Mass Innovation Nights - A monthly event held in various locations in Massachusetts.
You can follow info about the event on Twitter
here. #min20 was the tag to follow specifically what happened last night.
This event is a free event for people to show off their products and get some simple marketing with word of mouth. IP lawyers were also there to offer advice as well as people who run marketing sites who also offered advice to people for free.
Some of the products and people who stood out for me last night though included a anti-piracy software, which was more analytic's of who was pirating your iPhone/iPad software and had ways to help try and convert those users into paying users. Simple marketing for e-commerce, cloud based group collaboration projects and simple education animation software.
They have a great, simple to use stop motion animation software program called "SAM", which is aimed at K through 12 year old students, which has mostly been used towards science and maths classes, but can be used to enhance any kind of class by having kids create simple animations to show off their ideas and understanding of a project.
It really was very simple to use and a lot of fun. The free version is great and has most of the features, but a few extra editing features are in the licensed version which was $50 but a site license was only $300 and individual license costs would be deducted from a site license if you decided to upgrade at a later date.
iOS apps anti-piracy software you can bolt on to your apps, with Android coming soon. The free version has basic analytics which is pretty good and then a paid service for more features.
What it does is identify how many users are using pirated copies, how and where, allowing you to use the info to help convert some of those users into paying users, but the paid service can go as far as allowing your app to be used for a short while before bringing up notices to buy your app or lose the high score, or other such stuff to inhibit the fun of the game.
A whole suite of features from building your website with simple CMS funtions, to e-commerce and easy social media integration. What made this pretty interesting though was the level of realtime statistics, the huge amount of information it can provide for you in simple graphics was kind of neat, especially when seeing which affiliates of ad programs seem to be working the best for you.
A spin off from the Grasshopper Group. This was simple way to market your products using your customers, by allowing them to have a shout out on Facebook, Twitter or whatever they used to spread the word that they just got something they liked. Really useful for e-commerce, but probably less useful to convert sales in games where you are already on the platform, but it might work. There's a decent free trial of this service.
Cloud based collaboration software services. You can do ad-hoc group communications and work collaborations, file share and consolidate enterprise social networking with messages, chats, blogs and wikis all within one program.
There is free beta testing at the moment, but the licensing is $100 set up and then $20 annual service fee per seat.
Erik J Heels, of the above firm specialise in patent and trademark work with special interest in working with start ups to help minimise their costs. He does seem to understand the software and games sphere pretty well, so certainly with a talk to if you're in the Boston area looking for a lawyer, based in Maynard, MA.
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