#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.

bees and innovative cities

Last Tuesday night I attended a combination book event for The Pollinator's Corridor and film screening of Bees in the Key of A. You might ask "What's this got to do with innovation?" There's a heck of a lot of innovation going on in the economic, physical, and social development of small- to mid-sized cities (in fact Lowell hosted the Innovative Cities Conference a couple of years ago). 

The event was at the Spalding House, a Lowell Parks & Conservation Trust property with lots of historic New England atmosphere.

Even just hearing Aaron Birk chatting with Suzz Cromwell before the presentation about Philadelphia and how he likes that there's lots of activism, yoga studios on every corner  --- no mention of bars, late night partying, burritos, or venture capital -- told me I was in for a treat.

Aaron and Suzz before the talk

It was a packed house, filled to the 50 person capacity.  I enjoyed the fresh delicious food from the gardens of MillCityGrows, prepared by the teens from UTEC's FRESH Roots program: beets with goat cheese and basil leaves, mushrooms with pesto, mint water, iced tea with mint ... and that's not even counting the dessert.

Delicious Food from UTEC's FreshRoots Program

Mint water must be a big thing in Lowell. I remember them serving it at the Lowell Folk Festival the same year they were handing out mint and oregano seedlings grown in compost from the festival food booths.

Cities, the environment, bees, vultures, Buddhism, locally grown vegetables, and indie film. Oh my! All kinds of intersections with my interests!

Spalding House Entrance

Spalding house has a great view of the Merrimack River's Pawtucket Falls too. I checked out the Spalding House-Pawtucket Falls Overlook Park before the event.

Pawtucket Falls Overlook

Aaron is a lively and engaging presenter and the book speaks to issues that are dear to me. I kept nodding and wanting to shout "Yes, yes, yes, biodiversity has everything to do with urban life and keeping your brother out of jail! Relevant! Relevant! Relevant!" If there is one thing I'd like to communicate to urban dwellers and environmentalists alike it's that nature is not out there somewhere in the wilderness -- we're in it, surrounded by it, part of it.  The story is set in the Bronx in the 1970s and addresses exactly those issues brilliantly.

Aaron Passed around Copies of the Book while He Talked

His presentation also included lots of images that aren't in the book yet and amazing slides of traditional Nepali bee hunters.  One of the images he showed that's not in this installment of the novel was a beautiful drawing of a Himalayan griffon vulture flying over the city. The desolate city and the griffon vulture were just so evocative of decay and renewal!  Not only did he talk about vultures, but he also spoke a little about Buddhism.  I had to tell him my story about seeing my life Himalayan griffon circling over a cliff side monastery high on the Tibetan plateau.

Signing Books in Front of Old Clock

After the presentation we watched the wonderful short film Bees in the Key of A. The bees and the beekeepers were fantastic. By the end of The Pollinator's Corridor presentation and Bees in the Key of A  if you weren't already interested in bees you would be for sure.

I got plenty of time to talk with Aaron about vultures and tell him my story of seeing my first ever griffon vulture when I was in Tibet.  When he signed my copy of the book, he inscribed the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum.

Back home that night, I dreamed of bees and of beautiful soaring vultures.

#MIN40

Mass Innovation Night was back at the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham for its 40th event. 40. Wow.

IBM Lab Looking Awesome

The four chosen presenters for the night were:

• AnniesBid.com -- an online auction site that raises money for national and international charities in a game-like auction format.

  

  AnniesBid.com Presenting

  
  

• Azigo -- turns dealing with hundreds of emails and maintaining account relationships with your favorite companies into a fast, visual, enjoyable experience.

• Honest Discounts -- a mobile app that tells you not only where the nearest pharmacy is but also which pharmacy has the best price for your prescription.



Honest Discounts Ready to Take on High Prescription Prices

• Klypper -- a mobile app that makes it easy to create and combine video, text, drawings and emoticons for capturing those multimedia, multidimensional moments of your life.

Klypper CEO Presenting

All of the presenters were excellent and finished within 5 minutes. It was a great crowd.

Joszef wanted to know if I was photographing for the New York Times. I wish.

I caught up with some of the other participating companies after the presentations. Njabini Apparel was introducing a new scarf but also had lots of other beautiful stuff made by handicapped mothers in central Kenya. I love how local is global these days.

Njabini Apparel

Apptegic is a cloud-based analytics service that tells you how engaged each of your customers is with your business. I almost gave them Best Costume because the white board was wearing one of their t-shirts.

Apptegic T-shirt

I enjoyed talking with the folks from Orbeus about  computer vision and about the great Chicago fire. Their goal is to help computers see like human beings. Their visual recognition engine combines facial, product, scene and text recognition. I asked them if they could identify trees by species by viewing a forest from overhead (one of my fantasies for computer vision), but they don't have enough data about trees/forests to do that. What they do is take visual media content (video and images) as input and put  metadata around that content. Very cool and definitely useful for social networks and advertisers even if it's not the answer to my particular fantasy.

Team Orbeus

I think this is the first time I have ever watched a chemical reaction that didn't involve cooking at a Mass Innovation Nights event. The folks from Family Safe System were demonstrating a solution for a problem I never knew existed.  They sell devices and services to help chemotherapy patients protect their families, homes and everyone's water from the dangerous drugs that pass through their bodies intact in the 2-5 days after infusions.

Family Safe System Doing Chemistry

As usual, I tried to check out as many of the participating companies as possible. I missed a few this time. The ones I missed sounded interesting too:

• FairSetup -- provides a web-based performance management suite that allows companies to connect impact to compensation. Compensation according to one's impact, that defines fair compensation.
• CoachUp -- an online platform that connects people with private coaches in sports.
•  Boston Landlord Reviews--a free Internet site that allows prospective tenants to rate and review properties. Prospective tenants will be able to view valuable landlord information from current and previous tenants. That should come in handy during the upcoming student migration season.

Many of the usual suspects were there and there were lots of new people too. There was also a new wrinkle, lightning job postings. Folks who are hiring had a minute to pitch their job openings.

Pitching a Job

 

Entrepreneurs

Usual Suspects

Didn't get any photos of experts looking expert this time, but you're all experts and innovators anyway.

On the way back to the garage, I met the same people I had met when I arrived. It was their first time at MIN and they had a great time. They'll definitely be back.

Epic #MIN39 on the North Shore

Mass Innovation Nights visited the North Shore for the epic MIN39 event. OK, all MIN events are epic, but meeting in a giant former shoe factory/historic landmark is pretty darn epic . The Cummings Center in Beverly welcomed us with a well-appointed conference room, speedy wi-fi, and pizza. Hosts who provide pizza are awesome!

With the humid weather and the hot conference room, the APURE Air Purifier and Fan from Gulls Nest was attracting lots of traffic to their table. Cool in every sense of the word.

High-tech Fans from Gull's Nest Selling Like Hot Cakes

The four presenters showed us textiles, toys, video sharing, and good health. That's quite a range of products.

Crowd Tweeting the Presentations

The guys from Ministry of Supply looked cool and comfortable in their high performance business clothing despite the humidity. This is the kind of startup that wouldn't get off the ground in Silicon Valley because nobody wears business attire, but judging from the MIN39 attendees there's a definite niche for comfortable and practical dress shirts in Massachusetts. I hereby award the official MIN39 best costume award to Ministry of Supply.

Ministry of Supply -- Best Costume

I loved TheO™ from Physical Apps, a foam ball that combines your smart device with custom apps for fun physical games and activities. A smart ball for your smart device. Imagine bowling with your friends around the web with a real ball. 

TheO Ball

Bonfire Health is a multi-media health education company that changes lives by changing lifestyles. In case that sounds boring, the lemon flavored fish oil samples they were handing out were pretty exciting and didn't taste half bad.

Bonfire is Enthusiastic about Your Health

 Burst did a demo of their Mobile Video Solution designed for families. I was amazed at how fast and how simple it is. Way easier than and more private than Facebook.

The Burst Team

Theresa gave me a demo of  Strappy the Holder,  a polypropylene belt attached to a stretchy ring. It's extraordinarily well-designed.  The belt is worn as a bottle carrier and by adjusting the size of the ring a person can attach various size water bottles. Your water bottle moves with you instead of banging against your leg. Ingenious. You can add some decorative  "Bling for your Bottle" too.

Theresa Demonstrating Strappy

Bling for Your Bottle
And Theresa Got Her Parents to Watch the Table for Her

Why hasn't somebody invented such a massively useful thing as Zipboard before? It's a portable, retractable whiteboard that becomes a rigid whiteboard when you extend it. It even comes with a dry erase marker and eraser that store right inside the unit. Work in an open plan office? Teaching a class on the beach? Imagine having an easy to carry whiteboard right where you need it. Want to diagram plays for your soccer team right there on the sidelines? It comes in comes in 8 different sport specific versions.

Zipboard

Analytics is one of today's major buzzwords and a good source Social Media Analytics is much sought after. Klurig Analytics offers services to help social media marketers and social media agencies to calculate the Social Media ROI of their campaigns.

Klurig Analytics

By the time I got to the Demand Limiting Controller (DLC) from Save Energy Systems I was pretty tired and sweaty but anything having to do with HVAC always piques my interest, so I listened to the pitch for their simple, networked system to optimize HVAC units and reduce peak demand as well as energy costs with interest. So much interest, I forgot to take a photo of them.

This month's Experts Corner was up on a platform at the far end of the room behind the presentation screen. It was kind of fun to see the experts elevated. For the traditional Expert Looking Expert shot, I caught  Christina coaching on Ed using Pinterest for marketing.

Expert Looking Expert