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

Mass Innovation Nights Southern Exposure #MIN57

The MIN Crowd at Quincy Center for Innovation

Quincy Center for Innovation welcomed Mass Innovation Nights number 57 to their recently opened space. It's a great space and they did a great job of hosting.The crowd was lively and engaged, always a good thing at a MIN event.

The variety of products really showed how huge and interesting the entrepreneurship scene is around these parts -- not all techie by any means -- everything from toothbrushes to tourism and beyond. The four chosen presenters were:

• Boingnet
• 30 Hands Learning
• Equali Tees
• One Hen

Boingnet  has a different take on marketing automation with a great way to create campaigns across web, email, mobile, and all that jazz, with custom landing pages and micro sites. I loved that their presentation involved a live audience participation demo registering participants to win free candy. Disappointed that I didn't win the peppermint bark, but way impressed with the Boingnet platform.

Boingnet

 

Team Boingnet

I enjoyed talking with the guys from Canary about local online selling. They do all the grunt work  for the sellers, from researching the value of an item to writing and managing the online listings. They help the buyers find answers to their questions, coordinate sales, and provide a discounted delivery service. On top of that, they donate 12% of each sale to charity. Happy sellers, happy buyers, and happy charities - what more could you ask for? Oh, and they had cool gold-colored brains on their table. I think I have to give them Best Prop of MIN57.

Canary

PlowMe connects customers in need of snow removal with contractors. Their network makes it easy to book a plow for your own property on the North Shore or your Mom's on the South Shore and makes it easy for the contractors to optimize their routes.  They had a raffle for snowplow service, which could come in handy this weekend with a northeast storm approaching. Oh, and they do have Merrimack Valley contractors in their network.

PlowMe

The folks from Equali Tees impressed me with their philosophy: We are all equal, but we are also different and both aspects should be celebrated. Their designs are simple enough to work with your personal style and they encourage you to make them your own. Some of their designs are connected to various charities that connect with their mission. The team looked great in their tees and hoodies. Best Costume of MIN57 definitely goes to Equali Tees. Check out their Etsy shop.

Equali Tees

Team Equali Tees

Speaking of T-shirts, remember Project Repat from MIN36 and from the MIN500 panel? They surprised Bobbie C with a special MIN blanket featuring T-shirts of MIN alumni companies.  It's cozy and warm and full of memories. There's a story with every one of those logos. What an awesome surprise.

Surprise!

Look at all those MIN companies!

The Blanket

OK,  so Eric Braun (@SouthShoreEric) doesn't really have 30 hands, but the 30hands mobile app can make teachers feel like they've got lots of extra help. It's a fun storytelling app that allows students, teachers and just about anyone to create presentations or narrated stories  based on photos, images or slides using a smartphone or tablet. Eric walked us through a demo in less than 5 minutes.

South Shore Eric

I love how One Hen approaches teaching entrepreneurship to kids in grades 3 to 6. Inspired by a children's book about a young boy in Ghana that grows his one chicken into the largest poultry farm in the country, they teach kids the skills to be social entrepreneurs. Kids learn to make a difference for themselves and the world.  It is awesome to teach kids financial responsibility and personal initiative,  and even more awesome to teach them  global awareness and giving back. 

One Hen

I got a toothbrush and two free cookies from Brush in Time, checked out Cara Group Travel's travel planning services for my ancestral homeland (well, the Irish half, not the Nova Scotia half), and took a look at Lallitara's latest creations since I last saw them at the Merrimack Valley Sandbox Social Impact Pitch Contest back in September. So many great products, so little time.

The Experts Corner was buzzing as usual. Andrew Oatway, a business lawyer, did an excellent job of fielding questions from attendees and posing for me looking very expert for the traditional "Expert Looking Expert" shot.

Expert Looking Expert

All Fun and Games at #MINFun

Landsdowne Street

GameOn hosted Mass Innovation Nights number 56 (wow 56 already!) on Tuesday night 11/12/13. What could be more special? Well, maybe a World Series win at Fenway Park :-) but anyway...   The theme for the event was fun and games and the products on display were indeed fun. The four chosen presenters were:

• Click-a-waiter -- online food ordering
• Packout Gear -- camping gear rental
• Rednote  -- send snippets of popular songs
• BrassMonkey -- wonderful game controller with 2 new games

It was a pretty good crowd for a cold November night.

Innovators Checking In

PackOut Gear set up a tent and sleeping bag just like a campsite -- well, minus the campfire -- and it looked so cozy I was ready to rent gear and camp right there.

Pack Out Had The Best Campsite

Click-a-Waiter enables e-commerce for restaurants.  Their platform allows restaurants to take orders from their Facebook page or website. It makes online ordering easy and practical even for small restaurants.

Click-a-Waiter

The crowd got thicker and thicker as the excitement built and the pizza was served. The place really developed a party atmosphere.

Crowd

Rednote lets you send snippets of popular songs with text messages, email, Twitter and whatever other online social conversations with choices based on emotions, sort of like an audio emoticon. Music definitely makes a message more memorable and texting definitely needs something to give it a little more feeling.

Rednote Team

Oh, and Rednote had matching T-shirts with song lyric snippets and QR code on the back, so they win Best Costume of  #MINFun. All other matching T-shirts paled in comparison.

Best Costume

The two busiest tables were Brass Monkey and Tablelist. Brass Monkey's new Flip iT game was so popular that it was hard to get near the table. People were having a blast playing it.

Brass Monkey

Tablelist's app helps you book a table at amazing nightclubs and lounges. Maybe the reason their table was so busy was that everyone was booking the after-after-party. They did have great swag to promote their great idea, so maybe that was part of their popularity.

Tablelist Swag

Spogo is a mobile app that enables sports fans to make predictions as they watch live games -- adds fun and sociability, not to mention rewards, to spectator sports. They were getting a steady stream of attention too.

Spogo

AECyles had their nifty Freedom Cycle, a tricycle for grownups. They're aiming it at aging boomers (yikes, that's me) and folks who are not able to ride a traditional bicycle because of disability or injury. This is a big improvement on the traditional adult tricycle.

AECycles

ComedySportz put on an improv show for us after the presentations. They were a lot of fun. Check them out for your corporate party. They are seriously funny.

Comedy Sportz Entertaining Us with Improv

The MIN staff at the check-in desk looked even more expert than the experts, so I asked them to pose for the "looking expert" shot.

MIN Check-In Staff Looking Expert

And for an extra "expert looking expert" shot, how about Big Papi the expert at October baseball.

Senor Octubre

#MIN55 Recap

Mass Innovation Nights held yet another wonderful monthly event on Wednesday at WMware in Kendall Square. Thanks, VMware for great hospitality.

Boston Always Looks Great From Cambridge

The crowd took awhile to build, but things were definitely buzzing by the time the presentations started.

The MIN Crowd Checking Out Cool Products

It's about time school field trip planning moved into the 21st century. With EdTrips teachers can plan and manage the whole school travel process from sharing the info with parents to collecting the permission slips and payments. It definitely sounds like it will help get kids out into the real world for some memorable experiences. EdTrips gave an excellent presentation and the audience asked great questions, and they had paper airplanes.

EdTrips

Up until now the only colorful thing on the golf course has been the pants. Now colorful, personalized golf putters from Gift Putter bring golf into the technicolor age.   Jack Pregent and his team produce colorful putters in Massachusetts and can engrave them with your company name, your anniversary date, or some other  message. And yes, they do come in pink.

Pink Putter

Sbscri.be, the Online Subscription Marketplace,  makes it easy for any merchant to sell products or services by subscription. This is such a brilliant idea for ensuring repeat business and customer engagement. It's a radically different approach from those daily deal sites. As a cool touch, they were giving away a subscription to Biena Snacks, tasty chickpea provider and a Mass Innovation Nights alum.

Subscribe

It was great to see Patrick Houwer and  Joshua Goldberg of BeeInPlay again. Met them last week at the Merrimack Valley Sandbox All Ideas Pitch Contest. Beeinplay.com is a website that enables users to find and book their favorite sports fields, courts, ice-rinks, turfs and classes in real-time and coordinate pickup games.  They harness the power of the web to get people together to play. What could be better than that? (Well, besides a pink putter :-))

BeeinPlay

Janji apparel had a room to themselves to showcase their running apparel. Their mission is to extend the charitable aspect of running beyond race day. Each piece of Janji apparel helps provide clean water or proper nutrition to a country in need, and its design is inspired by the country that it supports.

Janji

Over in one of the Experts Corners, Barton Fiske of  zSpace , offered his expertise in 3D graphics, virtual reality and computer gaming with a stunning interactive demo that was packing people in. Everybody wanted their chance to assemble and disassemble a skull in 3D.

zSpace

In the other Experts Corner, Denise Noble, the HR Engineer, was handing out Twizzlers and giving advice on HR subjects for small companies. She also had some toy gears for us to play with -- featuring little tiny toy experts mounted on the gears!

Experts Looking Expert (Or At Least Busy :-))