#MIN36 Was Wonderful

Our Host for #MIN36
Space with a Soul

Waiting for the Presentations

Ready to Tweet

The lights were on in the Innovation District for Mass Innovation Night at Space With A Soul. The space was fantastic -- one of those wonderful old buildings in the former Leather District with a great view of Fort Point Channel and environs. The place was buzzing early and still buzzing after the presentations. The four presenters you all picked were SMAK (@onsmak), Me Two You Gifts (@MeTwoYouGifts), mosaicHUB (@mosaicHUB), and Splashscore (@splashscore). All were impressive.




Ever notice that too much information can be just as bad as none? Want to turn your social media clutter into real conversations? SMAK gives you one place to view, sort, group and manage your relationships across all your networks. That's right, no more Alt-Tab. SMAK lets you put all your social media in one place and sort it so you can prioritize your day.

SMAK

Gamification is hot these days and it made a splash at MIN36.  Splashscore (@splashscore) gamifies your Facebook activity.  It identifies social influencers by measuring the Likes and Comments ripple effect and  gives them rewards.

Splashscore Had the Best Stickers

Imagine the Mass Innovation Nights Experts Corner but online and with even more excellent experts. That's the idea behind mosaicHUB (@mosaicHub): supporting entrepreneurs. An online community built on trust connects you with service providers and mentors as well as other entrepreneurs. Community members share recommendations, advice and experience and find expert help, answers and resources, all in one place. It's like having the Experts Corner at your fingertips all the time! And they were giving away free t-shirts if you signed up that night. The team looked good in their matching t-shirts and the funky lighting.

mosaicHUB

Me Two You (@metwoyougifts) makes the softest baby blankets ever! They're made in Massachusetts. Who says we don't still have a textile industry? Best of all with each baby blanket purchased, Me Two You gives a baby blanket to an orphaned child. I know what baby gift I'm getting for my cousin's expected baby :-) (Stephan and Lisa, you are not reading this :-))

Me Two You

Tote Bag from
Upcycled T-shirts
by Project Repat

Ben's Bicycle Bling from LifeCycle

Upcycling emerged as an important theme at #MIN36 too, with Project Repat and LifeCycle featuring creative reuse. Time to upcycle my T-shirt collection with @ProjectRepat and upgrade my wardrobe with some bicycle chain bling from @thinklifecycle.  Oh, and it was a tough choice but LifeCycle totally wins best costume with Ben's bracelet and ring. LifeCycle reminded me of how my Dad used to recycle broken bikes -- assembling working bikes from pieces of junk bikes. He'd have figured out how to make an entire bike out of the chains!

cuppow!

Checking out Schedit

Speaking of reuse and creativity, I've always wanted something like cuppow for spill-free sipping from a canning jar.  Think about it, travel mug from a canning jar is the perfect reuse. All you need is a lid. Now you've got one. Can't wait to use mine.

 Lots of folks were checking out  Sched.it (@SCHEDITBoston), a hyper social event listings calendar. Which events are trending? Male/female ratio? Who's going? All things you want to know about an event. It adds a social layer to the Boston.com events listings.

Nexly in Action

Strides Against Stigma

Nexly has a cool tool to add a review bar to your website so your customers can add reviews and share with their networks.

Families for Depression Awareness was there to launch its inaugural event, Strides Against Stigma, a walk-a-thon dedicated to building a community to erase the stigma of depression.

Experts Couches

Disco Ball in Action

The Crowd Building

 I successfully talked to each of the 10 participating companies and had a blast trying to figure out how to expose for the interesting light. The crowd was lively and awesome and really enjoying the space. The buzz was incredible. The disco ball and the colored lighting added to the fun atmosphere.  The Experts Corner had couches for cozier consultations and Space with a Soul provided free WiFi for attendees. I saw lots of tweeting going on with all kinds of devices from tablets to smart phones to ordinary cellphones and laptops.


As always, the experts looked very expert.  Eileen and Julia from KCSA Strategic Communications posed for the traditional Experts Looking Expert photo.

Experts Looking Expert

innovative cities = uncharted territory

Lately we keep hearing that innovation is the big driver of economic growth and that innovation takes place in cities. What makes a city innovative? Among the factors often mentioned are arts clusters and place-making. (For an in depth analysis of what makes cities innovative, check out the Streets Ahead report from the Work Foundation in the UK.) It isn't just because I love art that I spent some time checking out the arts component of Winterfest 2012 in Lowell. Filling up empty store fronts with pop-up art galleries and installations is a great way to bring art into the foreground and to create public places. Innovative cities are uncharted territory to some, and Uncharted Studios brought some major creativity to Merrimack Street in downtown Lowell during Thursday night's gallery walk.

The intriguing video image in the window draws you in to a space filled with painting, video, music, and spoken word.  Inside, the  installation makes a place and delights the eyes and ears.

Video in the Window at 66 Merrimack Street

As video images flowed over the paintings and Mike Dailey banged on his drums, I got totally immersed in the colors and patterns around me.

Video Projected on Painting

Constantly Changing

Mike Dailey on Drums
He paints and drums too!

Folks discovered that they could play with the images too.

Watching How the Video Alters the Paintings

People were positioning themselves so the  video enlivened their sweatshirts and hipster sweaters.

Playing with the Shadows

People started doing shadow puppet things with their hands and their bodies, which looked really cool from outside the window too.

The Gallery

Visitors filtered in and out of the gallery. Many of them just happened to be passing by on the street. They weren't even aware of the gallery walk.

More Changes -- More Color

Every time I looked up, the paintings looked different.

This One's Getting Hypnotic

Once I tore myself away from the hypnotic images and went back outside, I still couldn't manage to leave the space right away. A group of young men were doing some kind of spoken word thing on the sidewalk and I was really enjoying it. They told me what the name of the style was, but I didn't quite catch it. Anyway, when I asked if they were getting a kick out of an "old lady" hanging around to listen to them, they invited me to join them. I didn't, but I got into a great conversation with Lindsey Parker, another of the great visual artists at unchARTed, as they spell it. :-)

I'd arrived knowing only that Mike (whom I know from Brew'd Awakening) was doing something with video and music on Merrimack Street and left knowing there's a great group of artists exploring uncharted territory in an innovative city. As the city seal of Lowell proclaims: Art is the Handmaid of Human Good.

#MIN35 at NERD

The View from NERD

Mass Innovation Night is always fun and Microsoft NERD is always a great event venue so #MIN35 was sure to be a winner from the get go. Sure enough, it was! The crowd took awhile to filter in, so I had a bit of time to check out the presenters before the tables got really busy.

Team OfferBeam

OfferBeam is a mobile app that provides location specific targeted marketing. No more searching for special offers and promotions near you. OfferBeam pops up nearby offers on your smartphone when you're passing by. They did reassure us that offers won't pop up when we're driving 100 mph on 128 :-) OfferBeam is such a great idea that I downloaded it during the presentation and it beamed me a welcome to Mass Innovation Night. The OfferBeam team had a great time striking poses for my photos and they had matching T-shirts so they get "best costume" for #MIN35 too!

CampusEmployer

Mass Innovation Nights Experts Corner regular, Corey Turner of Turner Business Services, founded CampusEmployer out of frustration in trying to hire college students. He found that he had to contact the career services department at each campus to get an account and post a job. There had to be a simpler, more efficient way to connect employers with college students. CampusEmployer makes it easy for employers to target college students with the skills they're looking for. No more campus by campus search and no more flyers in laundromats! Oh, and I am awarding Corey the "best hat" award because he was the only one wearing a hat. :-)

SnapHop

SnapHop is a platform that brings together lead generation, audience engagement, and analytics -- the basics of mobile marketing. All the social media marketing services you already use work neatly with the SnapHop platform. They make it easy to create and deliver a mobile marketing campaign. When was the last time you saw "easy" and "marketing campaign" in the same sentence? That's how innovative these guys are. Those cool QR codes that let you tweet from each table at MIN? SnapHop!

LiveCirrus

Live Cirrus takes advantage of the cloud to deliver the full desktop experience to mobile devices.  We all know how developing mobile applications from scratch can be time consuming and expensive. After all, we  already have so much invested in our existing web solutions. With LiveCirrus you don't have to start over. They take the pain and expense out of going mobile by deploying your existing desktop apps using their cloud platform. Their table and SnapHop's table were both very busy after the presentations. Definitely a hit.

Besides the chosen presenters, I had a chance to talk with these great folks with cool products:

• FreightFarms - hydroponics, networking, recycled materials, grow food anywhere!
• InsightSquared
- data intelligence for small and medium businesses made easy and smart
• Socialete- bringing young, urban professionals together in real life with handpicked events and unique nightlife experiences
• CoPatient Audit and Appeal Services
- an online community where consumers can upload their insurance benefits and medical bills and be paired with a billing expert who will provide a free audit of those bills
• ArtVenue - making it simple for artists and business to organize art shows

FreightFarms

InsightSquared

Socialete

CoPatient

ArtVenue

We had a great crew of experts in the Experts Corner this time too. For my featured "expert looking expert" this month: Michael Potts of EZOG. What's your Entrepreneurial Zone of Genius? Visionary? Architect? Builder? Cultivator? I guessed that I'm a Builder, then took the test and discovered I'm an Architect. Great insight.

Expert Looking Expert

Merrimack Valley Then and Now

We have our own weather in the Merrimack Valley, and Boston weathermen are always pointing that out when they predict snowfall amounts. At a recent event, while discussing the predicted pattern of the coming snow (which has come and gone by the time I write this), someone asked where I lived.  I replied "In the Merrimack Valley." To my surprise, the person I was talking with had no idea where that was. At lunch the next day, a friend pointed out that many people in Boston/Cambridge really don't know much of Massachusetts geography outside of Metro Boston. That got me thinking about where the Merrimack Valley fits in with the Boston media's definition of Boston when they talk about Boston's loss of tech dominance to Silicon Valley.

Even the Megaboston proposal 100 years ago this month, going around the Twitterverse today,  wouldn't have extended this far north. Of course, 100 years ago, cities like Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill were still important cities on their own. Maybe they weren't quite the world class cities they were in the 19th century, but they were definitely still on the map. There's a long and rich history of tech and innovation in the Merrimack Valley. So, completely serendipitously, I came across this video from the AT&T Archives about  Western Electric Merrimack Valley Works (in North Andover), later known as AT&T Merrimack Valley Works, now known as Osgood Landing.



The video reminded me of Alexander Graham Bell's Haverhill connection. Bell's story is not just about technology but also about venture capital back in the day. Say what? Yup. Bell's principal financier for the telephone was Haverhill leather merchant Thomas S. Sanders. Bell, a specialist in teaching the deaf, was tutor to Sanders' son. Bell and Sanders became friends, and lots of Bell's telephone experiments actually happened in Haverhill. Sanders invested $110,000 in Bell's telephone. Sanders was one of the founders of Bell Telephone Company in 1877 along with Bell, Thomas Watson, and Gardiner Hubbard (Bell's soon to be father-in-law).

Haverhill claims that the first business telephone call was between Sanders' home on Kenoza Avenue and his sole cutting business on Merrimack Street.  Haverhill was right up there with Boston (first phone call) and Cambridge (first long distance phone call). Nearby North Andover was at that time home to Davis & Furber, makers of textile machinery, and so home to many skilled machinists.  With good reason the AT&T video treats the valley as a whole as a good place to build a huge tech complex.

Osgood Landing (formerly Merrimack Valley Works) in North Andover

The successors to Bell's telephone company continued to be a big presence in North Andover until well after the Merrimack Valley Works was built in the 1950s.  With Alcatel-Lucent now gone, the building houses everything from laser optics to laser tag. The tradition of innovation in the Merrimack Valley goes back a long way and continues to this day. 

The valley has gone through transitions from the textile and machine industrial economy, to the old-style tech economy, and into today's New Economy. To ease the transition to the New Economy, entrepreneur Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks, in the Merrimack Valley town of Chelmsford, founded the Merrimack Valley Sandbox to develop and enhance the innovation ecosystem in the cities of the Merrimack Valley of Massachusetts, including Lowell, Lawrence and Haverhill.

In April, Mass Innovation Nights will be coming to Lowell, the very heart and soul of the Merrimack Valley. Boston/Cambridge innovators and entrepreneurs will be able to see for themselves exactly where the Merrimack Valley is.

#MIN34

Welcome to MIN34

The innovators gathered for another Mass Innovation Night at IBM Waltham. This was the first MIN without BobbieC, so Tim Stansky was in charge of rounding up the innovators. Between Tim and Christine Sierra keeping things on track they proved that MIN is all grown up!

Things in the Hall of Innovation, the conference room, and the Experts Corner were all buzzing before 6:00 PM and the excitement ramped up quickly. With products ranging from mobile website development to used textbooks to bras and nutritional supplements, it was a challenge to take it all in. That's a big part of what makes MIN fun.

BlueTrain Mobile Team

The BlueTrain Mobile team not only did a great presentation, but also won the triple crown for the night: best team costume, best hat, and best prop. They kicked off their presentation with a train whistle and presented an excellent video. BlueTrain's Mobile Marketing Engine enables you to create professional and compelling mobile websites easily. They also work with customers to translate the design and personality of their desktop site into a better mobile experience. The team had fun posing with their train conductor hats and made their brand name memorable.

Kevin with Smooth 8

Smooth 8 showed off their liquid additive that reduces acidity in beverages. According to Kevin and Evita at their booth, a few drops of Smooth 8 in your drink not only enhances the taste, but helps your body maintain a proper PH balance by reducing the concentration of free radicals in the body and making antioxidants more available. This helps your body stay hydrated and healthy. They claim it even prevents hangovers. I didn't try it, but their table was getting plenty of traffic.

Catch App

CatchApp is a smart phone application that lets you create and manage location-based reminders. Not only does it remind you to pick up the salmon for dinner, but it tells you when you're close to a store that sells salmon. CatchApp is currently in Beta test, so you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available in the app store.

jog.fm

The jog.fm team had matching T-shirts and an interesting product. Running, power walking, cycling, or spinning jog.fm matches your workout music to your pace.  It's a fitness app that gets you moving and keeps you moving.

Jess from Zyrra

It's about time somebody applied technology to getting a bra that fits! Zyrra does just that. Using 10 measurements and an innovative CAD system, Zyrra creates and sews bras for each individual consumer, no more 34 B or 44 DD - just size you! Whether it's at a bra party or on board the bra bus that comes to your work place, ten measurements and ten minutes to a great fit. Jess looked terrific and you can too.

Mike from GivingSomething

GivingSomething is the coolest way to give real goods to your favorite nonprofits.  Whether it's litter boxes to the cat shelter or lacrosse nets to kids in Nicaragua, they get what they need and you know exactly how your money is being used. It's kind of like a bridal registry for non-profits. The best part is, there's no cost to the non-profit!

Crowd Ready for Presentations to Start

Hall of Innovation

Pat from Campus Libre

There was a good turn out with lots of newcomers. I even talked to somebody from New York. The presentations from BlueTrain Mobile, GivingSomething, Smooth 8, and CatchApp managed to be fun and get done within the 5 minute time allotment.

I almost managed to talk to every participating company. Besides those already mentioned, I chatted with NetCommissions, Campus Libre, and Jungle Torch.

Jerry and Igor from NetCommissions

The Experts Corner was busy with innovators consulting the experts as always. Tim Orazem from Boston SEO Experts agreed to pose for the traditional Expert Looking Expert shot.

Expert Looking Expert