WebInno34 Wrap Up

WebInno 34 Wrap-Up

Thank you to everyone who came out to the Royal Sonesta for WebInno 34 on Monday! We had some interesting – and even delicious – presentations; and, as always, it was great to see some familiar faces and meet so many new people interested in innovation and the Boston tech community.

After some networking, things launched into our Main Dish presentations with Cloze. Cloze is a free service that analyzes your social networks, emails, and other digital interactions to identify all of your contacts and rank them based on the quality and level of your relationship with them. Once ranked, Cloze will make sure you never miss a message from an important contact. It also allows you to see who among your connections has the best relationship with anyone you might want an introduction to by helping distinguish between one-time acquaintances and true connections. As they put it, right now most of us are “blind to our network’s network,” but Cloze can help with that.

Dan Foody of Cloze

Next up was ImpulseSave. According to their data, Americans spend about 20-30% of their disposable income on impulse purchases. ImpulseSave is working to make it just as fun and easy to save as it is to spend. By signing up with ImpulseSave you create an online piggy bank (which is actually a savings account with Leader Bank, linked to your existing checking account). You can set concrete goals for what you are saving towards – a vacation, paying down student loans, a new phone, etc. Then you can “impulse save” online or directly from your phone, wherever and whenever you feel like it. And every time you do, you’ll get a message congratulating you on getting closer to your savings goals. Their users save an average of $3,000-$4,000, so it sounds like all that impulse saving is working.

Phil Fremont-Smith of ImpulseSave

Our last Main Dish was MyReci, an online community for finding, sharing and collecting recipes. Using the MyReci bookmark button, you can “Fork” recipes from basically anywhere on the web the entire recipe back will be transferred to you MyReci page where you can edit it, save it to different collections (they walked us through creating a dinner party menu) and share it. You can also take a picture of a recipe with your phone, and within 48 hours it will appear on the site. Pretty magical. They even brought a tray of founder Vijay Nathan’s delicious chocolate chip cookies. Either the cookies or their demo won over the crowd and MyReci won the audience choice poll!

Vijay Nathan of MyReci

After the Main Dish presentations, everyone returned to the networking area to chat with the three Main Dish presenters and the six Side Dish companies:

• ByteLight uses LED lights to provide indoor location technology, pinpointing a person’s exact position within a building. They’re currently doing some “top secret” free deployments to really put the technology to the test.

• GivingSomeThing is an online donation platform that lets you send physical products to nonprofit organizations. There are no fees, so the idea is this way you know exactly how your money was spent to make a difference, because you’re the one who spent it.

• Ovuline says they want to be “Weight Watchers for fertility.” They’re a free ovulation calendar designed to apply advanced statistics to produce accurate forecasts for conception.

• Specctr “supercharges” Adobe Fireworks to automate spec generation for site development.

• Stix is a mobile app that lets you customize photos with “stickers” to create wacky images that you can share with friends. You can also “remix” your friends’ photos too!

• Trendslide is a mobile business intelligence solution. It’s a subscription based application for iPhone and iPad that pulls in data from your existing sources (think Salesforce) to give real-time trend reports on the go.

All and all it was a great evening of innovation and interaction. Thanks again to all of our presenters and attendees for making this another interesting and fun event! Thank you, also, to our sponsors for the evening: Microsoft, GesmerUpdegrove, TripAdvisor, Wayfair, Litle, Constant Contact, Silicon Valley Bank and InkHouse.