The Innovation Economy Awards, TechStars edition
Boston's Most Impressive New CEO
Yifan Zhang of Pact, which has developed a mobile app that uses behavioral economics to motivate people to go to the gym. Not just for a masterful presentation today, but Zhang has built strong momentum for the company leading up to today.
Team on a Mission
The French fellows building Psykosoft want to make it easier for anyone to create digital artwork, animation, and music. In today's presentation, they playfully tweaked tech giant Adobe for offering pricey software (like Photoshop) that's hard to learn; their mission is to make it enjoyable and fast for anyone to start creating cool stuff online. The team has a great attitude and a fun marketing message: "We believe everybody is a bit crazy, but not everyone accepts it." (That's the Psykosoft team hard at work in the photo at right.)
The Making Cities More Liveable award
Zagster, a company founded in Philadelphia that relocated to Cambridge earlier this year. The startup wants to make it easy for colleges, hotels, and corporate campuses to offer fleets of bikes for hourly or daily use. And more bike riders is an excellent thing for any city.
Most Compelling Presentation
Chris Howard of Libboo, who's out to reinvent the publishing business for the digital age. He talked about his company's mission of finding more readers for e-books by poets like Marshall "Soulful" Jones... and had Jones recite one of his electrifying poems to begin the presentation.
The Gotta Download It Now award
UberSense chief executive Krishna Ramchandran made me want to buy one of the company's mobile apps on the spot. They allow you to shoot video of your golf, tennis, or baseball swing, for instance, and then pay $10 to have a coach analyze what you could improve. You can also watch your video side-by-side with that of a pro to observe the differences.
The Biggest Surprise award
Laveem, which started out the TechStars program focusing on building an online community to help teachers share lesson plans and classroom resources. Now, they're working on the Food Genome Project, a vast database of nutritional information that could help site builders and mobile app developers create useful new tools for cooks and diners. Great concept.
The Hive | Local Innovation News
TechStars Demo Day: The 14 startups presenting
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about the blogger
About Scott Kirsner Scott Kirsner was part of the team that launched Boston.com in 1995, and has been writing a column for the Globe since 2000. His work has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, and Variety. Scott is also the author of the books "Fans, Friends & Followers" and "Inventing the Movies," was the editor of "The Convergence Guide: Life Sciences in New England," and was a contributor to "The Good City: Writers Explore 21st Century Boston." Scott also helps organize several local events on entrepreneurship, including the Nantucket Conference and Future Forward. Here's some background on how Scott decides what to cover, and how to pitch him a story idea.
Events
May 22: MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
Chief information officers from Guess, Haemonetics, Intel and other companies talk discuss "architecting the enterprise of the future."
June 3: MITX Innovation Awards
Economist & blogger Jodi Beggs hosts at the Westin Copley.
June 25: TEDxBoston
The oldest and biggest of the locally-organized TED events is back, at the Seaport World Trade Center. Tickets are free, but tough to get. Also streams on the web and airs on WBUR.
