Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Blog

The community around Mass Innovation Nights

By Bobbie Carlton, co-founder, Mass Innovation Nights; founder, Carlton PR and Marketing

There’s been much written about the local Boston region innovation and entrepreneurial “community.” In fact, Joe Caruso, Christine Sierra and a seemingly endless team of volunteers have been celebrating this community and all that it offers for the last two years (BREW anyone?). But just how many communities can pick up like nothing happened when the host and founder disappears for the night? The Mass Innovation Nights (MIN) community is one.  

The January event happened to coincide with a reception for the Mass High Tech All-star winners. So, taking a deep breath, and feeling like a new parent leaving the baby with a sitter, I missed my first Mass Innovation Nights (#34). But, I knew the event was in the capable hands of Tim Stansky, Christine Sierra, the rest of the Carlton PR & Marketing team and our friends from the IBM Innovation Center, proving once and for all that the community isn’t just one person!

On a snowless night (thank goodness, remember last year?) in January, the Mass Innovation Nights community kicked off 2012 with a gander at 10 new products. We’re using a new system of QR generated shout-outs by working with SnapHop* (Spoiler alert: a February MIN launch!) from the founders of Evocatus, an August MIN company. SnapHop gives us an easy way to generate, manage and analyze the social media mentions.

Instead of simply launching a browser and taking you to Twitter (where you still have to sign-in to send the preloaded tweet), now the Mass Innovation Nights’ QR codes give you a way to choose whether you want to give your shout-out via Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, and sends that message quickly and easily. Much easier for us as well – our old system involved a cobbled together system of free tools that took end users to Twitter on the Web and pre-loaded a Tweet. This is much more elegant.

By using SnapHop, we were also able to see that CatchApp and Blue Train Mobile were the big “winners “for the evening, garnering the most shout-outs. CatchApp is a smartphone application that allows users to create and manage different kinds of location-based reminders. Users can choose whatever works best for them as a reminder – write notes, take pictures or videos, record voice memos and mark points on a map. BlueTrain Mobile’s mobile marketing engine allows brands to create professional and compelling mobile websites.

Meanwhile, we know from past events that search engine optimization (SEO) is a hot topic with the marketers and small businesses in the crowd. Jungle Torch is an advanced SEO report and social media tool. JungleTorch consolidates diverse online marketing analytics into an SEO report. And, when you get prospective customers to your website, your sales team comes into play – NetCommissions allows sales leaders to model compensation plans, manage the monthly compensation process and communicate with the sales team.

On the more consumer-oriented side of the house, the jog.fm app detects how fast you’re running and matches your pace to the best songs from your device. Campus Libre, a free college textbook marketplace and price comparison website is something I wish existed when I was in college! GivingSomeThing enables donors to give real goods to their favorite nonprofits, letting them know exactly how their money is being used. Note the capitalization in the company name. And, do we consider Zyrra a high tech company? The measurement and design system uses computer aided design (CAD) and that is certainly high tech, so I’ll say “yes!”

See you all next month in Kendall Square for one of our few Cambridge-based events.

*Full-disclosure, one of the SnapHop founders has been an Innovation Breakfast guest host for me, and I will be signing on to act as an advisor for the company.