#MINFoodie10 Recap

Welcome to Hatch Fenway

This month's Mass Innovation Nights host, Hatch Fenway, provided not only a huge space but also great views and a swing set. Despite the huge space, the event was jam-packed. It was quite a crowd.  Glad I grabbed a quick sip of green juice from the juice-support provider, Suja, on the way in the door.

Suja Providing Juice Support for the Event

With 11 companies displaying products plus a full Expert Corner, there was a lot to see and taste. Products ranged from fantastic Vietnamese juices to a soup CSA.

XOI Juices

My first stop was for more juice. I tasted two flavors of the Gac juice from XOI. Wow! What great tastes! They explained to me that Gac, a fruit I had not heard of before, has more beta-carotene than carrots and more lycopene than tomatoes. I really enjoyed both flavors that I tasted, and I signed up for their email list.

Realizing that I wouldn't be able to check out everything, I prioritized and went in search of the four chosen presenters: Vera Roasting, Stuffed Cookies, Banana Samba, and ShotCakes.

Delicious Coffee with Resveratrol

Imagine the much-publicized health benefits of red wine in a cup of coffee! CoffVee from Vera Roasters is infused with resveratrol, an antioxidant found in the skins of red grapes, which is responsible for the so-called French Paradox. The French eat lots of cheese and butter and other fatty foods and yet have less cardiovascular disease because they get resveratrol from drinking red wine. I had a nice hot cup of CoffVee dark roast and enjoyed the taste as much as many another dark roast blend I've tasted.

Sara Serving Awesome Cookies

Sara's "Stuffed Cookies" are so good that I had a hard time choosing whether to vote for Sara Ran Away with the Spoon or XOI Juices. The cookies got my vote, but it was really close. The mint chocolate chip cookie I tried had a scrumptious peppermint inside.

Banana Samba

Banana Samba is a Brazilian treat made from banana, pure cane sugar, and lime juice, or in the "no sugar added" version just banana and lime juice. I tried the no sugar added version. It's chewy and satisfyingly sweet.

Team ShotCakes

Who could pass up a fresh-baked cupcake with ice cream inside? ShotCakes takes "cake and ice cream" to a new level. I tried a "Birthday Cake" one and I hereby give it my seal of approval.

Maca-Nut

Maca-Nut tasted much like other chocolate peanut butters that I've tasted but with a little more depth and a smoother, more robust mouth feel. The essential ingredient in Maca-Nut is Peruvian maca flavored with 100% cocoa liquor. The only sweetener is unrefined brown Coconut Palm sugar.

Raduno Soups

Raduno Soup CSA is monthly soup service. All soups are made with homemade from scratch stock and fresh ingredients. Because I'm vegetarian, I didn't sample the beef-based soup but I heard other attendees saying "Mmmmmmmm" so I'm guessing it was good.

TBD Foods - Best Costume

TBD Foods  caters farm to table dinner parties for small groups. You can even host the dinner party in your home.  With so many teams rocking matching T-shirts, it was difficult to choose a Best Costume of MINFoodie10, but I thought team TBD's shirts were the most "foodie" so I hereby award them Best Costume.

In the fan voting,  the grand prize winner was Vera Roasting, with runners up ShotCakes, What's Good, and Omega Oil.

Vera Roasting's CoffVee Collecting the Well-Deserved Prizes

The Expert Corner was buzzing all evening. The folks from Toast, a restaurant technology platform,  posed for the traditional Experts Looking Expert photo.

Experts Looking Expert

#MIN82 Recap

Mass Innovation Nights started the year off right showcasing a variety of  local innovation at MIN82 hosted by Endurance International Group in Burlington. Endurance provided a great space, food, and beverages as well as decor that evoked Antarctic expeditions of bygone days.

Endurance

The products on display were diverse as usual. The four products chosen to present by the pre-event voting were: Sonzia, TripBuddy, WeGush, and Pavlok.

Presenters Waiting to Be Introduced

Sonzia brings affordable large scale touch screen technology to classrooms and workplaces for people of all abilities with TouchEasel and Ualli. The demo presentation was impressive with good contrast, responsiveness, and sheer size. Very cool. I can imagine big touchscreens in all sorts of applications.

The TouchEasel Screen

Pavlok's demo table was drawing big crowds well before the presentations began. It's a wearable device that helps reduce cravings and break bad habits with mild electrical zaps (and/or buzzes, beeps, vibrations) that are supposed to retrain your brain to stop liking the habit.

Crowd Around Pavlok's Table

Gratitude feels awesome! The WeGush Gratitude App for iOS and Android makes it really easy to  express your gratitude to others anytime, anywhere right from your smart phone (or as my friend Douglas calls it, your digital extension of consciousness). It's integrated with your social media and messaging apps and provides fun messages of appreciation for you. It couldn't be easier to thank someone. The app is an even better and more convenient way to spread gratitude around than the web site that WeGush presented at MIN67.

Martha Huntley - WeGush Founder

Does the world need another "ride sharing" app what with Uber and Lyft and all? You bet it does! tripBuddy is a ride sharing platform that connect students without cars with students who have cars on campus who happen to be heading to the same destination. That's right, it's real ride sharing, not a glorified taxi service. The tripBuddy team was very enthusiastic and showed off their matching T-shirts, so I hereby award them Best Costume of MIN82.

TripBuddy Team in Matching T-shirts

VQL is data analysis made simple. With VQL, even non-techies can query the database and get answers simply and quickly. Everybody on your team can get  answers, not just those who know how to write complicated SQL queries. There's no coding involved.

Answering Questions about VQL

College admissions website Admitster attracted a lot of attention. Billing themselves as "the world's most useful college admissions website" is not much of an exaggeration. They've figured out how to use data analytics to predict your  chances of being accepted by any of the colleges or universities in the United States, and they offer solutions for improving your chances.

Needless to say, Admitster ended up being the grand winner in the favorites voting. The other three winners (who got cool Endurance gym bags) were VQL, Sonzia, and WeGush. All well-deserved.

I didn't get a chance to talk with or photograph Impress.ly, metacog, GemShelf,, or SnapScreen, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't check them out online.

There were plenty of experts in the house. In addition to the traditional Expert Corner, our hosts offered some experts as well.

Business On Tapp  was one of the featured experts/companies from Endurance International Group. Got questions about your entrepreneurial ideas? Need answers, solutions, connections? No matter who you are Business On Tapp provides real business guidance for you. It's like having the Expert Corner in your pocket all the time.

Business On Tapp Team

In the Expert Corner. besides dispensing HR expertise, Mark DeMello of TriNet struck a humorous pose for the traditional Expert Looking Expert photo.

Expert Looking Expert

from wireless charging to the bike bus at #MIN80

As soon as I pulled into the parking lot at Autodesk in Waltham for Mass Innovation Nights MIN80, I spotted one of the evening's innovative products: the BikeBus. It's not every day you see a bus full of people working out on stationary bikes.

BikeBus in the Autodesk Parking Lot

Autodesk is a great host. Besides pizza and salads -- really good salads -- they provided a space big enough for the crowd. The turnout was amazing.  Every table had a knot of people at least three deep asking questions about the products. The four presenters BikeBus, QuikForce Movers, Stack AI, and Greenlight Technologies, chosen by online voting before the event, were already generating a lot of buzz before the presentations even started.

Crowd

By far my favorite product was the GreenTech Charge wireless charging network from Greenlight Technologies. Imagine being able to charge your mobile device at a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, or event venue without having to remember to lug a cable around with you, find a power outlet, or carry a spare battery pack. GreenTech makes it easy for coffee shops, restaurants, and other public places to become wireless charging stations. Their app helps you find places that have these wireless charging systems installed. It's a win for both the venues and the users: more customers for the venue and convenience for the user. You can charge more than one device at a time too! GreenTech's software platform provides added value for the venue with advertising opportunities and customer data.  It was no surprise that GreenTech Charge won the grand prize in the audience choice voting. Well deserved!

Chris from Greenlight Technologies

Another crowd favorite in the audience voting was the BikeBus. Taking a spin class on a bus during your commute may not be exactly as much fun as riding your bike to work, but it is a novel idea for making good use of commute time to get in your workout if you don't have the opportunity to bike to work. It's essentially a mobile exercise studio. You can book a private trip for an event, a tour of Boston, or a company rush hour ride. Say you have a group of workers in Billerica who want to get home to Somerville, if there are at least 6 of them you can book the BikeBus to drive them home while they work out. I'm not sure how this would scale, but it does open up interesting possibilities. Lots of MIN80 attendees tried it out and experienced what BikeBus was calling the BikeBus afterglow. Since it's hard to ignore a bus in the parking lot, I hereby award BikeBus Best Prop of MIN80.

Chatting about BikeBus

How about a data-driven approach to moving? QuikForce simplifies moving using a machine learning algorithm to match you with the best moving company for your needs.  Their presentation generated a bit of buzz on Twitter and definitely got people talking.  I was kind of surprised they didn't place in the crowd favorite voting. I wonder if they use their data and algorithms to solve the problem of the annual student migration in Boston on Labor Day. :-)

QuikForce

The other crowd favorite winners were Happening and Animatron. Happening is an app that helps you find things to do and organize your friends to go with you. Animatron helps you create mobile-friendly HTML5 animations without coding. The crowd made it a little difficult for me to get to their tables, so no pics.

The Crowd

I had a great conversation with the team from Nabi Music Center about finding the right music instructors for kids. They have an online marketplace to connect students and music instructors for private lessons locally. I loved the idea of easily finding teachers by zip code and instrument, and being able to read reviews. It simplifies the decision-making process for parents (or aunties :-)) and gives them the confidence in their choices.  The team rocked matching T-shirts with their logo so well that I hereby award them Best Costume of MIN80.

Nabi Music - Great Idea and Best Costume of MIN80

Fuzzy Compass was attracting a fair number of visitors to their table for demos of their SaaS platform/tool suite for providing top travel influencers like food bloggers and travel writers with a way to turn their destination knowledge into a trip planning service for consumers by providing personalized one-on-one trip planning help for a fee.

Fuzzy Compass

The Student Startup Spotlight this month featured two companies from the Wentworth Institute's Accelerate Innovation +  Entrepreneurship Center: ESI Devices and Organic Connections.

ESI Devices

Catheter Port from ESI Devices makes it easier for patients to deal with catheters and prevent infection.

Organic Connections

Organic Connections' wooden construction toys are creative fun for small children. The abstract shapes and the ability to reconfigure your creation without having to change any connection points stimulates the imagination and encourages role playing.

Over in the Expert Corner we had wordsmith Alan Dillingham providing information about the 1776 Challenge Cup. Judging by the number of people surrounding his table, expertise on the Challenge Cup was in demand.

Women Rule #MIN79

Women entrepreneurs invaded the Innovation District for Women Entrepreneurs Week and Mass Innovation Nights MIN79. District Hall was jam-packed. Boston Harbor was looking a lot less icy than the last time I was in the district (must get there more often :-)).  I parked a short distance away from the hall so I could get in a bit of a walk, enjoy the weather, and take in the view from Marina Park.

Welcome to the Seaport Innovation District

On my waterfront walk, I reached the conclusion that Babson, one of the MIN79 sponsors,  is amazing before I even got to the event when I saw this ingenious advertisement:

Babson Must Have the Best PR Folks Ever

This MIN Women Founders event is part of Women Entrepreneurs Week in Boston. WEBOS is the City of Boston's program to support its women entrepreneurs and they were there in full force (and obviously got the color coordination memo for their outfits :-)). It was a delight to talk with them, and you should check out their programs.

Team WEBOS

The crowd was huge. The table display area was practically already full before the doors even officially opened.

This Crowded and the Event Hasn't Even Started Yet

It was great to see Sherry Handel of  Energy Harvesters again and follow how things are going with the Walking Charger™ , one of the coolest hardware inventions ever.  Imagine being your own power source.  Charge your mobile device batteries just by walking.  At first the Walking Charger will be integrated within footwear by companies like Wolverine and Timberland. The next step after that is a version that's swappable among footwear. I've been imagining putting one of these on my hiking boots since the first time I heard Sherry speak.  Energy Harvesters deservedly won the grand prize in the voting.

Sherry Handel of Energy Harvesters Talking Entrepreneurship with Amanda from Babson CWEL

Second place went to JumpSmart with their super fun way of helping kids ages 8-12 learn programming and creativity. Their interactive mat full of lights and sensors reminded me of the musical stairs at the Museum of Science. Kids interact with it by jumping on it and use a programming language on a tablet to create interactive games that use the mat. Engaging mind and body in teaching coding takes learning to a new level.

JumpSmart

Beam impressed me with its simplicity and usefulness. It's an app that lets two people share their current locations in real time for an hour,  privately - just between the two of you. This beats the heck out of texting and calling repeatedly when trying to rendezvous for lunch with someone.  They definitely deserved their prize too.

Beam

You and Me as Map Pins

The other prize winner was  Cintell, a cloud-based "customer intelligence" platform that uses data  analytics to help companies to better understand their customers. It makes personas more dynamic and more detailed for way better insight into things like buying habits, preferences, and so on.

Cintell

My personal favorite was Cabbige, an online business management tool specifically designed for small-scale agriculture.  It makes figuring out the best price for a crop, tracking inventory, and keeping records easy and centralized all in one tool. Anything that helps small farmers become more profitable gets my vote. Plus they had the most beautiful butternut squash on display.  Judging by what I've seen at the local farms around me out here in "rural vibe with mills" this has been a great year for butternut squash.

Cabbige

Beautiful Butternut Squash

MIN regular Susan Ahern introduced me to Canadian entrepreneurs Janine Kwoh and Lily Zou.  Janine designs/makes wonderful little cards that celebrate all kinds of sentiments for our absurd and diverse lives.  Boston and Bale includes Janine's Kwohtations cards in their bales.  Lily's company, NutraEx Food, makes a line of alternative natural sweeteners called Sugarlike to help you reduce sugar and calories but keep the taste.

Janine, Susan, Lily - Women Entrepreneurs

Janine's Kwohtations on the Boston and Bale Table

Boston and Bale delivers monthly or one time curated packages full of handcrafted products. What a great way to discover new local products. They donate a portion of their proceeds each month to a Boston-based charity/organization.

Boston and Bale

I liked the concept of Design SySTEM from Teaching Garage.  It's an online engineering curriculum for elementary schools. Here's hoping it inspires a new generation of innovators that's more inclusive of girls. (BTW, girl scientists rock, especially those related to me.)

Teaching Garage

It's about time somebody came up with a service like Date My Wardrobe, an online marketplace to rent high end fashion pieces available near you. Plus, they had the best prop - a really stylish high-heeled shoe. I hereby award it Best Prop of MIN79.

Best Prop of MIN79

Digaboom is a new collaboration platform and community for digital marketing, design and technology experts. It brings together all the talent for a particular project. Tracey, the Chief Creative Officer and Co-Founder,  gave an energetic presentation. The Digaboom team's matching t-shirts, edged out all the other matching t-shirt teams for Best Costume of MIN79 too.

Digaboom

The Babson WIN Lab featured entrepreneurs this month were Green Pinata Toys and Lusterity. I enjoyed talking with both of them.  Green Pinata is basically a toy-sharing service. Kids lose interest in their toys so quickly, it's great to be able to rent them. You can subscribe by the month or every 2 months and get a box of non-toxic toys delivered. Lusterity is a one stop event planning shop for socially conscious celebrations. They've got a pop-up "Make It Matter" marketplace coming up on November 15, which should be festive and fun and get your holiday celebration preparation off to a good start.

Green Pinata

Lusterity

For the traditional closing shot of Experts Looking Expert, I give you the women of Silicon Valley Bank, generous sponsor of MIN79.

Experts Looking Expert - Silicon Valley Bank