BizSpark Archives

Six BizSpark members finalists in the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Industry Achievement Awards

2011-02-03T22:10:00Z

By Cliff Reeves

I was proud to be a presenter at the Washington Technology Industry Association’s Industry Achievement Awards on February 24^th. The event was a lively one, well attended, and held at Showbox SODO, showcasing so much innovation.

Picture courtesy of Tim Reha and John McIntosh, www.NewMediaSynergy.com

Six members of the Microsoft BizSpark program were finalists in this event, and I just want to tip my hat to them for this great achievement. These finalists, by category, were:

Consumer Product or Service of the Year

Swype

Service Provider of the Year

HasOffers

Best Early Stage Company of the Year

Off & Away

Best Seed Stage Company of the Year

I want extend special congratulations to the three who won their categories: SPARQCODE.COM, HasOffers, and Swype.

I was lucky enough to present the award for “Technology Leader of Tomorrow” where three sixth graders were the finalists. I was blown away by the quality of their work.

All in all it was a fantastic night.

Cliff

Microsoft and BizSpark Partners Help Develop Sweden’s ICT Skills

2010-04-04T20:58:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Arbetsförmedlingen, Sweden’s government-run employment agency, has developed a new ‘match-making’ service to connect job applicants with potential employers. Microsoft and its BizSpark partners have worked closely with Arbetsförmedlingen on the project, and Microsoft’s close relationship with the European Grants Advisor (EUGA) program was instrumental in helping Arbetsförmedlingen obtain EUGA funding for the project.

Arbetsförmedlingen aims to help people achieve long-term employment in the ICT sector. The agency saw a need to more closely align jobseekers’ skills with the specific and ever changing requirements of employers, and developed a program to help jobseekers understand and then, through hands-on training, acquire the specific ICT skills required by employers. Its new service has some interesting features. It provides candidates with ‘micro-feedback’ from multiple employers, helping rejected candidates see patterns, and it gives companies direct influence in the development of job skills that most closely match their future needs. Read how Sweden’s ICT skills are growing.

A Sopima Success Story

2010-03-31T20:59:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

I’ve just read some cool news about Microsoft BizSpark startup Sopima: Of the dozen Finnish companies competing in the March 24, 2010 semi-final of the Innovate!100 Pitch Slam competition in Helsinki, Sopima Oy was chosen as the winner, placing it amongst the top 100 technology, media and communications startups from around the world.

Sopima identified three major challenges: poor efficiency in handling contracts, poor management of existing contracts, and poor co-operation and communication between business and legal. Sopima is looking to revolutionize the way organizations control, create, negotiate and utilize their contracts. Their promise is to make contract management efficient and streamlined for any organization, including small and medium-sized businesses.

Based on the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform, Sopima’s service has built-in security that makes it “as safe as a bank.” Its smart, collaborative documents, capable of reminding customers about important dates and tasks, are a good way to close those expensive lapses in the negotiation of sales contracts. Since Sopima’s launch in January 2009, its customers have seen their procurement costs reduced by an average of 7% and the lead times of contract negotiations shortened by as much as 50%. See the video of Sopima's pitch at the Helsinki Pitch Slam contest and read more about Sopima's story.

Seesmic and Graphic.ly impress the press with Windows Phone apps at MIX10

2010-03-19T21:00:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Web developers and designers gathered in Las Vegas last week for the 3 day MIX10 Conference. The first day began with presentations and demonstrations of the Windows Phone 7 developer platform in keynote speeches by Joe Belfiore & Scott Guthrie of Microsoft.

Microsoft BizSpark company Graphic.ly brought Marvel characters Spider-Man, Iron Man and others to life with its interactive digital comic book reader, using hardware-accelerated video and Silverlight’s Deep Zoom feature to pan and zoom across high resolution images. Graphic.ly also demo’d its online marketplace for comic books and social networking features for comic book fans to share their reading experiences.

Seesmic introduced a plug-in architecture for its Twitter app and showed how it could be used to add Bing maps to geo-coded tweets. Developed with Silverlight 4, Seesmic’s app will run on Windows Phones as well as on Macs and Nokia devices. Seesmic also hosted a Seesmic Plug-in Developer Meet-up, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark. One audience member had already built a plug-in and demo’d it at the Meet-up.

The second day focused on Internet Explorer 9, introduced in a keynote by Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch. Microsoft Researcher Bill Buxton gave a presentation on Natural User Interface design. Michael Comperda, Director of Technology for the BizSpark company Curse, presented Curse.com - the go-to site for massively multiplayer online games. The Curse.com development team was on hand to meet with game developers and its fans from The World of Warcraft and The Hammer of Resistance.

Julien Codorniou hosted the MIX session “Software Entrepreneurs: Go Big With BizSpark and WebSiteSpark” on Tuesday explaining the benefits of both programs for early stage startups.

Wild Pockets Game Jam 2010 - 3D Game Development for Everyone!

2010-03-14T21:01:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

It no longer requires a big budget to design, develop and distribute a commercial, online game. Wild Pockets, a spin off from Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center, is democratizing game development and making it accessible to everyone. Its development platform provides an easy way for anyone to create, publish and monetize 3D games. It is free to use and simplifies all elements of game development, making it an ideal platform for independent developers, hobbyists, students, and game enthusiasts. “Our vision is that people will use the technology for things I have never dreamed of in the realm of games, education, training, visualization, architecture, art, design and much more,” says its founder and CEO, Shanna Tellerman. The company currently has over 5,000 registered game developers. Fifty game titles have been published to date and the company estimates hundreds more to be in development.

The Wild Pockets game building platform, like all finished Wild Pockets games, runs entirely online, in a web browser. The builder uses a renderer written in OpenGL, which works across all browsers, with Mac support coming soon, and provides hardware-rendered 3D content in the web browser. It also includes a built-in particle system, a graphical GUI editor, saved game support, and a performance-tracking analytics system. Wild Pockets games are written in the scripting language Lua and easily tested using a script mirroring system. Games can be displayed on any website that allows embedded content, similar to embedding a YouTube video, which allows for the viral distribution of any game. Art can be imported and exported using software plugins, and a global library of content, populated both by the Wild Pockets team and Wild Pockets users, makes it easy to get a game built quickly. The library includes models, animations, textures, sounds, and fonts, as well as collections of scene objects and their properties, game scripts, script modules, and sample code. In all, this development ecosystem now includes over 25,000 assets.

Wild Pockets also offers an integrated monetization system that makes it easy for developers to offer virtual goods and embed micro-transactions into their games. Monetization methods can be added to games easily with a single line of code. By invoking a simple Wild Pockets API call, a developer can charge money for content within a game, including new levels or new items, or for a game itself. Players can purchase Wild Pockets virtual currency coins and spend them on any game content in any Wild Pockets game, and Wild Pockets shares a small portion of the revenue with the developer. The company is in the process of developing a network of partner distribution sites that will make it easier for independent developers to showcase and market their work.

Wild Pockets’ revenue is derived from a revenue share on commercial games that incorporate micro-transactions or advertising and the soon to launch developer marketplace. “We do not make money until the developer makes money and even then we take a small cut so that the independent developers can thrive,” says Tellerman.

The company has taken a grassroots marketing approach, hosting both on and offline events. One of its most successful events has been a series of Game Jams – free, two-day live events where small teams compete to create the best game in 24 hours. The second annual Bay Area Game Jam, sponsored by Microsoft, will be held May 15-16 at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley Campus, 1065 La Avenida, Mountain View, CA 94043.

Making the World Happy with I Can Has Cheezburger?

2010-03-13T22:02:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

It began with a single LOLcat photo on I Can Has Cheezburger?, a site originally created by Eric Nakagawa and Kari Unebasami, and has grown to a network of over 40 humor blogs including such popular sites as I Has A Hotdog, FAIL Blog, GraphJam, There I Fixed It, Failbooking, Chatroulette Trolling, Must Have Cute and more. The sites are visited by as many as 15 million people every month.

Recognizing the popularity of the original site, Ben Huh, a former journalist, put up $10,000 of his own money to buy the ICanHasCheezburger.com site in 2007 and raised investor funding. Huh says the success of his company, the Seattle-based Cheezburger Network, has been the biggest surprise of his life.

The company has been profitable from the beginning. Advertising revenue is supplemented by online sales of merchandise and books such as FAIL Nation,Graph Out Loud, How to Take Over teh Wurld, I Can Has Cheezburger? and the forthcoming I Has a Hotdog: What Your Dog Is Really Thinking.

After buying the company, Huh focused on increasing traffic. It had been flat-lining, but it began to grow again when the company instituted a regular publishing schedule that guaranteed five new LOLcat pictures every day. For marketing, the company relied exclusively on its users. “To this day, we do not do any kind of advertising to draw in users,” says Huh. Cheezburger employs about 15 people on its content team, and most of them work full-time. “It's expensive, but we're also serious about quality,” Huh explains. “There's no substitute for humans.”

Huh attributes much of his company’s success to a few key principles. “Keep Your Lazy Attitude,” he advises. Cheezburger shuns complexity. As Huh says, “Human nature has a tendency to admire complexity but reward simplicity. The space shuttle is a wonderful thing but we would never buy it; we buy things that make our lives simpler.”

Cheezburger keeps things simple for both its users and its developers. Users are offered a simple LOL builder for submitting photos and videos – one page with space for just three captions. The company uses off-the-shelf products and outsources services whenever possible to free its developers to devote their energy to the company’s core technology. “We want to focus on what makes us different,” reasons Huh. “We can only do a few things well and those are the things we focus on. … We are a publisher not in the business of publishing. We are a publisher in the business of creating community.”

Huh’s overall goal for the company is “to make the world happy for 5-minutes a day.” What has he learned from his experience at ICanHasCheezburger? “When you’re entire business relies on a culture of generosity, the generosity of your community who share content, you become a believer in the inherent goodness of people.”

Change the World for Good with Piryx and Startup Weekend!

2010-03-12T22:03:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Piryx, non-profit Startup Weekend and Microsoft BizSpark will hold a fundraising get-together for Haiti, Piryxtopia Charity Bash, at SXSW. Piryx, a global social fund-raising platform, will help by making their service available for online donations.

Piryxtopia Charity Bash will focus on raising money for the charity We Hear Your Voice, which was started after Haiti’s tragic earthquake. Since 2007, Startup Weekend has been orchestrating gatherings of entrepreneurs who pitch their business ideas, self-select, break into teams and then work to build what they hope will become successful technology start-ups. Each Startup Weekend culminates with a business competition, where participants and invited panelists vote for the best overall start-up to receive a prize. Startup Weekend’s directors, Marc Nager and Clint Nelsen, hope to hold a similar event in Haiti in the fall of 2010, in support of local innovation. According to Nager's blog post, “We believe we will find local Haitians that will have great ideas to address some of the problems they face daily. The end goal is to take the money we receive via the fundraising get-together and award it directly to new, local ventures that emerge from the event.”

Piryx has worked extensively with politicians and nonprofit groups and it was Tom Serres, founder and chief executive of Piryx, who suggested holding a Startup Weekend in Haiti. Piryx’s involvement was driven, as Serres describes it, by “lots random events, a bit of passion, and some serious desire to help. What started out as a Facebook status update related to the Haiti earthquake - turned into helping a friend embark on a quest to help a woman rescue her three adopted children from Haiti. Subsequently it was picked up by Wolf Blitzer's Situation Room - and became the sounding board for hope in Haiti. The founder, Justin Yarborough, decided not to stop there - and I wanted to make sure he knew I was with him, all the way. A groundswell of support emerged beyond anything I could have imagined, and I couldn't help but continue as promised. I figured, what better way to shed light on to the issue and help folks maintain awareness of the situation that still exists in Haiti. It's sort of become a tradition here at Piryx to throw an annual charity bash at SXSW called Piryxtopia, and we decided in light of recent events - what better cause to support.”

Piryx is a social fundraising and real-time giving platform. Dubbed “Democracy’s PayPal,” it provides payment processing, analytical marketing tools, and API's for non-profits, social advocacy groups, corporations and government and political organizations to connect with donors and volunteers. The Piryx Platform makes it easy to market and manage a fundraising campaign, all from one central dashboard. The user signs up, initiates a campaign, and provides a bank routing number, so donated payments can be directly deposited into the account, and creates a campaign page. The campaign can be launched across multiple social networks at one time, with donor campaigns pushed out to Twitter, Facebook, Linked-In and other social sites all from Piryx. Campaign organizers can promote competitive giving, analyze who responds to which messages, when and why, and track which channels effectively drive revenue. Users pay a small transaction fee, based on the value of each transaction.

Applications developed by the Piryx Developer Network are available in the Piryx App Marketplace. Developers can set a purchase price, monthly charge, or give their apps away.

Piryx was founded in 2005. Since the launch of its fundraising platform in 2009, it has served hundreds of thousands of donors, across thousands of causes - raising millions of dollars for change makers all over the globe. Piryx has been doubling in size roughly every quarter ever since. The startup has served a wide spectrum of causes. Local, state, and federal political campaigns, environmental organizations, charter schools, private schools, alumni associations, school districts, religious organizations, chambers of commerce, and even a few rock bands.

Tom Serres launched the Piryx Platform while he was a still a senior in college. He learned that leveraging the internet and e-commerce could be the most cost-effective way to launch a political campaign. He also found that a political campaign “is much like a start-up - except every year you startup fresh, build up, and wind back down. Going from zero to 60 in a matter of months, advocating a cause, and winning constituent support to hold an elected office. You basically start out with nothing, and have to build a reputable brand on a shoe string budget.”

Loopt Keeps Friends in the Loop

2010-03-11T22:05:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

In the spring of 2005, Sam Altman, a sophomore computer science major at Stanford, had an epiphany as he walked out of class. Turning to his friends, classmates, and eventual co-founders Alok Deshpande and Nick Sivo, Sam asked, “Wouldn't it be great if I could open my mobile phone and see a map of where all my friends are right now?” From that idea Loopt was born in Silicon Valley. The co-founders won first place in the business plan competition by the Business Association of Stanford Engineering Students (BASES) and after that were able to secure funding to build a prototype service from Y Combinator, an early stage investment company that helps young entrepreneurs get past the challenges of starting a business. By September of 2005, the response to the prototype was so strong that the Loopt team made the decision to leave school and pursue their dream full time. Joined by co-founders Rick Pernikoff and Tom Pernikoff, they launched the company with $5M in funding from leading venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and New Enterprise Associates.

Loopt provides a “social mapping service” – that focuses on finding friends, places, and events -- who's around, what's going on and where to go, helping friends connect on the fly by showing users where their friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones. Users can share location updates, geo-tagged photos and comments with friends in their mobile address book or on online social networks, communities and blogs. The service facilitates serendipitous meetings between friends, allowing users to receive alerts when their friends are nearby, explore places and events recommended by friends, and share their own GPS-based location, status and photos with a few or all of their friends. Users can add friends to their trusted network by entering a mobile number, by searching the contacts on their phone, searching for Facebook friends also on Loopt and from a “suggested list of friends you may know on Loopt” feature. Encouraging these serendipitous friend meetings is a core part of what makes Loopt users come back time and again. I remember spending many wonderful afternoons in Brady Commons at my alma mater, the University of Missouri. Hanging out with friends, eating greasy pizza & watching people walk in-and-out; hoping for serendipitous meetings consumed, I have to admit, much of my time. This was before mobile phones, but even those would not have helped because as Loopt’s co-founder Alok Deshpande notes, “A phone is not good at multi-way communications.”

In addition to the popular Friend Alerts feature that notifies users when any of their friends are nearby, Loopt offers Pulse, which helps users find something fun to do. Pulse integrates information from multiple sources to show users what’s going on around them. Information from Microsoft Bing, Citysearch, Zagat, Eventful, and Tasting Table, as well as the personal recommendations of a user’s friends and the Loopt community can all be consolidated on one screen. The Tips feature allows users to post their own recommendations on local places and events. Users can view their friend’s journals to see what they’ve been doing and leave comments for them, or access their friend’s favorite places and events, to navigate new neighborhoods or cities.

Loopt was designed with user privacy at its core and offers a variety of effective and intuitive privacy and security controls. Location and other information can be hidden as well shared and Loopt users are added as Loopt friends only after they accept a user’s friend request or if a user accepts their friend’s request – so it’s a ‘double opt in’ friend connection.

On March 10^th, Loopt announced a new version of its application, which expands the Loopt’s Pulse feature to include tens of thousands of local events, and allows check-in to events, and the ability to RSVP to events posted on Facebook. For some music events, users can actually hear a sample of the band playing at a certain venue right within Loopt. This new version of Loopt also features a full guide to the music, events and celebrations at this month’s SXSW in Austin. Loopt users can check-in at certain SXSW venues for the opportunity to win giveaways and other special offers. “Locally-relevant content is crucial for helping people to truly discover the world around them,” said Sam Altman, CEO of Loopt. “By adding Events to our Loopt Pulse, our users can now not only find great places to eat and drink, but also discover music, movies, dance, comedy and theater events going on in their neighborhood right now.” Loopt now features music and entertainment content from new partners SonicLiving, Zvents and Metromix – expanding upon Loopt’s existing suite of leading content providers – including Zagat, CitySearch, Microsoft’s Bing and TastingTable.

Today, Loopt has over 50 employees and more than more than 3 million registered users, and has launched its social mapping service across all major U.S. wireless carriers, including Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Boost & MetroPCS, and over 100 mobile phones. The startup makes money through hyper-local targeted advertising and coupons.

Monetizing the Real-Time Web with OneRiot

2010-03-10T22:07:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Since releasing its real-time ad network, RiotWise, in January this year, OneRiot, a Microsoft BizSpark real-time search technology startup, has seen “explosive growth,” claims Tobias Peggs, General Manager for OneRiot. “We will serve more ads than searches in March this year …. We are the first company to monetize the real-time web.”

Founded in 2006, in Boulder, CO, and funded by Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital and Appian Ventures, OneRiot has already had enormous success with its real-time search engine, which scours the social web - Twitter, Digg, YouTube, Delicious, MySpace, Facebook, URL shorteners, and other services - to find the freshest, most popular and socially relevant news, videos and images. OneRiot crawls not just tweets and diggs, but crawls the pages behind the links themselves. This is all done in real-time.

According to Peggs, about 40% of all search queries, display intent that can be served by real-time search. For example, when searching for “Haiti,” it can be inferred that a user is not looking for a Wikipedia or CIA Factbook article about the country, but information about the earthquake. Most general-purpose search engines are partnering with real-time search technology companies to display these fresh results & OneRiot is positioned well for the future.

However, signals from the social web add value in more ways. For example, after the demise of Michael Jackson, a TMZ story was the number one link on OneRiot. But instead of serving the same information – that Michael Jackson had died – from 20 other news sources that picked up the same TMZ story, the second link was Jackson’s Thriller video, because fans were celebrating Jackson’s life. By harnessing crowdsourced curation of content & capturing the pulse of society on any issue, at any moment in time, OneRiot’s PulseRank algorithm – which like PageRank for the realtime web – uses numerous signals to find the freshest, most relevant content for users.

OneRiot’s ad network, RiotWise, streams contextually relevant advertisements, producing 3-4 times industry standard click-through rates. For example, if the user is trying to find out what's going on right now for “Chile,” RiotWise will serve up links to freshly published, quality content - news, stories, videos, etc - concerning the earthquake in Chile. RiotWise ads directly match the user’s intent - in other words, they add value to the users’ experience; they help users do what they are trying to do in the moment. Advertisers include a range of publishers such as entertainment sites, sports networks, and news organizations. In Peggs’ words, “Approximately 40% of search queries - across all search engines - display an intent that would best be served by results from a real-time search engine. That's a huge market, and it needs monetizing. That's what we do.”

What is really neat about OneRiot’s advertising platform is that they turn the top search results into advertisements on-the-fly, so they can be immediately re-purposed, to serve the unique timeliness of the real-time web. And this in turn makes for a painless process for advertisers. By simply signing up with RiotWise, they see their content show up both as search results and as sponsored advertisements.

OneRiot’s marketing strategy has focused on partnerships right from the start. Though OneRiot.com is a destination, 97% of their searches are driven by their partner network comprising over 100 web sites & numerous applications. For example, users of Internet Explorer 8 can download OneRiot’s search bundle, including OneRiot search, “what's hot” video webslice, powered by Microsoft Silverlight, and other services.

Join us for lots of cool events at SXSW & connect with innovative BizSpark startups!

2010-03-09T22:08:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

SXSW is an exciting opportunity for you to meet the members of the Microsoft BizSpark team and to connect with the founders of several innovative BizSpark startups. We’ve got lots of fun BizSpark activities at SXSW lined up for you.

Come & connect with innovative BizSpark startups!

Amulet Devices builds voice enabled devices such as the Amulet voice-enabled remote control, that enables users to fully control their Windows Media Center via voice. Users can record and watch TV, listen to their favorite music, and view DVDs, videos and photos, all using simple voice commands.

Cheezburger Network, is the Seattle-based company behind one of the largest blog networks and some of the funniest and most popular blogs on the Web, including the LOLcats repository, I Can Has Cheezburger? and FAIL Blog. CEO and founder Ben Huh launched the company in 2007, aiming “to make the world happy for 5-minutes a day.”

Graphic.ly is a cutting-edge digital content delivery system and community platform for comic publishers, creators and enthusiasts, and provides an immersive social experience and marketplace around digital comics and associated merchandise.

Loopt, a Silicon Valley based start-up, founded in 2005 by Sam Altman, Nick Sivo and Alok Deshpande, is the creator of a new location-based, social-mapping service. Loopt helps friends connect on the fly by showing users where their friends are located and what they are doing via detailed, interactive maps on their mobile phones.

Metaio develops augmented reality software for enterprises, helping them visualize their product ideas from concept to manufacture, ensuring the viability of their production processes. Their “Unifeye” software platform not only lets users place 3D animations directly into live video streams, but also supports the seamless integration of images from the external user environment.

Notice Technologies helps local businesses advertise more effectively in the world of the Web, Twitter, Facebook, and emerging technologies that have captured consumer interest.

NutshellMail aggregates all your latest updates & email messages from a variety of social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more into one snapshot email, sent to your primary email address on your schedule.

OneRiot, based in Boulder, Colorado, was founded in 2006 by Kimbal Musk and Robert Reich. OneRiot is a leading realtime search engine and the first marketplace for advertising on the realtime web. It crawls the social web and ranks results according to their PulseRank or level of social buzz. A growing number of third-party search engines, websites, and mobile applications show their users realtime search results, and realtime ads, powered by the OneRiot API.

Piryx was founded in 2005 by Tom Serres. Piryx is a social fundraising and real-time giving platform. It has been called “democracy’s PayPal,” and it provides payment processing, analytical marketing tools, and API's for non-profits, political organizations, and social advocacy groups to connect with donors and social advocates.

RedCritter, founded by Mike Beaty, is a cloud computing platform enabling Silverlight developers to build context aware applications that run inside Microsoft Outlook. RedCritter Apps can pull information from around the Web and across a company’s Intranet, supporting rich media, interactivity and animation.

Wildfire Interactive allows organizations to create attractive, branded interactive promotions such as sweepstakes, contests, giveaways, and incentive-based surveys, and to simultaneously publish them in multiple social networks and on their website.

WildPockets, founded by Shanna Tellerman in 2006, is democratizing game development, making game development free, open and accessible to everyone. Its development platform provides an easy way for anyone to create, publish and monetize 3D games.

Yammer, founded by David Sacks and Adam Pisoni in 2007, provides a real-time communications platform for companies, groups and organizations. In addition to micro-blogging, Yammer enables enterprises to create communities for B2B collaboration.

Join the BizSpark team and many cool startups at SXSW, MIX10 & DEMOSpring!

2010-03-08T22:09:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

SXSW, MIX10 and DEMOSpring are exciting opportunities for you to meet the members of the Microsoft BizSpark team and to connect with the founders of several innovative BizSpark startups. We’ve got a variety of fun activities lined up for you at the conferences.

SXSW Interactive

March 12^th – 16^th, 2010, in Austin, TX, USA

Microsoft BizSpark invites you to join us for a “Meatup” for Startups, a meetup event with a decidedly Texas twist. Join the party for BBQ and great conversations with entrepreneurs from BizSpark startups, Cheezburger Network, Loopt, OneRiot, Piryx and Yammer. 5 attendees will be chosen from the audience to come up with a caption for a featured LOLcats picture. Cheezburger Network CEO, Ben Huh, will announce the winning caption voted on by applause. Winner will receive a Zune HD. Get Loopt on your phone to receive a sweet treat at the Meatup. Go to www.loopt.com on your mobile phone to download Loopt now.

For an invitation, please email your name and company description to msftebt@microsoft.com.

March 15^th from 5:30 – 7:30pm at the Beauty Bar (617 E. 7th St.)

Late Night with Cheezburger, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark: Late-night party that will feature margaritas, beer, and of course—cheeseburgers, and karaoke

Sunday, March 14^th, 10:00 pm – 2:00 am, Cedar Door, 201 Brazos Street, Austin, TX 78701

http://sxswcheezburger.eventbrite.com/

At the Microsoft BizSpark Accelerator at SXSW, 20 startups, including Microsoft BizSpark companies Metaio, Wildfire Interactive, NutshellMail, Amulet Devices, & Notice Technologies, will be selected from a pool of over 200 companies in the online video, audio, social networking and web apps spaces to make pitches to a panel of judges. March 15-16, 2010. Hilton Austin Downtown, 500 East 4^th Street, Austin, TX 78701

The SXSW TECH Cocktail presented by TECH Cocktail & sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, will showcase over 30 startups, including BizSpark companies OneRiot, Piryx, RedCritter & Wild Pockets, in a casual expo-style mixer. Sunday, March 14^th. 8:00 PM – 10:30 PM. Palm Door, 401 Sabine St, Austin, TX 78701

Piryxtopia 2010 – A fundraiser for Haiti

This event is focused on raising money for the charity, “We Hear Your Voice,” which was started after the tragic earthquake that left Haiti in shambles. We Hear Your Voice began as a mission to unite a mother with her 3 Haitian children, but has grown into an effort to assist all children devastated by the disaster.
Saturday, March 13th (9PM – 1AM), Speakeasy, 412D Congress Ave, Austin, TX

Website: http://314.piryx.com/

Tweet-up with Windows Azure: Cheezburger Network CEO, Ben Huh will provide a how-to session on using Windows Azure for sites they anticipate will receive a lot of traffic. Saturday, March 13^th, 4-6 pm, Windows Phone Blogger Lounge

Microsoft BizSpark startup OneRiot is teaming up with Taptu, a mobile search engine, and BizSpark startup Loopt, a location-based social-mapping service, to run a scavenger hunt with giant inflatable dinosaurs using mobile phones, geo-tagging and status updates.

The Yam-up (tweet-up) will be a quick overview about BizSpark startup, Yammer, and will focus on how they’ve created a new communications platform that improves the way co-workers and business partners collaborate. Yammer will be raffling off 2 flip video camcorders at the event.

Tuesday, March 16^th, 4 – 6PM, Windows Phone Blogger Lounge

Bizspark startup Cheezburger Network speaks at How to Rawk SXSW Interactive, March 12th, 2PM

BizSpark startup Loopt talks about The Life Graph - You Are Your Location, March 15th, 2PM

BizSpark startup OneRiot talks about Social Search, March 15th, 11AM

BizSpark startup WildPockets talks at Anyone Can Create a Video Game session, March 15th, 9AM

Join us at other Microsoft activities:

Silverlight Interactive Lounge Space: Located on the 4^th floor at the top of the escalator, in front of the tradeshow floor
Microsoft Bing: Behind the Scenes of The Decision Engine:One of the most anticipated, high-profile product re-branding and re-launch efforts of this past year, Microsoft's Bing didn't just gain mind- and search-share, it earned it through unique positioning and a holistic social media marketing strategy. An informative, entertaining look into how the right advertising and social media marketing efforts made.
Extending your brand? There’s an app for that:For many, brand extension into the digital realm means a Web site, a banner add, a viral campaign. But applications can extend conversations and perceptions of a brand, as well as add to discussions and ideas in compelling new ways. How can applications help your brand and idea be more authentic?
Opening Remarks: Privacy and Publicity: The SXSW Interactive Festival is very excited that danah boyd will serve as the Opening Speaker for the 2010 event. One of the world's foremost authorities on social networks, boyd works at Microsoft Research New England and also serves as a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins:We're doing somuch with the Web platform these days, from cross-domain access mechanisms to new drawing and graphics tools. But in the end, we still have to deal with different web browsers. This discussion brings the leads from Mozilla (Firefox), Chris Wilson from Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google (Chrome) and Opera (Opera) together for yet another incendiary discussion about the future of the web.
Wounded Warriors:Microsoft and SXSW will host Wounded Warriors and their guests from the Warrior Family Support Center at Brooke Army Medical Center
Blogger Lounge:Will include Xbox, Windows Mobile 6.5/7 device bar, and a podcast/ blogcast area
Windows Phone-branded Taco Trucks:Available at a variety of locations at the conference
Microsoft SXSW Official Party: Innovation Expo featuring Silverlight, Win 7, Surface, Zune, Xbox, Monday March 15^th, 8PM -12AM

Email Microsoft BizSpark team members, Brian Hoskins, Christopher Griffin, Midori Lawler & Sharon Koshy to connect with them at the conference.

MIX10

March 15th–17th 2010, Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas

Explore the art and science of creating great user experiences at MIX10. Designers and developers will learn about Microsoft’s broad web platform and tools that help bring together the clients, servers and cloud services needed for creating great, rich web applications.

Demos will feature Microsoft Silverlight: the cross-browser, cross-platform and cross-device browser plug-in that helps companies design, develop and deliver a new class of rich, secure and scalable cross-platform applications and experiences on the Web. Silverlight delivers high quality video and leverages the .NET platform, with backend support for rapid development.

Email Microsoft BizSpark team members, Dave Drach, Julien Codorniou, Matthew Clark, & Michele Johnson to connect with them at the conference. Connect with the founders of Microsoft BizSpark startups Curse.Com, Graphic.ly, and Seesmic.

Software and Web Entrepreneurs: Go Big with BizSpark and WebsiteSpark: Come and learn about BizSpark and WebsiteSpark from Microsoft. Discover how Microsoft provides startups and web professionals with the latest development tools, production server licenses and the marketing opportunities they need to get big fast, at no cost. Also hear about the worldwide network of experts available to help entrepreneurs succeed. Meet startups and web professionals who got very successful building innovative websites and applications on the Microsoft Stack with the Sparks program.

Microsoft BizSpark Company Formotus Signs Up Global Partners for its Mobile Business Services

2010-03-04T22:11:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

At the 2010 Mobile World Congress, Samsung recognized Formotus as one of its Premium Solution Partners while Formotus demonstrated its mobile business forms running on Windows Phones as well as Android. Microsoft, Motorola, Intermec and Pacific-iD in the U.S. to AlpSoft in Singapore, Mobilise IT in Australia, Refined Logic in Canada, and Avansys and Tiestro in Mexico, have all signed up to support Formotus’ enterprise mobile services.

Formotus automates mobile workflow and data collection. Using Formotus Software + Services, mobile workers can be dispatched to job sites, retrieve and submit data in real time, and collaborate with people back in the office. Field service workers - inspectors, interviewers, surveyors, mobile health care workers and others - can collect all kinds of data on the go - signatures, drawings, photos, GPS positions, bar codes, time stamps – and transmit the information directly and securely back to headquarters.

Formotus uses Microsoft Office InfoPath-compatible based forms to connect to data stored either on a company’s own Microsoft SharePoint server or on a hosted SharePoint service in the cloud. No server-side installation is required and the rich client application is installed on the phone over-the-air. Custom forms can be created easily without writing code and deployed rapidly to many kinds of mobile phones through the Formotus Management Console service on the Formotus site.

Formotus mobile forms offer significant advantages over browser-based equivalents. Multiple forms can be saved and completed offline for later submission so mobile workers, working with more than one form at once, can handle complex workflows and do not require a constant connection to remain productive in the field. With a pay-as-you-go subscription model, Formotus minimizes the startup cost for its customers, making its solutions even more appealing to companies whose people are going places.

Calinda’s Coding Marathon at Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest (guest post by Alex Mermod)

2010-02-08T22:12:00Z

The Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest was a very code-intensive week for the Calinda software development team. We arrived at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus at 8AM, coded non-stop until 10PM, just to drive back to the hotel and resume coding at the hotel into early morning. We got only 3 to 4 hours of sleep each day, before starting over. The steady supply of food and drinks and the great organization by the Microsoft team made this possible.

We were very ambitious. We wanted to take advantage of many features of Microsoft SharePoint 2010 such as the Silverlight webpart, connectable webparts, social search, Business Connectivity Services and the ribbon. The presence of top Microsoft experts proved invaluable in helping us solve our challenges. We developed a few really cool things: We integrated a dynamic, interactive Silverlight map of team email conversations into SharePoint. We also integrated the ability to automatically search the social network to find experts within an organization on the issues being discussed in email.

Although we finished 2nd in the competition, our huge reward was SharePoint Director Christian Finn mentioning that MindUP for SharePoint addressed a pain very commonly reported by many SharePoint customers! More than ever, MindUP is the SharePoint mailspace all SharePoint customers need to leverage the power of SharePoint and start managing the conversational dimension of their projects!

We ended the hard, but productive week with wine tasking and a tour of the beautiful San Francisco Bay Area. See our famous sculpture of the “Three exhausted developers at the end of SharePoint 2010 SocialFest” by Calinda Rodin.

Touching the Surfacing of Human Potential at TED 2010

2010-02-08T16:49:00Z

Dan’l Lewin, Corporate Vice President, Strategic and Emerging Business, Microsoft Corporation

At the TED 2010 conference, the Kauffman Foundation will host the World of Entrepreneurs tent.

Ewing Marion Kauffman founded the pharmaceutical company, Marion Labs, and later the Kauffman Foundation. Known for its support of entrepreneurship, the foundation addresses the roots of issues to fundamentally change outcomes in people’s lives. Kauffman wanted to help young people, especially those from disadvantaged backgrounds, get a quality education that would enable them to reach their full potential. He saw enterprise and innovation as the great levers for change.

Microsoft and the Kauffman Foundation share the belief that entrepreneurship and innovation are the great change multipliers of our time, and both organizations have many dramatic and compelling examples of these forces at work in driving positive change. In keeping with the spirit of TED, “Ideas Worth Spreading,” we embarked on a project with the foundation to bring these stories to life; stories of how humans inspire, educate and preserve their culture and past. We wanted to marry the latest technology in digital story telling with the life changing work of our two organizations.

Building on the Microsoft Local Impact Map, an online application we developed to show how Microsoft, working with local partners, is helping people and communities in over 100 countries, we added stories from the work of the Kauffman Foundation. To bring the stories to a human scale, we moved the application to Microsoft Surface. Surface is a new computer that responds to natural hand gestures and real-world objects, creating unique new ways for people to collaboratively interact with digital content and to communicate. Surface brings the Local Impact Map to life, enabling you to navigate with your hands, finding, and exploring stories through text, video and pictures from around the world.

Visit the World of Entrepreneurs Tent at TED 2010 and experience the inspiring stories of the Kauffman Foundation through Microsoft Surface, a great vehicle for “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

Microsoft Local Impact Map: Surface Edition from Stimulant on Vimeo.

For the TED 2010 conference, Microsoft and the Kauffman Foundation have worked together to bring the foundation’s success stories to the Microsoft Local Impact Map on Surface. It enables visitors to the TED 2010 conference to use their fingers, to travel around the world, seeing the local impact of technology, entrepreneurship and innovation.

Today, more than ever, helping people to bring their ideas to life, can help communities, and result in positive and sustainable social change. Events such as TED 2010 and the leadership shown by the Kauffman Foundation is helping to raise awareness of the importance and value of supporting entrepreneurship for everyone.

From Learning Chinese to Empowering Enterprises – Loqu8 Instant Information Tool for SharePoint 2010 (guest post by Jim Hsia)

2010-02-05T22:13:00Z

By Jim Hsia, Loqu8 VP Marketing

Loqu8 was founded on an innovative learning paradigm called “augmented learning.” Instead of traditional rote memorization or simulated learning, the company developed an engine to instantly show related information whenever users hovered their mouse over a word.

Two years and 13,000 users later, Loqu8 has built a series of products to help people understand and learn foreign languages. When corporate and university customers asked for flexibility, Loqu8 introduced the first user-customizable instant translation resource. Through a simple menu command, users could add new words and phrases while specifying meanings and usage examples. Today, Loqu8’s iCE Professional, an instant Chinese-English tool ranks among the company’s most popular products.

With prompting from some corporate users at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco last year, Loqu8 started to build a platform for users to find, update and share corporate information throughout their organization. After preliminary evaluations, we concluded that traditional designs relying on extract, transform and load (ETL) manipulations were too static and inflexible. Today’s enterprises demanded real-time, read/write synchronization and security. As a direct result, Loqu8 decided to embrace the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 platform.

By joining Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, we quickly learned the value of working closely with Microsoft. After a full week of non-stop application development, it’s also hard not to be impressed with the depth and breadth of Microsoft’s commitment to both SharePoint and the BizSpark community of companies. After many late evenings integrating various code modules, we were quite pleased with the way many of our functional challenges were addressed with SharePoint services (Foundation, Server or Workspace). Had we chosen a different integration path, those late evenings would’ve easily turned into several additional months of development.

Loqu8 Prelude scales seamlessly from a personal productivity tool into an organization-wide learning and knowledge management resource. Prelude Enterprise Edition will be available in Spring 2010. For more information, visit www.loqu8.com/products/prelude.

Read & watch video’s about the applications built by the seven startups at Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest.

Socializing with Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (guest post by Alon Novy)

2010-02-03T23:34:00Z

By Alon Novy, Founder & CTO, Liaise

What a week it has been! This Monday, as we arrived at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus to compete with 6 other Microsoft BizSpark partner startups at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, I confess that our motto may not have been included the words “Peace” and “Love.” Yet as we and our competitors filed into the room we were greeted not only by insulated cups with a “Peace, Love and SocialFest” logo, but by a broader sense that our hosts intended for this week to produce more than just one winner.

With SharePoint 2010 RTM nearing, Microsoft made a diverse array of resources available to help us gain a more rounded and better contextualized view of SharePoint. In a series of talks, SharePoint insiders talked not only about 2010’s feature set and development tools, but also covered how SharePoint is positioned, the use cases and business cases that SharePoint 2010 is geared to fulfill; Even information about how start-ups can hope to work meaningfully with Microsoft.

A particular highlight was having a member of the SharePoint product team in the room for 3 days straight to offer support and insight on demand. It sure beats searching for answers online, particularly given product is still in beta. Finally, Microsoft provided each of the companies with an additional developer.

Oh – and we cut a lot code. And I mean: a LOT of code to produce a functioning system by Friday.

I believe that in the new enterprise era, to deliver real ROI to customer organizations, software solutions will need to augment rather than disrupt established work practices. The truth is that business is just moving too fast now to accept anything else. I have watched SharePoint since 2003 as it evolved from a content management application to a platform on which a wide range of applications and workflows can be built.

Liaise is a product that works seamlessly with email to intelligently identify, capture and manage any important key points in the emails. As such, we have long considered and planned how Liaise can work with SharePoint, and how the two products can be leveraged for mutual benefit. Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest has provided an effective forum for exploring SharePoint and to accelerate us towards this goal.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest – Yes, I skipped the iPad launch for a SharePoint event (guest post by Ed Buchholz)

2010-02-02T23:34:00Z

By Ed Buchholz, CEO, Confer

Starting a company is a lot of work. Just ask any of the seven companies that attended Microsoft’s SharePoint 2010 SocialFest last week. With solutions ranging from enterprise micro-blogging to email integration to business intelligence, these companies assembled with the goal to build the next great SharePoint integrated application.

My company, Confer [http://www.getconfer.com], provides enterprise communication tools and attended with the intention to build our first SharePoint integration points. Being a technology startup, we’re used to working our tails off, and the event went right along with that mind-set. SharePoint 2010 SocialFest was a five day marathon of training, developing, discussion, and general hackery culminating in pitches to a group of top-tier venture capitalists, SharePoint product team members, and MSFT executives.

SharePoint 2010 is in beta, so we have been incredibly fortunate to have product stakeholders and technical evangelists working shoulder-to-shoulder with us. Traveling from Mountain View, Redmond, and beyond, they’ve been available to answer questions, provide feedback, and relate deep insights into upcoming features, fixes, and programs.

We’re a young company and our product is built entirely on Microsoft technology, so SharePoint 2010 SocialFest has given us a great platform from which to launch our SharePoint integration and get our larger Microsoft integration roadmap rolling. Microsoft’s BizSpark program has also been instrumental by providing no-cost software licenses and access to Microsoft staff members and resources. It’s clear that Microsoft is deeply invested in helping startup companies develop and thrive utilizing their technologies.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest – What an interesting week! (guest post by Joseph Kleinschmidt)

2010-02-02T23:32:00Z

By Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO, Leverage Software

I'm Joseph Kleinschmidt, CTO of Leverage Software -- we're an on-demand social networking platform that companies use to connect their employees and customers with one another. We tend to be particularly good at helping connect companies that are really large or distributed -- it's not uncommon for us to serve companies that might have a few hundred thousand users.

We've worked with Microsoft for some time -- we're now a BizSpark One partner, something we're thrilled about -- and last week we were invited to participate in the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest.

What an interesting week! So different from our typical day-to-day. Our company has two offices -- one in the South Park neighborhood of San Francisco, and one in a brick-walled loft in Chicago. Both offices are pretty non-corporate -- for example, in San Francisco our windows look out onto a city park, and the Chicago office is just down the street from an art studio.

So initially we figured spending the week on-site at the Microsoft campus would really feel different. The campus is beautiful, the buildings are quiet and peaceful, but there is more of a traditional office feel to things -- or so we thought at first.

But it didn't take too long for us to start to get into the groove -- Josh putting together a new design, Chuck and Mark cranking away on some code, and each of us discussing a feature or idea from a different angle. And (well-fed by a seemingly endless supply of food -- I could go on-and-on about that), soon enough we would find ourselves at 9:00pm or 10:00 at night working to get the next idea completed. And the other folks around us -- whether they be Microsoft employees or people from other start-ups -- all seemed to be “in that groove” as well. So suddenly it DID feel very much like a start-up, which was cool. Tons of great energy.

Every day our engineers were cranking away from early morning to late at night -- but we did manage to carve out a couple hours one night to get everyone in the company together for a dinner at a Greek restaurant in Palo Alto. It's a great feeling to sit in front of a giant fireplace, look around the table at each person in the company, and realize not only how much each person can contribute to the company individually, but how much more everyone can do as a team as well. That's the part of start-up life I personally like the most. We tend to lean on each other quite a bit -- something you can only do if each person is particularly strong.

And that's the feeling that we've always gotten from working with Microsoft too -- that it always comes down to the people you meet and are able to connect with. Just as with our company, I've always been impressed not only by so many Microsoft people at an individual level, but also that so many folks seem to really “get” what a start-up is all about and work together as a team to help make interesting things happen.

And I think SharePoint 2010 SocialFest was a really good example of that. Maybe it's because we're a bit further along these days -- we have a growing number of Fortune 500 customers, so we're really well “out of the garage” at this point -- but I loved the fact that while this was a coding week, we ALSO had the chance to connect with VCs, with really talented people from Microsoft, and with folks who are experts in the Enterprise 2.0 community. I really like that “real-world” nature of Microsoft -- that idea that the best thing you can do as a start-up is just build some great stuff and then go talk directly with top-notch people to see what they think of it. It's a great way to learn things in a hurry -- and it's tons of fun as well.

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest - Joe Kleinschmidt talks about Leverage Software’s "People-Centric" Approach

2010-01-29T23:43:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest, an event lead by the Emerging Business Team of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, will feature seven startups who are building social-oriented applications on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.

Leverage Software, a white-label social networking platform used by enterprises of all sizes, helps people connect with others within or outside their organizations. What Leverage is attempting to do better than anyone else is help people find the “right” people to connect with -- what Joe Kleinschmidt, Leverage Software's CTO, calls “people-centricity.”

For example, if you are a technology firm and are working on a new feature to allow your customers to customize your product, the platform will help you “leverage” the institutional knowledge that exists in your large, geographically-dispersed organization on the subject of product customization. Could you connect with and leverage the expertise of a sociologist in your R&D center in India? Or, could you connect with and leverage the research conducted by a colleague in China? For most organizations it is a challenge to keep employees in one location, one department or one subsidiary aware of the expertise that resides elsewhere. To help solve this problem in a "people-centric" way, Leverage offers features not commonly found in similar applications such as their Interactive People Map and Geo-Social Networking -- which provides ways for people to visually "see" their company's social networks.

Joe and his fellow co-founder got the idea for Leverage Software while in their previous jobs. Joe had found it challenging to recruit developers and was looking for a solution where he could easily leverage his network of contacts for referrals. His partner was looking for ways to easily leverage his network of contacts for sales leads. This was 2003, when social networking was still nascent.

Joe jumped off the precipice, leaving his full-time position to write code, later hiring contractors to help him. It was not easy. The co-founders leveraged their network of contacts to find early adopters within organizations to iteratively and jointly provide feedback as they built their application, and eventually the company raised a round of funding. Today companies such as Microsoft, The Home Depot, Hilton Hotels, Stanford University, St. Jude Medical, Ingram Micro, and McKesson are among 15 of the Fortune 100 companies paying Leverage to help make it easier for their employees to identify the “right” people to collaborate with. Last year the company was named a "visionary" in Gartner's Magic Quadrant on social software.

Joe shared a few tips for for others looking to get their startups off the ground. First and foremost, always focus on your customers' needs above everything else -- rather than chasing what you think might be the "hot idea" that will interest VC's. Second, especially in an area as tighly-knit as Silicon Valley, it's important to remember that it's the relationships you'll build with everyone you encounter -- whether they be customers, employees, contractors, or potential investors -- those can really help you in the long run. And finally, whether you're trying to sell your product to a potential customer or a concept to a potential investor, it's frequently best to simply focus on the fact that you're here to help them solve a problem -- rather than trying to "pitch" them on something that they may or may not want. In other words, just like when you hire an employee you're looking for a "good fit" between them and your company, so too should you treat potential investors and customers in a similar way. If there's a "good fit" between what they're looking for and your own vision, you're both more likely to succeed.

Access MicrosoftStartupZone.com for how Microsoft supports entrepreneurs with software, support and visibility and to get more information about Microsoft Sharepoint SocialFest and Microsoft Bizspark.

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest – Ed Buchholz of Confer is the quintessential startup story

2010-01-29T23:42:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

icrosoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest, an event led by the Emerging Business Team of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, will feature seven startups who are building social-oriented applications on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.

Ed Buchholz, co-founder and president of Confer believes in building relationships. He proved it in the short time we spent talking about his social networking application targeting the small to medium-sized business space.

Based in North-East Ohio, Confer’s is the quintessential startup story. Ed was working a full-time job as Director of Product for another software-as-a-service company and recognized a significant need around communication and transparency across the disparate workgroups of sales, service, product, marketing, and development. He put together a small team and, quickly built a prototype around the concept utilizing Microsoft technology from the BizSpark program. Within 90 days, Ed and team had found seed funding from a local angel, left their full-time positions, and had numerous committed beta customers.

Confer’s initial focus was to build a highly scalable and efficient technology and interface platform, with features coming later. As Ed put it, “There have been too many examples in recent months of products experiencing outages, security failures, data loss … We wanted our offering to be rock-solid.”

Confer aims to enhance collaboration and awareness in the workplace through micro-blogging, chat, and social networking. Employees of an organization enter a short biography, upload a photo, and then start sending and receiving status updates. It’s just that simple. So, I asked Ed, “Isn’t it too simple?” Ed argued, “The world of business software might benefit from a little simplicity. We’re a young product, and building cloud-based software is an iterative process. We’re not done yet, by any means.”

In fact, Confer is heavily invested in the development of features that will differentiate it from other companies. Ed continued, “Our aspiration is to completely change the way and method through which you communicate in the workplace. It’s an ambitious goal, but achievable. Modern technology has made unified communications a possibility, even on a budget.”

Their vision must be compelling, they were just accepted by the Ohio Department of Development into the Ohio Technology Investment Tax Credit Program, and are raising a Series A funding round, primarily from a coalition of Ohio-based angel investors.

Here are Ed’s top three tips for obtaining funding:

1. Tap the government economic development programs in your area. Many areas have made significant commitments to drive job growth.

2. Be forthright with investors when providing revenue projections, status updates, or pitching concepts. Investors know if you’re not being realistic.

3. Build relationships with everyone. You never know where that key introduction is going to come from.

Introducing Seesmic LOOK (Guest post by Loic Le Meur)

2010-01-29T23:41:00Z

This post has been written by Loic le Meur (@Loic), Loic is the founder and CEO of Seesmic, a software company that makes one of the most popular Twitter and Facebook social software clients. Loic also founded and hosts the #1 tech event in Europe, LeWeb.net, with his wife Geraldine. LeWeb gathers together 2000 entrepreneurs from 40 countries in December every year.

Prior to Seesmic and LeWeb, Loic started several other businesses such as Six Apart Europe, RapidSite, a web hosting service (acquired by France Telecom in 1999) as well as B2L, an interactive agency in 1999 (acquired by BBDO).

Recently, Business Week Magazine named Loic one of The 25 Most Influential People on the Web. Loic was also named “Young Global Leader” by the World Economic Forum. He advises the World Economic Forum as well as covers the Annual Summit every year in Davos. Originally from the South of France, Loic lives in San Francisco, California and has three boys.

At Seesmic, we work very hard to reach our vision to help users manage their presence online, and we try our best to make Seesmic available on every screen and touch every social network.

Now, we felt it was time to challenge ourselves and make something truly special.

We took an unusual route and shifted paradigms to develop something no one has done before. We were challenged to reach out to an untapped market - a mainstream audience not familiar with Twitter – people in your personal circle like friends or family members (think “Mom” or “Dad”), that heard of Twitter but were never interested, or never had the opportunity to have a positive and friendly experience.

To accomplish this, it was important for us to:

• Offer a fantastic browsing experience, with a visually pleasing and easy to use interface. More importantly, you don’t even have to log in to Twitter to experience it!

• Organize it in a way for users to quickly recognize and connect to their specific interests – be it people or brands – like popular TV shows or companies, celebrities in sports or entertainment, or even leading authorities in news or politics.

• Make available a specific place (a sandlot or plot) where brand channels can connect with their interested audience and offer something more special than what you would normally find when just connected through Twitter.

As such, we are extremely excited to announce a new product that will open the eyes to new users and change the experience of viewing Twitter in real time. This innovative application provides a visually rich and engaging way for users to keep track of the people, topics, news and brands from one of the most popular social networks in Twitter.

Introducing Seesmic Look

Seesmic Look is a unique way to learn, observe or be immersed in the real-time web. Look is a Windows desktop application that brings together Twitter data with a beautiful design, approachability and ease of use to deliver a rich, cinematic experience.

Interests > Entertainment: Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) Twitter Account

In partnership with Microsoft, optimized for Windows 7 (developed in WPF with Visual Studio 2010, courtesy of Microsoft BizSpark) and powered by Twitter, this unique interface allows you to easily navigate through the pulse of the Twitterverse or be inspired by individuals of your specific interest. Beginners learning to understand real-time can stay engaged and connected without the need to log into Twitter, while experienced users can take advantage of Look's powerful features in creative and imaginative ways.

Timeline or Playback Mode

With Seesmic Look's unique and alluring interface, you may find yourself enthralled with viewing your streams of interests. View Twitter in a standard timeline view or observe the stream of messages in Look's distinguished playback mode, which fades in messages in a visually engaging way. You can even match your personal preference by choosing a light or dark background.

In Interests > Celebrities: Kim Kardshian (@KimKardashian) Account in Playback Mode with Light theme

Discovering Trends

Discover what millions of users are saying in the Twitterverse. By viewing Trends, you can find out the Trending Topics in Twitter of what's popular now, in the past day or in the past week. In Look, you can learn why a word or phrase is trending and view all the trends or specific topics in timeline or playback mode.

Trends > “MLK” in Playback Mode

Finding Interests

The “Interests” Directory provides a simple and easy way to start navigating Twitter through an organized list of several popular Twitter accounts in categories like News, Sports, Politics and Celebrities. Find accounts and view tweets that match a quality and style you might have in common. You can choose any one of those categories to view all the tweets of that particular category or explore your interests in a specific twitter account.

Interests > News: Time.com (@time) in Playback Mode

Channels

Channels provides a simple, authoritative, aggregated view of a brand’s activity across Twitter making it easy for any user to discover and navigate the breadth of activity the brand has going on Twitter. Receive real-time updates on exclusive events or special breaking news, or follow up on product tips, advice, ideas or inspiration.

Channels > Red Bull Channel > Action: Lindsey Vonn (@lindseyvonn) Channels > Red Bull Channel > Athletes: Reggie Bush (@reggie_bush)

Search Real-Time

Track any word or phrase being said on Twitter in real time and display it in Look's unique playback interface. Search a person, brand, or any other interest you may have, and save that search so you can always refer back to it.

Searches > Search Term: “Super Bowl Ads” in Playback Mode Login to Your Inbox

The inbox and social timeline features becomes readily available when you log into Seesmic Look. View and manage your Mentions, Direct Messages and Sent Message in the Inbox section.

After logging in > inbox > Twitter public replies – in Timeline mode

With Seesmic Look’s simple yet powerful interface, you can view profiles, post replies and direct messages, retweet, and favorite messages. When posting messages, shorten links and post photos with ease. In the Social section, view your friends’ timeline of the accounts you are following, including creating, editing and managing Twitter Lists (groups of Twitter accounts that you can create for your account).

Seesmic Look’s Profile View of Twitter Account

After logging in > social > accessing Twitter Lists

Seesmic Look provides the best user experience to help you get connected and stay connected in the real-time web. We’re very excited to what we have to offer and look forward to making Seesmic Look the most positive and friendly experience.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest - Tim Uy and Jim Hsia share how Loqu8 Prelude Empowers Users with Just-in-Time, Contextual Information

2010-01-29T23:40:00Z

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event led by the Emerging Business Team of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, will feature seven startups who are building social-oriented applications on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.

Tim Uy and Jim Hsia’s eyes light up when they talk about their concept of “augmented learning.” Both co-founders of Silicon Valley-based Loqu8, their software applications aim to provide contextual information in a small pop-up window, simply by hovering over a word or two. Say you’re writing a digital marketing plan for your product. As you type into a Microsoft Word document, Microsoft PowerPoint slide, Microsoft Outlook email message or even on Microsoft SharePoint, imagine hovering over a word, such as “social media” and getting a pop-up window of content that is contextual to what you are writing about. This could include the contact information for your company’s social media guru or presentations made by colleagues on other teams who ran social media campaigns. Or, it could include results from web search. By accessing internal data sources and external web sites, the application delivers relevant content just-in-time, enhancing your productivity.

“Augmented Learning!” What is neat about Loqu8 is the creative ways in which they use this concept of e-learning to develop solutions for both consumers and enterprises. While we focus on enterprise solutions in this article, I encourage you to take a look at iCE (iNterpret Chinese English), an application to help you leverage contextual linguistic knowledge to learn an international language. If you are attempting to read email messages or documents written in Chinese, Loqu8’s pop-up window will help by translating words into English, telling you how to pronounce them, and even offering to show examples of how those words are used on the web.

Loqu8’s Prelude empowers users within organizations, with information to make smart decisions quickly. By hovering your mouse over a word, a pop-up window opens and immediately displays related information from documents, databases or search results. Users have just-in-time access to relevant information including products (part numbers, pricing), organizations (staff, contact information) and more. Prelude seamlessly delivers key information without you having to go somewhere else to look it up.

Prelude works with Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook), websites and line of business (LOB) applications. The enterprise edition, to be launched in Spring 2010, provides a semi-custom platform for accessing key information from within an organization. Enterprise-wide information sources like Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server will be supported.

At Microsoft’s SharePoint SocialFest, Loqu8 is planning to spend the week integrating their nifty application with the FAST Search Server on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.

Here are 5 tips from Tim and Jim for new startups:

• Build something for yourself or someone you love. Yes, it really does make a difference!

• Free is good, but paid is better. Let your customers vote on your product or service with their wallets.

• Take smart risks. Start with a simple business model. Scale up only when it’s successful.

• Assemble a team that’s passionate about turning your vision into a reality.

• Realistically evaluate your strengths and stay focused on them. In your areas of weakness, look for partners who can complement you.

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest – Huddle’s Success according to McLoughlin comes from being Business people first, Engineers second

2010-01-29T23:39:00Z

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest, an event led by the Emerging Business Team of Microsoft in Silicon Valley, will feature seven startups who are building social-oriented applications on Microsoft Sharepoint 2010.

Huddle, a London, UK-based software-as-a-service startup, was founded in 2006 as an online collaboration platform for businesses. A simple and elegant solution, Huddle allows users to collaborate with others both within and outside their companies. A network of secure online workspaces, users can share files, collaborate on ideas, manage projects and organize virtual meetings. Huddle is available on the desktop, online, via mobile devices and social networking sites such as LinkedIn, and via Microsoft Office applications.

With the Huddle Office Plug-In, users can access their Huddle files directly from within Microsoft Office. This allows users to save their local files directly to Huddle with one click, view and edit them, add new versions, request approvals, and send notifications, all from the Microsoft Office environment.

Huddle’s founders took a business approach to their idea from the very start. While working in their jobs in product management, marketing and operations, they found it hard to collaborate with partners. I second this. I’m a Huddle user and love the flexibility it gives me in establishing workspaces with partners I work with. I can set up multiple workspaces, one for each of my projects. Each workspace can permit collaboration with a different set of people.

Huddle’s founders started off building the user experience for their web-based application, contacting potential customers and writing marketing collateral, all before engineering had begun. They partnered with a software development company who provided them with engineers for an equity stake. As Andy McLoughlin and fellow co-founder Alastair Mitchell stated, “We thought big from the very start. Our vision was to be a global business and so we worked closely with customers and partners early on to build a horizontal platform that could be used in all industries and by companies of all sizes.”

Huddle’s business-approach is visible in their success. Hewlett-Packard will include the Huddle collaboration application on commercial PCs and laptops sold around the world. Huddle also debuted within HP Connect Solutions, a new desktop collection of HP and partner software aiming to help small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in their day-to-day activities. Huddle is one of only two third-party applications available on Connect Solutions, alongside Symantec’s Norton Online Backup.

Huddle was named in the Visionary Players quadrant in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Social Software in the Workplace. Gartner positioned Huddle in the Visionaries quadrant because of the speed at which its product evolved through partnerships and its innovative viral adoption model.

Huddle was also named the Internet Product of the Year in the UK IT Industry Awards.

I asked Andy for tips for other startups.

• Talk with everyone in your network of contacts and ask them for referrals – great for finding customers, partners and staff.

• Give away your solution to your first few customers; their feedback is invaluable and will help you improve your product.

• Be realistic & up-front when talking with customers; don’t over-promise and under-deliver!

• Focus on customer service. In Andy’s words, “It doesn’t take a lot to make customers feel special… We make it a point to try and solve all customer problems quickly.”

• Target investors who are involved and interested in your space; raising capital takes time and you don’t want to spread yourself too thin.

Microsoft Sharepoint 2010 SocialFest – Alex Mermod talks about MindUp which helps make email interactions more efficient

2010-01-29T23:37:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Calinda Software’s MindUP is a software-as-a-service solution that helps workgroups collaborate more efficiently, within the email environment, that most of us are used to. A user would set up a MindUP group, including identifying its members, and start by sending an email message to the group. The MindUP software splits the email into topics (issues or items being discussed in the email), and sends the email to the group. Team members can respond via email to the specific topic that is relevant to them. At any time, team members can get a global visual map of the status of the various topics. This enables the team to stay on top of action items, all within the comfort of their familiar email environment. All email attachments are centralized and stored in the specific MindUp group, so team members can easily access them. MindUp also generates status reports, thereby helping users manage projects and deliverables more efficiently.

MindUP for Microsoft Sharepoint is a plugin that installs on any SharePoint Server (MOSS or WSS), and connects SharePoint sites to MindUP groups. The result is that all attachments are automatically stored on Microsoft Sharepoint. Users are able to utilize the features of Microsoft Sharepoint to manage their workflows. In this way, users are able to stick with applications they are familiar with such as email and Microsoft Sharepoint, while being able to benefit from the efficiencies enabled by Calinda’s MindUp.

Calinda was founded in 2007 in Marseille, France. In this interview with Alex Mermod, co-founder & CEO, Alex openly shares growing pains and learnings.

As luck would have it, or as luck comes to those who persevere, Calinda started out with a signed customer contract. How many startups begin with this advantage? However, as luck would take a turn, the customer cancelled the contract. This too happens to many startups. Today however the perseverance has paid off. Calinda has 15 organizational customers. The integration of MindUP with Microsoft Sharepoint gave a boost to Calinda’s sales. In the words of Mermod, “Market traction started with the integration with Sharepoint, when IT managers saw the solution holistically.”

How did Calinda acquire their first three customers? They went after early adopters within companies, cold calling and utilizing their network of contacts. And, what tips do they have for other startups?

• Don’t try to look like a large corporation. Be who you are.

• Target early adopters within companies. Many employees are partial to entrepreneurs and will champion your application within their companies.

• Contact customers sooner to get their feedback. Calinda had to discard 60% of their code over time.

• Acquire sales skills. Calinda invested in sales training and marketing consultation for the development of their value proposition and pitch. Being engineers, the sales training taught them how to sell their product.

• Get paying customers as it makes it easier to get funding.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 SocialFest – From Award Winning Text Mining to a Comprehensive Competitive Intelligence Service

2010-01-29T21:37:00Z

By Alpa Agarwal

Cortex Intelligence, a Rio de Janeiro, Brazil-based startup was founded in 2003 with a grant from FINEP to research text mining. FINEP is a Brazilian government organization dedicated to promoting innovation by awarding research and development grants. While Cortex’ research in text mining won them accolades, it was a great technology looking for a customer problem.

Many late night brainstorming meetings later, the founders hit on a need: market intelligence. Market Intelligence is a process by which organizations gather, analyze and disseminate information regarding a company’s external environment for better decision making.

Thus was born the Cortex Competitiva® Platform and the tag line, “Turning information into results.” The Cortex Competitiva® Platform, awarded by the Brazilian Competitive Intelligence Association as the first integrated support system for the competitive intelligence process, supports employees in organizations through text and data mining technologies to leverage information both within their organization and externally, to enhance decision-making.

The Cortex Platform offers a modular structure, is customizable to client needs, combines structured data analysis technology (data mining) with non-structured text mining and can use a variety of internal and external data sources.

In addition to the software solution, Cortex also offers consulting and outsourcing services for competitive intelligence.

Their client list is impressive. It includes some of the largest companies in Latin America in industries such as oil and gas, banking and credit cards, insurance, chemicals, retail and ecommerce, metals and mining, among others.

At Microsoft Sharepoint SocialFest, Cortex will develop Cortex Competitiva® for SharePoint, an information service of Sharepoint web parts that will enable Sharepoint users within an organization to pull-in relevant data from external sources, for reports on what is happening in their markets. The types of information include quantitative market data, text mining-enriched news articles and qualified social media data. Cortex’ Sharepoint webparts will also integrate with Sharepoint’s collaboration features, enabling users to share, discuss and act on the insights triggered by the market intelligence.