Mass Innovation Night 2

Tonight, Boston marketing impresario Bobbie Carlton held the second  Mass Innovation Night at the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation in Waltham, Massachusetts. This showcase of local high tech companies drew several hundred attendees and eight companies ranging from raw startups to...IBM.

Tonight's lineup:

• AllFocus isayusay
• Clickhealth
• IBM LotusLive
• hubUnity
• Mixandmeet
• Nexiwave
• Pixily
• WherePhone

I had a chance to visit with a few of these.  IBM?Lotus showed off its latest Software as a Service offering built on the Notes/Domino platform: LotusLive. Offering the social networking capabilities of LinkedIn and Facebook, the document sharing capabilities of Domino, eRoom and Sharepoint, and the collaboration features of WebEx and Sametime, LotusLive can connect people inside and outside the enterprise for $45/month.

Pixily is a good example of the simple but useful type of service enabled by cloud computing.  For $14.95 a month, Pixily will let you send them a postpaid envelope of documents. They will scan them and store them on the Web (using Amazon S3) and then either shred the documents or return them to you.  They also OCR them, so you can search by content. They were handing out green Tyvek envelops good for a month's service.

Nexiwave was not giving a demo, but they were describing a new voice conferencing service that does speech recognition on the conversations.  (They claim 85% accuracy).  While they aren't yet available in real time, the transcripts offer the capability of searching for keywords in a meeting - shades of the omniscient computer from Star Trek that could play back any scene.

The venue for the event is interesting in its own regard. Housed in Francis Cabot Lowell's factory in Waltham, the Charles River Museum of Industry & Innovation houses exhibits of the watchmaking business that once dominated Waltham, a collection of early steam engines, and part of the Whirlwind computer.  I put some pictures here.

The next Mass Innovation Night is June 10, 2009.

Comments

[SpinItUp]

Thanks Chris! I appreciate your overview of the participants and a quick sense of what I've been missing (schedule conflicts. Argh.) I can't wait til June to try again. Bobbie, kudos to you for such a wonderful idea and successful execution.

I've been working with the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium team on our own event, slated for May 20th at MIT/Cambridge. Many of the companies represented at MassInno have so much to add, especially wrt how information, technology, and solutions can positively impact today's organizations. Newly launched, leading edge, these organizations can offer incredibly valuable experience in driving and delivering change. So to any of you CIO-types out there (and esp those from the companies launching at MassInno), check out www.mitcio.com and join us. We can learn a lot from you! Special rates are available if you contact me directly at melindamoses@gmail.com.

But mostly, keep on rockin' at MassInno and the blogging community. What a great service you're providing, and thanks again Chris. See you soon!

Melinda Moses
social and strategic marketing/community developer, MSM Strategic Marketing & Partner Dynamics
Co-Chair, partnerships and online community, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium

[Ben Jiang]

Hi, Chris, you are spot on with the nexiwave features: we want to enable you to search in your conference calls. You will be amazed by our speech recognition engine. If you, or anyone who reads your blog, haven't had a chance to try our service, please feel free to register in two easy steps (it's free):

http://nexiwave.com/registration/newRegistration.do?targetype=brf&promoCode=MassInno

btw: you can also enjoy full fledged telephone/web/video conference service with us too.

Ben Jiang
Founder/CEO
nexiwave.com