Mass Innovation Nights- Pizza, IZZE and Plenty of Innovation

Jen Kaye is a PR, marketing and social media professional. At Carlton PR and Marketing, Jen specializes in using both traditional and social media marketing techniques to gain coverage and spread awareness for companies and their products. 

Can you believe last week was the 40th Mass Innovation Night on the books? Age sure isn’t slowing the event down as the IBM Innovation Center in Waltham was abuzz with excitement surrounding the local innovation on display. As always there was a great turnout and a ton of networking, along with dozens of boxes of pizza supplied by our sponsor, HostingCON! The presentation room was continuing to fill up as our top four products picked to present, Klypper, Honest Discounts, Azigo and AnniesBid.com took the podium.

Klypper App opened up the product presentation with an explanation of their platform, a mobile video editing application. This innovative app enters the market at a great time considering 90 percent of all internet traffic will be video in next three years and 2 million videos are uploaded to Facebook each month. Klypper lets users creatively add their own content and annotate video, which in its current state is so rigid and difficult to modify. Users can edit videos from their library or take one right from the Klypper app. From there, they can add drawings, text and emoticons. Users can also create picture slideshows and add commentary to it as the pictures rotate through. Klypper allows users to easily share on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, email or SMS. The Klypper app is available in the iPhone app market for free and will be on the Android market shortly. The Klypper team would love to hear feedback from users about how they use it, its ease of use, what challenges users have, what works best or what users would like to see.

The second product to present was Honest Discounts, a free prescription discount card that saves people up to 75 percent on FDA approved medication at 54,000 pharmacies across the country. This solution is great for three case examples, people who don’t have health insurance (50-70 million Americans across the country), people with health insurance but their insurance doesn’t cover the medication that they need (diabetes, mental health and lifestyle medications) and people who have insurance and their insurance does cover the medication needed but their co-pay is very high ($50-$80). For these people, Honest Discounts is a great solution. It is completely free to sign up for the card and people just have to show their card at the pharmacy when they go to pay and compare the savings. In first calendar year, Honest Discounts saved people over $3 million and generated over $425,000 per month in retail sales for the pharmacies. Right now they are in over 2,000 clinics across the country and in 12 major cities. The Honest Discounts card is available at the check-out window of participating clinics. There is no activation necessary, users just show the card like they show a coupon. The Honest Discounts mobile app is available on the iPhone market and is free and only requires name, email and password. With the app, there is no need to carry the card, they just need to open the app. The app also shows real-time price comparison as prices vary from pharmacy to pharmacy. The app searches all of the prices at pharmacies based on your location and right from the app you can call the pharmacy and order the script.

Azigo, a visual email management platform, was the next product to present. Azigo gives users a new email address that they will then give to vendors/companies that they subscribe to. This gives users control of their email stream as Azigo files these emails away and creates a visual, Pinterest like flow. There is a mute button to tune out the flow from vendors if users are over-budgeted and wish to stop receiving messages from online deal sites and the like. Whenever users build a new relationship with a vendor, a form pops up and users fill in their information and Azigo will remember it in the future so they won’t have to fill out the same information twice. Transactional emails (receipts, itineraries) show up in Azigo but are also forwarded to the user’s email so they are sure to see it right away. Sign up and request an invite for early adopters to try the service.  Azigo wants to learn about people’s preference for organizing messages and their behavior.

AnniesBid.com is a charity auction site that uses the pay-per-bid model. Instead of sites like ebay where the winner pays for the item, on AnniesBid.com users pay the bid upfront. This model results in the prices being significantly reduced to as much as 90 percent off. Each bid increases by $0.01 and the last bidder wins the item at the final price. AnniesBid sets aside a $0.10 amount from each bid for different charities. Operation Smile raised $12,000 using this model while ongoing charity for Operation Homefront has raised $3,000 so far. To date, AnniesBid has raised $18,000 for different charities. The auctions help different causes and national charities raise funds from sources they otherwise might not have. In the future, AnniesBid has plans to have local charities run their own auctions on their own site. There are bands on each auction that let participants know which charities are funded in that auction. Intermediate auctions are held for those that are new to the site and experienced bidders are not allowed in those auctions to give others a fair shot.

Thanks to everyone who attended for another great edition of Mass Innovation Nights! And a big thanks to all of our participating companies, Fair Setup, Njabini Apparel with their Beth Loop Scarf, CoachUp, Apptegic, Orbeus, Pharma-Cycle Inc.’s Family Safe System, Boston Landlord Reviews, Klypper App, Azigo, Honest Discounts, AnniesBid.com and IZZE for providing their sparkling juice! The next event is Mass Innovation Nights Foodie Edition on August 8th at Trade Center 128 in Woburn.