Monday, February 26, 2018

Recapping EforAll Shop Local Pitch Contest in Lowell

The EforAll Lowell & Lawrence  #ShopLocal Pitch Contest on Thursday focused on a retail and services theme. Products ranged from skin care and hair care items to cutlery, clothing, and play space. Santander Bank sponsored the event.  Mill No. 5 and Coffee and Cotton hosted it, with the tables arranged along the 4th floor bazaar space, much like the weekly bazaars, so it felt very natural to have retail products on display.
Mill No. 5 -- Great Space for Tabling
The pitch contest was inside Coffee and Cotton in the "Victorian Lounge" space. The crowd was so big that it was standing room only and there were even people watching/listening from the hallway. The energy and enthusiasm of the pitchers and the audience ran high.
View of the Tables from Inside Red and White Market
The judges were:
  • Karen Cirillo, Lowell City Councilor
  • Sarah Hand, Mill No. 5
  • Jennifer Howell, Owner of Sutra Studio and EforAll Alumn
  • Deep Singh, Vice President of R&D and Operations at Alcyone
The scheduled pitchers were:
  • The Chameleon Room
  • KOI Inc.
  • Nourish Shakti
  • Dandelion District
  • Eva's Garden
  • Mill Girls Cutlery & Kitchenware
I made the rounds to check out every table and use my table favorite voting stickers to help decide who else would get to pitch. Each attendee gets three stickers and it was hard to choose the product I most wanted to hear. I enjoyed talking to all of these entrepreneurs and I managed to photograph most of them.

Salon Mii is a hair salon based in Lawrence offering hair and skin care, with their own line of products. I enjoyed talking with them and meeting their youngest brand ambassador.
Salon Mii
Manraaj, A Liquid Yoga Company offers cold pressed herbal juice shots that deliver both nutrients and flavor that will wake you up, revitalize you, and maybe even reverse aging. OK, just kidding about reversing aging but I did feel suddenly younger after I tried a little of both juices: Embrace and Revive.
Liquid Yoga
Nourish Shakti offers holistic wellness coaching and botanical creations for personal care, such as herbal lip balm and facial toning mist.
Nourish Shakti
Eva's Garden specializes in natural skin care products, including body butters for people with allergies to coconut and nuts and other sensitivities. They had the best understanding of their market of anyone I talked to. They made a very strong and focused pitch. Loved hearing them.
Eva's Garden
Dandelion District sells vintage, re-purposed, and art clothing in Mill No.5 and is looking to expand her offerings. Her pitch was strong and on point too.
Dandelion District
The Chameleon Room pitched a re-configurable indoor playspace to provide kids with new play experiences. She also had a cool chameleon lamp at her table -- I photographed her with it when it was a nice blue to coordinate with her outfit.  She generated a lot of audience enthusiasm with her pitch.
The Chameleon Room
Mill Girls Cutlery and Kitchenware showcased some of the cool cutlery and kitchen stuff they're planning to carry in a retail store in Lowell soon. Millennials need good knives and there's currently no kitchenware store in Lowell. Just as I was thinking "Maybe they could sell the UTEC cutting boards," I spotted Geoff Foster of UTEC shaking hands with Claire. Guess there might be some UTEC cutting boards coming to Mill Girls Cutlery.
Mill Girls Cutlery and Kitchenware
One of the coolest products there was MOON Selfie Light a handy clip on light for your phone that provides perfect lighting for selfies. Who hasn't been in a memorable situation and wished for better lighting for your selfie to preserve the memory? The MOON light is very compact and fits your devices neatly. The best part is the ability to adjust brightness and color temperature. I was a little surprised it didn't win the table favorite pitch slot, but it did get the Santander Pick pitch slot and Ed handled the last minute pitch opportunity brilliantly.
MOON Selfie
DryLQD is a clothing line of wearable inspirational art. Eli, the artist, creates incredibly detailed artworks and treats the T-shirts, hats, etc. almost as a gallery. DryLQD won the table favorite pitch slot.
DryLQD
XOI makes a skin care juice from gac fruit. Used in traditional Vietnamese medicine, gac fruit heals skin and delivers Vitamin A. I tasted a couple of flavors and liked it. Maybe I should add it to my skin care regime.
XOI
The pitches were all interesting, the judges asked good questions, and the timing moved along smoothly. While the judges were off deliberating, it was time for the audience to vote. The fan favorite voting, a fun part of the event, usually done by texting the letter of the pitch you're voting for to a specified number, developed some sort of glitch so the fan favorite was chosen by the loudness of the applause.

The Fan Favorite went to The Chameleon Room. An additional prize of personal mentoring from Santander went to DryLQD.
Chameleon Room Wins Fan Favorite
The big money prizes went to:
Dandelion District  3rd Place $500
Mill Girls Cutlery and Kitchenware  2nd Place $750
Eva's Garden First Place $1000
Dandelion District 3rd Place $500
Mill Girls Cutlery and Kitchenware  2nd Place $750

Eva's Garden First Place $1000
What a great night!

Monday, February 19, 2018

You bet there's a lot to like about Lowell -- #MIN107 Recap

Mass Innovation Nights returned to Lowell on Thursday, February 15th for #MIN107 at UMass Lowell's Innovation Hub.  The City of Lowell and UMass Lowell's Innovation Hub co-sponsored and co-hosted the event and provided excellent food catered by UTEC's catering program.
The Crowd Begins to Build
The turnout was impressive. It was great to see so many innovative folks from near and far, especially people I know.  I loved  running into Rajia Abdelaziz and Ray Hamilton, founders of invisaWear,along with EforAll Lowell and Lawrence Program Manager (and FreeVerse! co-founder as well as Sizzling Kitchen restaurateur) Joey Banh. InvisaWear presented at MIN95, a year ago right here at the Innovation Hub, and they are EforAll alums too. There's a great concentration of entrepreneurship and innovation all around the Merrimack Valley, especially in Lowell. You bet there's a lot to like about Lowell!
Ray, Rajia, and Joey
The four presenters chosen by online voting before the event were:
  • WakeMealarm
  • wmnHealth
  • CAIDE Studio BSR
  • adopets
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.
WakeMe
wmnHealth, introduced by Dynamicly,  is a conversational platform for women to tackle mental and neurological diseases. Mental illnesses and neurological disorders, such as depression, anxiety, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease affect women differently from men. wmnHealth aims to promote conversation and research and development using analytics and AI. Daily flash briefings on the latest information on women's mental and neurological health are available through an Alexa app.  A chat-bot (they call it a virtual agent) named Marine answers questions and helps you track your brain health. It sounded like a really interesting application of both analytics and AI.
wmnHealth
Also in the cool uses of AI category, CAIDE Systems made a big impression with CAIDE Studio BSR, which uses deep learning technology to speed up stroke diagnosis. It can automatically diagnose and detect three different types of strokes from analyzing the CT scans (or other medical images) of the brain. It can reduce the time to analyze the image and make the diagnosis to under two minutes. Given how crucial every minute is in dealing with stroke, this is a big win. They got my vote for favorite.
Olive Lee and Jacob Lee Demonstrating CAIDE BSR
Everybody loved adopets, the latest pet adoption management platform. People interested in adopting a pet can view animals available for adoption across various locations. You can filter by gender, size, and age too. So if I want to find an older male cat near me, it's a snap. I've seen variations on this idea at pitch contests and MIN events before, but what stood out was that it's provided at no cost to the shelters or the potential adopters. Their plan is to make money promoting pet supplies to adopters once they've adopted their pet. It was no surprise that adopets won the grand prize.
Adopets
The AI theme of the night continued with axelvideo's  axle ai tool for content creators to find and re-purpose video quickly. Deep learning software automates the analysis and search. You can search for video content by selecting frames or still images from the Internet and find content that contains similar objects, themes and logos. It makes managing your video content library way simpler.
axle ai
DSP Wireless  showed off the RCB-W24A-LVDS Wi-Fi interface for the Intan Technologies RHD2000 series of electrophysiology amplifier boards. It was fascinating to see so much progress in devices for bioelectric signal acquisition -- so small and low cost compared to what data acquisition devices were like back in my "real-time data acquisition" days. There are so many useful applications for this kind of technology, like monitoring electrophysiology lab experiments or even acquiring signals from the brain and transmitting them to control a prosthetic.  I wish I could have spent more time talking with them about these devices.

DSP Wireless
With the growth of indoor farming, the FLW900 LED Grow Light from Exact Lux  seems like a  product whose time has come. It's a powerful LED grow light that delivers constant light levels for the life of the LED. These light fixtures are designed to be sustainable -- that is they can be repaired and upgraded over time. The Exact Lux table was getting a lot of attention.
Exact Lux -- Best Hat of MIN107
Also, I hereby award Best Hat of MIN107 to the Exact Lux trucker style hat. There were no teams with matching T-shirts this time, so I guess I have to award Best Costume to Exact Lux too.
Plants Growing under FLW900 Grow Light
Another crowd-pleaser was 360 Properties's immersive approach to viewing a property.  If you're selling/leasing a property you can showcase it online in ways that your customers can explore it from every angle. It's impressive enough on a traditional browser or a smart phone, but it's amazing  using a VR headset. Check out the demo on their website.
Checking Out 360 Properties
Probit Systems had a table with materials about their cloud solution for monitoring data center servers as a service. That's about all I can say about it as there didn't seem to be anyone manning the table.

The winners in the audience choice voting for the night were:
That's quite an impressive array of products.
The Audience Favorites
As a finishing touch on a great night, attendees got nifty gift bags from our City of Lowell hosts. In addition to coupons and special offers from Lowell's local businesses and restaurants and a nice pocket sized map of downtown, the goodie bags featured a Sweet Lydia's chocolate-coated marshmallow on a stick. Lydia's s'moresels are a reason to come to Lowell in themselves.

As is traditional, I'll close with a photo of experts looking expert. Director of Economic Development Andrew Shapiro and Vice Mayor Vesna Nuon repping the City of Lowell agreed to be my featured experts.
Experts Looking Expert