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This is part two in a series of blog posts and interviews about Microsoft BizSpark companies that will be presenting at TechCrunch Disrupt NY. Here is an interview with John Bracken, CEO and Co-Founder of Speek , one of the easiest teleconferencing apps you will ever use. This interview was conducted...

Phriz.be founders Michael Forte and RJ Holmberg created an app that helps you share what's relevant to anyone you like with a literal flick of the wrist. But before you get into the video (at the bottom), we wanted to introduce you to Michael and RJ. We asked them some questions recently about how...

There are so many games out there that it is very hard to do something new or different, but every now and then, one comes along that just stands out from the crowd with. Spanish start-up Echoboom has done just that, combining unique idea with strong game play in Dogfight . This multi-player game has...

Start-up competition season is in full swing and a couple of the big ones - the annual TNW Europe and TechCrunch Disrupt NYC – are both coming up later this month (go BizSpark finalists!) So we thought it would be interesting to get some ‘behind the scenes’ viewpoints from start...

We do a weekly analysis of the questions -- literally, these are questions -- that are being asked in our networks each week. So far this week, these are the five most important questions, based on how often we have seen them discussed in this form, or in other ways. Today we have contributions from...

What drives a successful start-up? A lot of things, but it definitely needs a founder (or founders) who are really passionate about what the business is doing. After all, when times are tough and sleep is scarce, having a strong belief in and love of what you are doing is going to help carry you through...

In a world where obesity is killing thousands of people a day in the world, it's almost joyous to hear that there are startups and app builders out there trying to use any means necessary to create the simplest apps to defeat life-threatening lifestyles and habits. The folks at Bodeefit ,one of the...

We have friends who are into the mobile experience. When we were in Austin, we saw this dude shooting video and interviewing mobile developers about their take on the mobile space. The video that came out of that explores the future of mobile in the absence of "the next big app" and also captures...

Thanks to Jason Calacanis and his Launch team for letting Festomat use its software to help check people into the conference this year. Here is a video showing this BizSpark team proving to thousands of attendees that their NFC-enabled software on Windows Phones can handle massive traffic and then provide...

If the discussions over the coffee breaks were any indication, delegates at the annual IAMCP Summit in Brussels all seemed to agree it was a great success, but for me the highlight was the first-ever EU AppCup competition. This post was written by Soha Hohnecker, Software Startup Lead at Microsoft...

Startups in Microsoft BizSpark now qualify for Yammer . Get it while the getting is good.

Speek.com, a platform for easy conference calls , started as a way to permanently rid the world of PINs and elevator music. As corporate employees, founders Danny Boice and John Bracken were fed up with how stale business communication was, and set out to re-think an industry that hasn't seen innovation...

In the past decade, we have witnessed a steady transition of content and media from our physical world to the online digital one with the most marked transformation happening in books and music. But in the publishing world, there has been a radically absent player in this metamorphosis -- recipe and...

The games app market is extremely competitive, so finding new ways to keep players captivated is the big challenge facing developers right now. Finnish-based start-up Tuliotus has achieved just that, by introducing an exciting new approach to game-play with Haunted , which is also the first AppCampus...

Why bring one app to market when you can launch 10, 20, even 30? That is the ethos of a dynamic team of young Finnish developers who go by the wonderful name of the Magnificent Eight . As the name might suggest, this is an award-winning team of eight who have known each other since high school and have...

So, last night we had this perfect storm of pitch events, tech meetups, and a wild party in the Microsoft Technology Center. One of our partners, 500 Startups , held their Mexico Demo Day at our BizSpark Lab . It was full on startup day yesterday. Today, Mountain View Mania continues with a live feed...

Many of you have probably heard of the great things that Frank Gruber and Jen Consalvo do with TechCocktail, the rapidly growing entrepreneur evenings that are spreading across the nation. We certainly noticed them. That's why we recently partnered up with them to be at a few of their events. Tech...

Mobi Weave was founded to create great User Experiences for Enterprise apps and with our 4.5 star rated BI app on the App Store, we were well on our way to fulfilling that mission. But talking to our customers, we did find some issues that are holding us back. These issues affect most business apps on...

BizSpark member Zirtual is in the news today with founder Maren Kate Donovan securing $2 million in funding from Zappos founder Tony Hsieh and others . We interviewed Maren some time ago for our success stories project. Here is some of that interview again. What was the most difficult challenge...

Guest blog post by Prateek Gupta, founder of FreshTag, an app that connects multiple people by entering hashtags or clicking a link. FreshTag was founded at a San Francisco hackathon in June 2012. Co-founder Ben Denial and I attended it to work on a simple idea to connect people on browser-based video...

To start off this bit of news, we recently found out our old commander-in-chief Bill Gates is going to be kicking off SXSW . How's that, hipsters!? From hipsters, we move to entrepreneurs. Namely, the entrepreneurs that have been slamming our Facebook page with advice, experience and narratives of...

We're running a live stream of this really fascinating iOS camp for Windows 8 Development . About Big Nerd Ranch BNR is a training company focused on teaching iOS programming languages. They actually started out training Apple developers’ Cocoa API. It’s co-founder, Aaron Hillegass...

Developers have been asking me about what Microsoft BizSpark will do to get more developers and startup people together around the world. Well, it turns out our partners at Startup Weekend have more than we had bargained for. I didn't know what it was, but I kept seeing this awesome graphic about the...

There was a rush of Startup Weekend events this weekend. Here are a few of the tweets, photos and videos that came in during the events. We love seeing how fast these teams work together to create businesses, hacks, and usable stuff. The pitches were just about to begin in Kirkland: Pitch presentations...

It’s exciting enough when we hear about developers taking existing apps and putting them on our new Windows 8 platform, but it’s even more exciting when it’s a brand new app that is breaking new ground – and in children’s education. Infantium is one of a number of W8 apps...