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Congratulations 15MOF Winners

By mesh11

After a hiatus, we decided to bring back “15 Minutes of Fame” this year as a way to help put the spotlight on the growing number of start-ups doing interesting things. We were delighted to receive a flurry of applications from a wide variety of start-ups. It made life difficult for our judges who were given the challenge of boiling it down to six selections.

In the end, the following companies were picked:

The six companies get a pass to mesh11 and an opportunity to demo their idea in the mesh Village. mesh attendees will be asked to vote for the Grand Prize Winner, which will receive the following package:

– A mentorship lunch with Farhan Thawar, vice-president, engineering, with Xtreme Labs

– A half-day PR training session from Edelman

– A one-year membership from the Toronto Board of Trade (more details here)

– A one-hour consulting session with Mark Evans, a mesh co-founder and digital marketing strategist.

Sponsor Spotlight: Florist One

By mesh11

I know I’m probably not allowed to say this, it’s like saying you actually prefer one kid over the next, but I immediately liked Brian, a Partner at Florist One.

His story is the kind of story that means mesh is doing exactly what mesh is meant to do- inspire!

Brian has been attending mesh from the start, this will be his sixth year attending, and if you ask him, he’ll tell you he looks forward to it like it’s Christmas morning.

He was suffering, like a lot of you out there, not finding conferences that really captured what was going on with Web 2.0 in terms of social media, user generated content and the participatory web.  Intro. ..mesh conference!

Florist One’s API is a direct result of Brian’s “mesh” learning.

In learning about APIs, he thought about they could be applied to Florist One – they are an online florist that delivers flowers through local florists in the U.S. and Canada. They had an affiliate program where they paid affiliate partners on flowers they would sell for them. They ran their program like a traditional affiliate program – with links that take a visitor from the affiliate’s site to their site where the visitor makes the purchase. The affiliate is paid a commission on the sale.

With the Florist One API, a partner such as Stewart Enterprises, a large operator of funeral homes in the U.S., can create a flower storefront directly on their website. For example, Stewart’s Garden of Memories website offers flowers using the Florist One API – the visitor never has to leave the Garden of Memories to make a purchase. The order is sent to Florist One via the API and they handle every aspect of order fulfillment and customer service.

The Florist One API can also be used to build mobile applications on any mobile operating system to let users of the applications send florist-delivered flowers through their phones. Florist Now is a mobile application built by an affiliate that is available through iTunes that let’s you send flower nationwide through your iPhone or iPad. Mobile Florist is another application built by an affiliate using the API for the HP webOS operating system.

There are many uses of the Florist One API including Facebook applications, dating websites, helping corporations and helping good causes. Their API let’s our partners offer flowers directly and it creates new and easy revenue streams for them.

The Florist One API fundamentally changes flower buying in many ways – mainly in that flower buying moves across the internet and trust is leveraged as the visitor never has to leave a website or application to make a purchase.

The release of the Florist One API and their presence at mesh this year as a sponsor is like coming full circle.

It helps that Brian is also amazingly prompt, extremely hard working and a really really nice guy.  Make sure you take some time to connect with Brian next week.

These are the stories that inspire US.

Sponsor Spotlight: Motorola

By mesh11

It probably goes without saying that without the support of sponsors, it would challenging to make mesh happen. Among the growing number of sponsors this year is Motorola Canada.

Motorola can be found in the mesh Village with a wide variety of products, including the ATRIX superphone, XOOM tablet and lifeproof DEFY. Stop by and check out their latest Android devices. Motorola will also be running a Motorola XOOM loaner program, giving you the opportunity to try out the Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) tablet for yourself.

Motorola is also giving away a couple passes to mesh. To enter, tweet using the #MOTOROLAmesh hashtag and let then know why you want to attend mesh. Contest closes today. If you’re already coming to mesh but still looking to win, Motorola will be giving away two Motorola XOOMs during the conference. Details on how to enter will be available at the Motorola booth in the mesh village.

You can connect with Motorola on Twitter (@Motorola_CA) and on Facebook.