TechColumbus Innovation Awards

Last night TechColumbus held its annual Innovation Awards at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. I got the opportunity to attend as a representative of The Fisher College of Business Center for Entrepreneurship.

The event, attend by more than one-thousand prominent figures in Columbus business, has seen 40% grown since last year. The primary purpose of the event was to announce and celebrate the finalists and winners of awards in the following categories:

• Green Innovation
• Minority Owned Enterprise
• Outstanding Service
• Outstanding Product
• Innovation in Non-Profit Service Delivery
• Executive of the Year
• Outstanding Woman in Technology
• Inventor of the Year
• Outstanding Start-up Business
• Outstanding Technology Team
• Student Innovation Awards

However, the event emceed by 10TV’s Andrea Cambern and Jeff Hogan also included several special guest appearances including one by Resource Interactive Founder and CEO Nancy Kramer.

TechColumbus’ web marketing team made creative use of social networking technology to engage the audience at the Convention Center as well as those that did not attend. A “tweetpit” was setup next to the stage with three web marketers who live blogged, tweeted, updated facebook and posted live video of backstage interviews with the winners. A giant display showed a live twitter stream of the Innovation Awards twitter hashtag (#IA09) which the “1100 geeks in a room” drove to a regional trending topic.

It is interesting to see what happens when you encourage the twittersphere to embrace your event. All the conversation certainly attracted attention from people outside the physical event, but it also gave a voice to people with negative opinions of it.

Congratulations to all the winners and nominees and thanks to the Center for Entrepreneurship and Dave Shaw for the invite.

Reposted from Fisher Grad Life Blog.

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