Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. It's actually just a promotion for a startup that uses busy intersections and photo-taking kiosks to promote brands using digital / social campaigns. On busy Michigan Avenue in Chicago stands one of those digital kiosk promoting a bank. 

It's an effort by Elevate Digital to make location-aware and people-aware advertising that gives people what they want as soon as they need it, but not at the micro level. They meet people in public spaces using interactive displays

This is an example of  one of the companies our evangelists work with, and the kinds of company that can end up being a Microsoft BizSpark member.

We provide startups less than five years old and making less than one million in revenue. You should check out the site and look through the requirements. 

Elevate Digital develops street-level technology that connects people where they live and work. We have seen this kind of technology in Seoul, Korea, where at busy subway platforms commuters waiting for their trains interact with celebrity content and even create their own content to compete for brand rewards and contests. Elevate Digital places their digital kiosks running branding campaigns at the street-level, usually in major metropolitan cities, so that people can take their photo, play interactive games and enter to win contests. Their latest campaign is about how Benny The Bull, Tommyhawk and Hubert have Bieber Fever! 

The digital interactive display sits on Michigan Avenue, and is being used to promote a campaign for BMO Harris Bank. Contestants can qualify for tickets to see Justin Bieber in concert. 

If that video doesn't tell you enough, here's a 14 minute interview with Digital Elevate founder George Burciaga. 

Here's a video that explains it. 

At the recent Foundercon, the private networking event hosted by TechStars, I was fortunate enough to meet Andrew Stein, VP of Development at Distil and an alumni of TechStars Cloud Accelerator.

Written by Allan Da Costa Pinto. Allan is a Technical Evangelist who works with startups and software developers in the northeastern US to build apps for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Azure

Andrew and team have built a set of services around various back end cloud technologies to offer clients the ability to “Protect your website against web scraping, content theft, competitive data mining, and more, without impeding your end-user,” he says.

To improve their algorithms, Distil collects vast amounts of data to query for trends and analyze usage patterns. Since going live in April 2012, they have faced an ever-increasing data explosion problem. “At one point, we had tons of logs on a single mysql instance.” With a very small team focused on their core competencies, Andrew didn’t have much time to research and ramp on new technologies to solve his data problem.

By his own admission, Andrew is definitely a non-Microsoft technologist, “I know very little .NET”, he said. “We do a lot of perl and PHP.”

By virtue of being enrolled in Microsoft’s BizSpark Plus program, Andrew did have access to hours of free cloud computing on Windows Azure and was able to see an opportunity to simplify his data problem. He was able to use Windows Azure SQL Database and Azure Blobs and Queues, to offload, process and query the data in a cost effective and efficient manner. Given his background with mysql, Windows Azure SQL Database proved very familiar to Andrew and he realized the benefits of not having to worry about up time, data replication and management of this solution built on Windows Azure. In his words, “Microsoft manages those details.”

BizSpark Plus “makes it really easy to jump on Windows Azure,” said Andrew. “We keep building on it!” Not bad for a non-Microsoft guy who knows very little .NET.

If you are building highly scalable solutions or unlocking business value from huge volumes of distributed data, consider Windows Azure!

P.S. Andrew has done some cool things with connecting his Ubuntu based VMs and Windows Azure, he intends to blog about it on the distil.it blog, stay tuned!

Back in the early part of November, I cruised around San Francisco looking for developers to talk to, as I do normally. I was introduced to Emil Anticevic, a developer working for Imaginary Feet. He was working at the time on one of the first Windows 8 apps that would go into the Windows Store. His team is run by Tom McLeod, a well-known developer in San Francisco. They are based out of RocketSpace on Fremont Street. 

Update: Includes link to app in Windows Store. 

This interview is from November 2. Frametastic launched in the Windows App Store about three days ago. In the interview, you will see that the sharing function doesn't work when he hits the charm in the Windows 8 interface. We found out after I stopped the video that this was because he was unknowingly working with a version of the app that hadn't had the connection for sharing worked out. It works. 

Here's the full interview, which offers an honest view on working with Visual Studio. "It's a really good developing environment," says Anticevic. He says that it's a really easy interface to work with once you figure out the Windows 8 design. 

Visit us for more information on how Microsoft BizSpark can help your business with free software, visibility and technical support. 

Microsoft Technical Evangelist Steve Seow takes us through the 54 hours of glory that go into doing a Startup Weekend and coming out of it with something awesome.  And if no product, at least a bunch of great friends. You can get in touch with Steve on Twitter @SteveSeow.