our IT breakout session: the region is home to an all-star cast of software companies in the architecture, engineering, construction, and product design markets. They’re all pushing each other to innovate faster and cheaper and regularly introduce new features to their products. The technology is also making it easier for regular people outside of those professions to try their hand at computer-aided design.
—Presenters at our health IT breakout session said the medical industry has missed the mark. “People go into medicine to help people, and we’ve turned them into minute-by-minute money grubbers,” said John Moore of the New Media Medicine project at the MIT Media Lab. “The real solution is getting rid of fee-for-service and to move toward a patient-centric model that allows doctors to care for patients.”
—The smart energy breakout panel raised some issues that the field has in common with health IT. Namely, how to get widespread adoption from consumers. Phil Adams, the president and chief operating officer of World Energy, said Americans need to “wake up,” and that “energy is a different animal” from software, in terms of how much work it takes to acquire customers. Bob LeFort, the CEO of Ember, said energy companies can take lessons from the telecom and mobile industry in marketing new features and products. “We have to make it easy and fun for people to take advantage of these things,” he said.
—The good old iPad pulled through in our end-of-day Xpo. Wade used his favorite gadget as an applause-o-meter (yes, there’s an app for that), to determine which of the four companies in each track—life sciences, IT, cleantech/energy—was the audience favorite. The life sciences winner was medicine authentication company Sproxil. Marginize, a TechStars company that lets consumers see what people are saying about the websites they’re visiting, took the IT crown. And lastly, the audience cheered its way to proclaiming Promethean Power Systems, a maker of solar-powered refrigerators, the winner of the cleantech/energy track. Thanks to all the Xpo companies for presenting.
