River under the Central Bridge in Lawrence. It was a nice day for a walk and without Internet I couldn't work, so I grabbed my camera and went for a long walk.  There's nothing like an excuse to photograph the historic buildings and canals of Lawrence, not to mention the Great Stone Dam. The views of the mill buildings from the Central Bridge are excellent and there's a walkway along the North Canal.

Tight Quarters Under the Bridge

There were Verizon trucks everywhere. They were lined up along the canal. They were under the bridge. There were two or three of them in front of me at every stop light. Additional trucks from Phoenix Communications were there with huge rolls of fiber optic cable. As I walked across the bridge and along the canal, I ran into a few Verizon workers who had been working around the clock to bring back service. Real people fixing physical things in the material world. I made a point of thanking them for their hard work. The folks splicing cables under the bridge are not the ones who didn't plan for redundancy and security.

There are parallels here to both the National Grid response to the October snowstorm last year (power out for over 5 days  at my place -- longer other places) and to the Heroku outage on top of the AWS outage caused by the violent thunderstorms in Virginia. Insufficient redundancy and "cloud on top of cloud" architecture assume that nothing physical will ever break.  Guess what? Things break. Weather knocks down trees and takes out power. Flaming mattresses melt PVC conduits. We need to plan for that. In the olden days of the Ma Bell monopoly, they actually did plan for weather and disasters and they had a goal of 99.999% reliability.  While I definitely don't think we need a monopoly like that ever again, we do need more attention to reliability and contingency planning. We also need a whole lot more communication among the various owners of all the pieces that make up the Internet infrastructure.

While I was incommunicado, the sun rose and set a couple of times, the Red Sox lost a couple of games, my cousin Stephan and his lovely wife Lisa welcomed their new son to the world, water flowed over the Great Stone Dam, cormorants stood on rocks in the Merrimack to dry their wings,  and cedar waxwings flitted past the window of Three Dogz Diner in the physical world. Mountains and rivers remain.

Fiber Optics Experts

Verizon Truck Next to Canal

#MIN42 at Intrepid Labs

It was standing room only by the time the presentations started at Mass Innovation Night number 42. Our intrepid host, Intrepid Labs, deserves a big shout out for the great space and for finding a chair for presenters to stand on. The energy in the Intrepid space was amazing.

The Crowd

My favorite product of the night was Timbre from Intrepid Pursuits. It's a location-based app that finds bands playing at local venues near you and much, much more. It connects you to iTunes to play clips of their songs and you can buy tickets from concert websites right from the app. Their demo rocked. I think I even saw a couple of developers dancing in the co-working space behind the presenter. I downloaded it immediately. Heck, I may not be the young hip urban demographic they targeted, but the secret is out now -- I lurve live music.

Fiona and Pattie Making the Scene

So many products, so many people! It was a truly festive atmosphere -- one huge party! And who knew there was an orange color theme?  RaceMenu had huge orange banners at their table and wore matching orange T-shirts. Abroad101 had orange shirts too along with their green shirts. Fiona evidently got the orange message too.

Wearing orange and talking Raceday event registration

This being Cambridge lots of teams had matching T-shirts, so it was hard to pick "best costume". I have to go with RaceMenu just because their banners, coffee mugs, and overall decor matched their shirts.

The presentations were great and all came in within their allotted 5 minutes.

Johnny from Hard Data Factory presented Tech Cal Mobile with the most over-the-top high energy presentation I have ever seen at Mass Innovation Night. Amazing with a dozen exclamation points doesn't begin to cover the energy level!  And he baked chocolate chip cookies for all. Chocolate chip cookies! Tech Cal Mobile is Boston's largest high-tech and business calendar. If there's a meet up, a pitch contest, a networking event, a PHP hackathon, or venture capitalists dropping money from the skies, it's in there. This is just the tool for ramping up your participation in the fall event season.

PollVaultr did a great job presenting their service to help small businesses collect customer feedback with iPad-based surveys right at the point of sale. They also had one of their iPads set up at the MIN registration desk to collect feedback on the event.

PollVaultr

The Leaf team did their five minutes on LeafPresenter, a very cool point-of-sale tool that enables businesses to manage their stores from the cloud through a single platform that provides traditional POS features, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and social loyalty all in real time at the point of sale. It's like e-commerce but in real brick and mortar retail businesses. Clearly an idea whose time has come. Green leaves were everywhere too.

Leaf

Among the non-presenters, I liked  Cubby from LogMeIn a lot.  It's a better way to stay up-to-date across all your devices, or collaborate easily with colleagues. They've taken the DropBox concept way further.

Cubby

I love how Earthfrendz turns scraps of fabrics and burlap into beautiful bags and wallets. Environmentally sustainable upcycled accessories -- what's not to like? Anything that reduces, reuses, recycles STUFF makes me happy. Pretty accessories make me happy too.

Earthfrendz

I would have used the convenient QR code to tweet about Abroad101 Study Abroad Evaluation Software except that the pre-loaded message said I was reminiscing about my study abroad experiences. Darn, I never studied abroad in my college years. My "study abroad" experiences have been more on the order of dealing with software problems at giant Japanese phone companies, photographing botanical specimens at the National Herbarium in Beijing, collecting pine cones in weird places, birding in even weirder places, and of course, spending way too much time in Hungary working on Conifers Around the World with my Hungarian dendrologist friends. BTW, the spellchecker keeps wanting to change dendrologist to hydrologist. There's a pun there somewhere waiting to get out, but I can't find it. Anyway, besides reminiscence, the Abroad101 people provide software-as-a-service tools to universities nationwide that want to collect study abroad program evaluations from students, automatically share that information with perspective students, create reports on their data, and compare their data to other institutions.

Two Tims Networking

One of the cool things about Mass Innovation Nights is the mix of "usual suspects" and new people to connect with.  I love catching up with folks I've met at previous MIN events, running into former co-workers, and making connections. In yet another MIN connection story, I discovered that Mapocosm, the app that enables anyone to self-publish their own mobile app based on location services, at very low cost, is exactly the app that my friend and former co-worker, Steve, currently of Steve's Travel Guides, is using for his Freedom Trail app. Steve wasn't there, but this still counts as a former co-worker sighting :-)

Another cool thing about MIN is the age diversity of the crowd. I love mingling with people with whom I can use the line "I was coding in assembly language before your mother was born" along with people to whom "coding in assembly language" is a meaningful term :-) One of the best moments of the nights was expert Larry Blumsack's description of himself as "chronologically gifted." Therefore, Larry gets the all-important closing "Experts Looking Expert" spot.

Expert Looking Expert

#MIN41 #foodie #epic

The place was packed for the annual Mass Innovation Nights foodie event at Trade Center 128 in Woburn on Wednesday night. Cummings Properties provided a great space and lots of support. Thanks, Cummings! Food really brings out the crowds.

The Foodie Crowd

Fourteen food-related businesses (plus the Experts Corner experts) had tables. That's a lot to see, taste, photograph, and talk about! It's hard to pick out the highlights, but here a some of my favorites.

Did you know that we use over 500 billion, yes that's billion, plastic shopping bags per year? I learned that from EarthHook's presentation. Reusable bags are key to solving that problem, but they take up space in the cart and get buried under all the stuff you're buying. Where can you put them so they're easy to access at checkout time and they're not taking up space in the cart? That's the problem EarthHook solves. They've created a nifty little attachment to the shopping cart where you can hang the reusable bags while you're shopping.  Very clever.

EarthHook -- Now that's a useful innovation!

There's even room for advertising on it. Roche Brothers, one of the evening's sponsors, clearly understands the advertising potential.

A Closer Look at the Earth Hook

Over in the Experts Corner (which wasn't really a corner) I met Scott Sanders, who describes himself as a "marketing guy for food and consumer goods companies, plus a chocolate syrup business owner."  That chocolate syrup business is an iconic brand that brings back all kinds of memories: Bosco. I think he was impressed with my rendition of the Bosco jingle. :-)

Experts Looking Expert --- With Bosco!

Chick peas are a wonderful food -- full of fiber and protein --  and Biena Foods' roasted chick peas are an amazingly tasty, crunchy snack.  I tasted the Lime and Chili and the Sea Salt varieties.  Both were excellent. I liked the Lime and Chili so much that I bought a bag to take home. Yum. 

Biena Foods

People were mingling, networking, exchanging business cards, and totally munching out too. All the best food was disappearing quickly. Food is fun to photograph too, and I've never seen so many people taking pictures at MIN with real cameras (as opposed to smart phones). Some of the cameras and even the tripods were making me drool.

Crowd Enjoying Delicious Appetizers

I loved having a chance to talk with the Foodies of New England folks, old friends of MIN. I told them to make sure to taste the T'art.

Foodies of New England

Bittersweet Cake Shop had an amazing selection of sweet and savory gluten-free treats. Everything I tried was delicious. I only wish I could have tried all of them :-)

Tasty, Colorful, and Gluten Free

I rarely drink soda. Coffee, tea, and water are my preferred beverages. However, I'm starting to develop a taste for Izze blackberry sparkling juice since I first tasted it at a previous Mass Innovation Night. I sampled it again at #MIN41 and even went back for a second sample.

Izze Soda

I gave up all hope of photographing every exhibitor before the presentations and just enjoyed as many interesting tastes as I could.

Portabella Mushroom Appetizer -- Delicious

I've often thought it would be great to have "dinner kits" with all the ingredients delivered so you don't have to do the shopping and the prep work, just cook it. That's exactly what Of Course does. They deliver  healthy, delicious, ready-to-make meals right to your door.

Of Course

I've never tasted a better cupcake than the mocha espresso cupcake from Pipe Dream Cupcakes. Nadine had the most inspiring entrepreneurial story too.  One thing that stuck with me from her presentation, besides how quickly the cupcakes disappeared at her first catering event,  was a quote from one of her mentors: "Opportunities aren't lost, they are simply taken by others."

Pipe Dream Cupcakes

After tasting three varieties of Root Cellar Pickles, I'm now craving the Zesty and Sweet ones. The Bread and Butter pickles and the Dill Chips were great too, but I am seriously jonesing for Zesty and Sweet. And Best Costume for #MIN41 goes to the Root Cellar Pickle Person.  A pickle green shirt identifying one as a pickle person is even better than the banana and strawberry costumes from #MIN29! Now, I've got to get some of those Zesty and Sweet pickles...

Root Cellar Pickle Person -- Great Pickles and Best Costume of #MIN41

Who says there's not a lot of innovation at the foodie event? One of the chefs came up with a device that injects the cocktail sauce into the shrimp. It's an innovative and cool-looking way to serve shrimp cocktail.

Shrimp Cocktail with Innovative Cocktail Sauce Delivery Mechanism

The little bite of tart from Armour Creations was so deliciously moist and buttery that I had to tell everybody I talked with to try it. T'ART in a bag is a prepared baking mix that makes sweet or savory tarts. It only takes 7 minutes to have the tart ready to go into the oven. Just add eggs, butter, and whatever your choice of tart filling may be, bake for 45 minutes, and enjoy an awesome treat.

Awesome Tart

I sampled the Autumn Blend wellness tea from ApotheCaring and it really hit the spot. Never mind the health benefits, this is just plain tasty herbal tea!

Tea

Oh, the other thing I learned from the presentations, besides the 500 billion plastic bags, was that the stump has the highest BTU value of any part of a tree. Stump Chunks had one of the most popular tables at the event and they weren't even serving food, just giving away bags of their unique fire starter. 

The crowd was full of both new people and MIN regulars, mixing and matching and enjoying themselves. A couple of the usual suspects, Jeff Cutler and Tim Stansky, posed with camera and shrimp cocktail respectively.

The Usual Suspects

And don't forget that October 24 is Food Day, a nationwide celebration and a movement for healthy,
affordable, and sustainable food.