Merrimack Valley Sandbox Consumer Ideas Pitch Contest

The Merrimack Valley Sandbox Consumer Ideas Pitch Contest that got snowed out in February was rescheduled to Tuesday night, March 11, which provided much better weather. As an extra added networking bonus, this was a combined event with Friends of Kevin so the sandbox space was jam packed. It was a great mix of people. There were folks I know to catch up with and new folks to meet and, of course, lots of opportunity to photograph entrepreneurs and their products.

Lianna and Lucky at the Check-in Desk

Entrepreneurs Setting Up as Early Comers Arrive

Entrepreneurs were still setting up when I arrived. There were crackers and cheese with grapes as well as juice and iced tea for light refreshments. That somehow created a welcoming, down-home, bootstrap feeling conducive to conversation.

Social Pup

I enjoyed talking with Sarah Quigley about Social Pup doggie day care and grooming. She has a very good understanding of her target market. There are a lot of dogs in Lowell.

Concussion Detector Prototype

Matt and Dylan from Pure Innovation, Inc. are engineering students who are working on detecting concussive impacts to make sports safer. I talked with Matt about watching my brother take a high stick to the head in a high school hockey game and wondering how the trainer would know whether he should come out of the game. Turns out Matt had some hockey experience, so we connected around that. Concussions in high school sports are a major problem and these guys are onto solving a real problem.

Nkese with Bra

Great product, great presenter, great pitch all came together with Nkese Applewhite's cleverly and beautifully designed combination pumping and nursing bra. Who says you have to change bras for pumping vs. nursing? And who says a nursing/pumping bra can't be beautiful? Nkese made a big impression with a practical and beautiful product.

Spiceventure

Spiceventure is a food truck in the planning stage, getting ready to offer the best authentic Thai, Lao, Khmer, and Indian foods in New England plus some exquisite specialties not found anywhere else. They just successfully funded their Kickstarter campaign. For those who remember the original Southeast Asian Restaurant in Lowell (1985-2006) this is the longed-for return of the Antonaccio family to the  food business. Sam grew up hanging around his parents' restaurant and he'll be managing the Spiceventure operation.  I'm sure the food business is ready for the next generation. 

Scarves

Weaver Leanne Tremblay of Western Avenue Studios had a colorful array of her handwoven scarfs on display and she had the good luck to be picked as the wildcard presenter.

Events

I enjoyed talking with Gloria about event planning and the endless possibilities of decorating with balloons.

Gracie's Hair Butter

Gracie's Hair Butter started out to solve her husband's hair loss problem. She's built a home grown solution into a business.

Inclusive Toys

The women of Increment have designed these clever stack-able rings to encourage play and help children of all abilities develop spatial reasoning and other important developmental skills through inclusive play. They're already in use at one preschool.

Beautiful Vegetables Go Into Asulia Dumplings

I've been waiting to sample more of  Asulia Foods' dumplings since #MINFoodie6. I love the kale and the taro ones a lot.  It was great to see them again and to resume my tweet campaign to get my local Whole Foods to carry these delicious vegan delectables. (Yeah, I like dumplings, OK :-)).  I can't pass by a beautiful bunch of kale either. Vegetables are just inherently wonderful. I got into a conversation with another veggie dumpling lover and Andover Whole Foods customer, so the demand outside of Boston/Cambridge is growing. That led to discussion of how farming is growing in Massachusetts and how amazing the farms of Essex County are - some in business for hundreds of years, some new, all with great food.

Confidence Covers

Confidence Covers makes beautiful designer help button covers that make it much less clunky and stigmatizing for seniors who need these devices to wear them. You can match the cover to your outfit and fit right in instead of standing out and looking frail and weak.

Crowd

I kept running into people I know. It was great catching up with Gary Tremblay of Pro Diagrams and hearing how the Merrimack Valley Sandbox Winter Accelerator program has helped him refine and develop his easy to use presentation tool and the business strategy for it.

Entrepreneurs Sharing a Laugh

Cam Preciado of Design 4 Lowell Deep in Conversation about Best of Lowell

Design 4 Lowell has big plans for design and creativity in  Lowell and The Merrimack Valley.  Imagine a creative network designing a beautiful future, a one stop marketing shop featuring local designers, video directors, web developers, artists and other creatives. Design 4 Lowell is already bringing that network to life in Lowell. Cam is one of several entrepreneurs that I heard use the word community repeatedly and mean it!

Asinine Games

I can easily see becoming addicted to Asinine Games' Palindromic Puzzle Game, the latest of his game offerings.

Everybody Photographing Nkese

Not surprisingly, Nkese Applewhite won the fan favorite voting. She also won second prize! The fans and the judges picked up on her knowledge of her market and the brilliance of her product. Congrats to Nkese!

Scarf Lady

Leanne weaves the most beautiful scarves and gave an excellent presentation. Third prize was well deserved.

Social Pup

And the first prize winner was Sarah's Social Pup. Again, well deserved.

This blog post doesn't begin to cover how much fun this event was or the energy of the entrepreneurs, the judges, and the attendees. You have to experience this for yourself, so check out the upcoming events on the Merrimack Valley Sandbox website.

Dumplings, Coffee, Choffy...#MINFoodie6

Asulia Foods Vegan Dumplings

Last night's Mass Innovation Night, Foodie Edition, was jam-packed. The Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts Boston hosted us along with the Consulate General of Canada in Boston. Big big big thanks to both of them. The folks at Le Cordon Bleu know how to put on a food event, with wine, fancy hors d'oeuvres, and a chocolate fountain.

Chocolate Fountain

There was so much to see and taste! The vegan dumplings from Asulia were generating a lot of buzz, as were Choffy, Boston Brewin, and Dot Ale.

Team Asulia

Asulia makes all natural, handcrafted foods in Boston. Their newest product line is fusion vegan dumplings: Chickpea, Kale, and Taro Root. The kale dumplings were especially delicious. Chatting with them, I learned of their commitment to social responsibility. Not only are they big veggie advocates, but they are also interested in helping lift girls out of poverty all over the world. They donate a percentage of their profits to Room to Read. And not only that, their packaging is printed using wind power. I hope my local Whole Foods carries Asulia dumplings soon.

Boston Brewin

Boston Brewin what can I say? Tom and Danny take social enterprise to a new level. Starting out with a love of Boston and for creating change, Boston Brewin serves 100% organic, fairly-traded coffee and local food including Haley House pastries, and they pay every one of their team members a living wage.  Boston Brewin announced their new Pay It 4Ward business model, a radically new vision of building a coffee community, modeling the best of crowd funding, social enterprise and small business. Danny was by far the best presenter. He nailed it.

Team Choffy

Choffy is brewed chocolate. Yes, brewed chocolate. Their table was by far the most popular, edging out even the dumplings. People were lined up 3 deep to taste Choffy.  It tastes so great that I bought some to brew at home. Simply described it's premium cacão (cocoa) beans, roasted and ground: no sugar, no dairy, no chemicals, just cocoa. It's richer and more flavorful than hot chocolate, brews just like coffee, and gives you a lift without the buzz (and subsequent crash). We've all heard that chocolate is good for you, and this is the perfect way to get that benefit. It tastes awesome!

Checking Out Foodicine

Foodicine may be the first TV show to pitch at a Mass Innovation Nights event.  It sounds like a great idea. Basically it will be at “food-makeover” show that focuses on healthy eating for people who require special diets. Who wouldn't want help from celebrity chefs and world class doctors when learning to live with diagnoses that require special diets?

Percival Brewing Team

The folks from Percival Beer Company greeted people in the lobby with a chance to enter to win some of their Dot Ale 1630.  They're a craft brewer that develops and self-distributes beers that celebrate the diversity of Dorchester. I know nothing about beer, so all I can say is that they were definitely getting some attention.

Planning a Foodie Trip?

Also in the lobby, I had a great talk with Cristiano from Food.Stories.Travel. I was attracted by his display of root vegetables. Food.Stories.Travel is a small  tour operator organizing travels to learn the stories behind local food makers and tasting and supporting their work. I'll certainly call him when I get some time to do an agricultural tour of Italy. Meanwhile, I think I need to get the Essex National Heritage Area folks to look into this kind of tourism for our Essex County farms. (Hm, I feel a blog post coming on come spring.)

GUD Stuff

Speaking of local farms and food producers, the good folks at Something GUD have developed a network of local food producers (farms, fishermen, bakers, etc) and a platform that allows you to buy online and have fresh local foods delivered to your home, sort of a digital farmer's market. They deliver to the Boston area and the North Shore and don't charge delivery fees.  They know the farmers, the fishermen, the fish, the cows... order a steak from them and they can tell you the name of the cow.  I recognized a lot of the farms they work with, but was surprised that they didn't know about Appleton Farms cheeses and Ingaldsby's honey (where you can see the bees that are making your honey and the crops they're pollinating). (I definitely feel an Essex County farming post coming on.)

Best Costume of MINFoodie6

The innovative spelling of good, the cool t-shirt, and the trendy beanie hat earned Something GUD the award for Best Costume of MINFoodie6.

The Caviar of Vegan Treats

DOOS P.K. calls his sauces  "The Caviar Of Vegan Treats!" We're definitely talking innovation in condiments here. It's a multipurpose flavor-enhancing dip, sweet and spicy and full of fruit and vegetable goodness.He's also got a great origin story.

Re:Covers from MyRecovers

When not running Mass Innovation Nights, Bobbie C moonlights as a model for MIN alum, re:covers, fashionable covers for casts and walking boots. If you have to suffer a broken leg, you might as well be stylin' while you recover.

The Experts Corner was busy as usual. Rachel was being very expert and Scott was taking it all in so they're both "Experts Looking Expert."

Experts Looking Expert

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