Best “Doing Good” Innovation
Do you “do good”? Have you designed an application or product that helps consumers be green, drives visibility for a cause, or mobilizes a group of people to benefit society through a socially responsible act? This category acknowledges the innovative technologies that are directly or indirectly driving contributions to society.
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Best Bootstrapped Start-Up
Starting a company has never been cheaper. Elastic cloud services, lean start-up mind-sets, readily available tools, and great talent have enabled companies to get a product out the door and monetized without the need for institutional money. This category recognizes companies across the technological spectrum who haven’t yet received a round of institutional funding, yet have created and delivered a compelling product to market. Our tagline at MITX is “What’s Next,” and the people and companies emerging from this category just may have the answer.
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Best Business Operations Simplifier
Otherwise known as “innovative tools that makes employees whistle while they work” (well, not literally). In all reality, innovative technologies have sharply reduced the cost of and complexity for deploying and managing mission critical infrastructure and applications, making our work lives easier and more effective. This category recognizes innovative technologies that fundamentally improve how organizations are addressing their most challenging internal tasks.
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Best Commerce Transformer/Game Changer
Collective buying, swapping, flash sales, personalized products and mobile commerce applications: these game changers have transformed, and continue to transform, the commerce world over the past several years. This category rewards the companies and products that are driving the furious innovation within the richly evolving commerce sector.
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Best Consumer Tech that Makes Life Easier
Have you ever wondered what life would be like without your (insert favorite, can’t-do-without-it technology here)? New England was already known as a vital innovator in the business-to-business space, and we are now seeing substantial growth in the number and variety of consumer technology innovations coming from our ecosystem. From personal productivity applications to team schedulers and health maintenance tools, this category recognizes innovations that help make our lives richer and easier as consumers.
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NEW!! Best Contribution to Innovation by a University/College
Boston is at once a hub of innovation and a vibrant college town. From opening innovation centers, to making groundbreaking achievements in technology, to fostering the entrepreneurial spirit in their students, local colleges and universities are constantly advancing the future of innovation in Massachusetts. The college community deserves recognition for fostering the ecosystem in New England, and this category aims to reward the institutions that are enabling innovation every day.
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Best Customer Engagement Driver
If only it was as simple as giving customers bright shiny rings to start long-term relationships. Instead, online marketing, social CRM and a variety of multi-mode communications tools have transformed how we identify, sell to, and manage customer relationships. Evolving from their roots as traditional CRM, PPC, CMS, or Outbound Marketing tools, this category rewards technologies that are helping enterprises small and large drive their sales and marketing efforts and support their customers in ways that were not previously possible.
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NEW!! Best Innovation in Financial Services
Digital Innovation in the financial services sector helps companies find opportunities for improving the customer experience by creating more digital touch points, and using consumer insights to drive new ideas. Financial services institutions face a more difficult challenge than other sectors when it comes to innovating, and those companies who have found a way to foster innovation stand far above the rest.
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NEW!! Best Mobile App
Nombophobia, or the fear of being away from your mobile phone, might sound far-fetched, but it afflicts a large and growing number of Americans. Then again, what's the big deal? You might be addicted to your smartphone, but with hundreds and thousands of attention-grabbing mobile apps to keep you organized, connected, and entertained, we can understand why you don't let it out of your sight. This category recognizes game changing developers that are stretching the limits of mobile OSS and providing a meaningful user experience.
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Best Mobile Solution
The growing number of mobile devices, from phones to tablets, are giving companies new opportunities to innovate mobile solutions. What are companies doing to enable building connections between the mobile user and businesses or other enterprise technologies? The Best Mobile Solution category rewards products and platforms in one of the most rapidly evolving sectors in the technology world, and one that our local community is helping to drive.
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Best Use of Game Mechanics
The line blurs. In the old days (pre-Foursquare and SCVNGR), games were specific things that we did instead of work, or as a way to socialize with other people. Those days are over. Gamification is now utilized across a range of applications to drive commerce, enhance social stature and recognition, or convey knowledge. This category recognizes applications that have effectively integrated Gamification, game mechanics and gaming elements into broader applications to improve user engagement and application effectiveness.
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Best User Experience
Think of this as the “Steve Jobs was right” award. Interface and usability design are critical to users as they embrace new technology products, whether on the desktop, tablet or handheld. Winners in this category will feature engaging, intuitive user interface and navigation that enhances the overall user experience and simplifies the use of the product.
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NEW!! Best Wellness Innovation
Nothing is more important than your health. Not even (gasp!) your iPhone. Massachusetts was one of the first states to require healthcare for all of its residents, and Boston is home to some of the best hospitals in the country. Innovations in healthcare technologies are impacting the very idea of healthcare, and how it's delivered. This category rewards the game-changing companies that are forging ahead in the wellness sector.
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Most Insightful: Analytics/ Business Intelligence
So much data, so little time. Whether creating a PPC campaign, analyzing user behavior, stock price fluctuations, data anomalies or advertising effectiveness, companies gather incredible amounts of information (we’re watching where you go from here). Tools in this category help to create actionable value for their users as a result of insightfully spotting trends, patterns, and unanticipated relationships.
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