Okay, so maybe you’ve seen the pictures and saw our press release for the big event in North Dakota called North Plains Inventors Congress. But what’s this about Marketplace for Entrepreneurs??

We were confused two as to the significance of the two events taking place back to back on January 15 and 16th. So we’ll try and break it down into it’s simplest form.

The North Plains Inventors Congress, aka NPIC, was put on by Neustel Law Firm. The NPIC is really two things 1) an invention contest and 2) a 4 hour educational seminar on everything related to inventions and ideas.

Since our site, IdeaTango, is based on some pretty sweet patent-pending software, we actually participated in the Invention Contest. However, since the whole purpose of the show is to promote growth in North Dakota, we figured we didn’t stand a chance and participated just for the practice. Roughly 30 inventors competed and the big winner of the $2500 grand prize was actually someone we interviewed. We’ll have that video up later. This guy had created what looks like a golf cart that floats so people could go ice fishing and not worry about the ice breaking since it also floats.

The 4-hour seminar talked about all the important topics like patents, market research, public relations, financing inventions, and more. We’ll have some video and audio in our education section for the different seminars.

Now Marketplace for Entrepreneurs is a much larger part of the show, which promotes all kinds of new business and innovation, not just inventing. There were people with agricultural services, candle makers, business plan contestants, and 100 other small business and service providers. They also had roughly 100 classes for people looking to start their own business, or get their business on the right track.

The exhibition part of the show was only January 16th from 9-5pm. Although the booths were almost free $25, I probably wouldn’t exhibit there if I was an inventor because there were not any manufacturers or quality service providers walking around. Of course if you’re in the upper midwest area, I’d recommend going just for the contest or the helpful seminars.

From the weather side, yes it was friggin’ cold. I haven’t seen that cold of weather since I worked in Russia. My nostrils would freeze shut just walking from the car to the hotel entrance. Just as you would do in any cold weather, we just layered and layered and layered!

Other things of interest, we interviewed Senator Kent Conrad from North Dakota and Michael Neustel who put on the NPIC. Of course we have lots of pictures with locals wearing our light bulb hat, check out our photo gallery. If you were at the show, by all means chip in your thoughts about the show.