Anthony Deaver

If you follow me on twitter you know I’ve been whining about how lousy my week has been. Can’t seem to get out of my own way, etc… Sorry about that. At 9:21 am this morning all that went away, and nothing short of the end of the world will bring it back. That’s when Beck left a message for me on my cell saying Accessible Places was a finalist for the 2011 MITX Innovation awards.

If the world got a little brighter about that time it was me grinning like an idiot.

Maybe it’s no big deal for some to be nominated and make it to being a finalist, but for a couple friends that built something on a whim over 48 hours, and has had an avalanche of interest since launch it’s awesome. If you want deep detail about what AP is you can check out my post about it here, but the basics are: we built it at the Boston.com hack-a-thon based on the seed of an idea from my wife where we ended up winning ‘Best use of Geo-Location’. Since we have been approached by Code for America about keeping the data open and having them consume it into their Open Civic dataset. We’ve also been approached by CitiRoller about also taking our data once we get a reasonable amount.

We’ve had a meeting with the Boston Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities to work with the city to get their existing data cleaned up and put into our system to help build a better system for people to get where they want to go safely.

Now we are finalists for MITX.

All in 2 months, and all without any kind of promotion. Everything has been word of mouth to this point.

Your head swimming yet? Mine is. The original plan has us here next year. So, as Sam said at the presentation Tuesday night, we went through our One Year plan in 2 months. Now we are trying to figure out the next steps.

Speaking of the presentation, those that know me know I hate presenting. Especially when I’m talking about myself or something I built. I get nervous, tunnel vision, the whole thing. Even as a kid I sucked at presenting in front of the class or at the science/art/whatever fair. I failed to get into the theater class in high school (where I figured I could fix the problem) because I was so bad.

I made it through without sounding too much like an idiot, thanks in no small part to Sam. The stupid part is, once the ‘presenting’ is over and the Q&A starts I’m fine. No nerves, no tunnel vision, nothing. Like I said, stupid. Best part is that after we were done every judge gave us their card and said they knew someone that would love to work with us on this. It’s mindblowing that we are getting all this attention.

Anyway, that nightmare is over and now all I have to do is wait until June 16th to see if we win. I’m actually okay if we don’t win because we’ve come so far and being a finalist this soon in the lifecycle is a special thing. Plus we made some great contacts at the presentation, and I’m sure we will make more at the event in June.

But I so want to win.

Just hope I don’t throw up if we do :)