The continually morphing Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 ecosystem added another feature this weekend as one of our Microsoft BizSpark members, Ilija Injac, delivered to the Windows Azure market a new app for Windows developers. Introducing TapMap, a heatmap extension for Windows developers. 

TapMap helps developers track real usage data on their apps as they develop for Windows 8 devices and Windows Phone 8.  Here is a video that demonstrates some of the features.  If you want to get a direct link to the app, you can contact Ilija here.

Startup Weekend and the Startup America Partnership announced today that they will join together to create UP Global, a new organization supporting the creation of vibrant entrepreneurial communities around the world. With generous support from The Kauffman Foundation, the Case Foundation, Omidyar Network, Google for Entrepreneurs, Microsoft and The Coca-Cola Company, UP Global will combine the impact and reach of Startup Weekend’s action-based programs with Startup America Partnership’s deep expertise in building strong regional eco-systems. UP Global will leverage the strengths of both organizations to build a more comprehensive offering that bolsters entrepreneurial communities across the globe.

“We initially launched the Startup America Partnership as a three-year project focused on jumpstarting the entrepreneurial economy, but as we watched the tremendous momentum that was built through the launch of more than 30 regional ecosystems, we knew there was a need to continue a broader effort to help maximize the success of American startups,” says Steve Case, chairman of the Startup America Partnership, who will also join UP Global as chairman of the board. “Partnering with Startup Weekend, which has played a critical role in inspiring and preparing tens of thousands of entrepreneurs, was the perfect solution to continue our mission..”

As part of UP Global, the Startup America Partnership will strengthen and expand the first truly national entrepreneurial ecosystem with deep local roots. UP Global will then expand and utilize best practices internationally with the vision of being the single most effective organization supporting entrepreneurial communities across the globe. Both Startup Weekend and the Startup America Partnership will retain their brand names and missions, joining with Startup Digest, Next and NYSE Corporate Connections, all closely collaborating and powered by UP Global.

“Over the past few years we’ve seen an incredible groundswell in grassroots entrepreneurial activity on across the nation and around the world. There is a huge need to drive consolidation and added collaboration among community leaders in order to create more clarity for entrepreneurs so they can easily find the local resources they need to get up and going, when they need them. Seeing two organizations that we support come together is a win for all entrepreneurs,” says Tom McDonnell, CEO of The Kauffman Foundation.

UP Global will become the first full-spectrum support structure for entrepreneurs, focusing on every aspect of the entrepreneurial journey, from pre-idea through high growth stages. The organization will be grounded in two key pillars: empowering startup champions to deliver action-based learning programs for entrepreneurs, and building local, regional, and national networks between startup champions in order to drive collaboration, sharing of best practices, and celebration of the entrepreneurs at the heart of the movement.  

“Startup communities are truly driven by their leaders, and we’ve shown that we can provide useful tools and frameworks for those leaders to foster sustainable early stage ecosystems, ultimately leading to the creation of more meaningful and persistent firms,” says Marc Nager, CEO of UP Global.

For more information on UP Global, please visit www.UP.co.

Meet the founders of Pre-Apps -one of the newest partners joining the BizSpark community . With over 30,000 new apps introduced each month, PreApps is a marketplace to discover, rate, and download the best mobile apps coming soon. They also have an exclusive offer for BizSpark members - you will receive free PreApps featured services ($24.99 Value) using the promo code: BizSpark.

Simply create an account, submit your app and enter the promo code upon check it out.  

This interview was conducted by Neha Bhaskar, SR CHANNEL & ECOSYSTEM Marketing Manager at Microsoft, in NYC.

The PreApps Team.  You can watch a video demo here

Here is an interview we did with the CEO of the company, Sean Casto. 

Tell us a bit about your app and company

PreApps is the exclusive place to preview new and exciting apps coming soon. Our vision for PreApps is to forever enhance the relationship between mobile app developers and mobile app users, which will in turn create better quality, more successful apps. By implementing user feedback in the development process, apps have a greater chance of success, and for users a more enjoyable experience. PreApps provides developers with the tools, knowledge, and resources to increase their app’s chance of success. Our collaborative process has proven to increase an app’s downloads, ranking, and overall quality.

What came first for you-the team or the idea? 

The vision for PreApps came first. The idea was first conceived 3 years ago. We began development over a year ago and have been growing our team ever since. 

What inspired you to work on this idea and how do you see yourselves evolving?

Our team consists of app developers and we understand first hand the struggles app developers face. PreApps was built to provide developers the tools, knowledge, and resources to over come these struggles. The mobile ecosystem is constantly changing and PreApps will evolve with it. We will continue to improve our services and further provide significant value to the developer community.

What was the most difficult challenge your business faced this year?

 As a startup, our biggest challenge has been building our brand informing developers of the advantages PreApps provides to the development community.

How do you know when you are failing in product development and how do you make a correction – do you make the decision on your own, or do you consult your team?

App developers know when they are failing in development when users encounter issues in quality, functionality, and design. Generating quality user feed back prior to an apps release is critical as it eliminates the potential negative reviews posted once the app is released, which will indefinitely ruin an apps status.

Who would you like to be your mentor, and what would you ask him or her?

I believe Mark Pincus (CEO of Zynga) would be a great mentor for PreApps. Mark Pincus has an extensive understanding of the mobile app ecosystem and particularly social games. He could provide invaluable insight into how our organization could further provide value to both the app user and developer community. 

Who is your mentor, and what was the last great thing he or she told you and your team?

Chuck Goldman (Founder of Apperian) is one of our great mentors. The last great thing he told our team was to continue to innovate and expand our services for developers.

Who inspired you the most this week, and why?

Richard Branson inspired me the most this week. His recent article “Convincing Investors to Fund Your Tech Startup” provide me with the insight to better position our company to be more appealing to outside investors.

When was the last time you fell in love with a product?

The last time I fell in love with a product was 2 months ago when I downloaded an app titled Analytics Tiles. Analytics Tiles allows me to instantly and conveniently view our PreApps.com analytics in real time.  

Is the lean startup process a type of marketing, or is marketing different from customer and product development? How does your company utilize next generation marketing techniques?

PreApps provides developers with the tools, knowledge, and resources to increase their chance of success. Our marketing techniques and quality user feedback results in an increase in app downloads, ranking, and overall quality. PreApps utilizes next generation marketing techniques through social media integration and a user reward system. Our user reward system can be viewed as a next generation marketing technique as users are rewarded for previewing, sharing, rating, apps coming soon. 

We hear you have an exciting offer for BizSpark members. Could you tell us more about it ?

We are very excited to announce that all BizSpark members will receive FREE PreApps featured services ($24.99 Value) using the promo code: BizSpark. Simply create an account, submit your app and enter the promo code upon check out! It’s takes less than 2 minutes to post your app and gain expose

We don't know what the future will bring. Within reason. I do know that in three days I will interview Denis Crowley. So, that has me thinking a lot about the future of online / offline / web / mobile retail. 

This post was written by Douglas Crets, Social Media Strategist of Microsoft BizSpark, which gives free software and support to any startup in the world that is making less than one million in revenue and less than five years old. He also hosts a weekly talk show on Livestream called Startuplandia. It airs every Thursday at 3pm Pacific.

I think that Foursquare holds one of the better positions for exploiting what Dave Holmes at Pando Daily refers to as daily deals sites bleeding each other dry. The daily deals market serves a need, but the problem with the need it serves is that the daily deal itself is not the proper medium for satisfying it. 

Consumers are loyal to one thing, above all else -- their own needs and behavior. They will choose the thing that services that. A daily deal will only be able to cover the occasional need, at best. At the least, it may lead someone to become interested in a thing, a shop, or an offer. The problem with daily deals is that they are basically digital offers that cannot create habits for any one shop or retailer that seeks to gain customers from them.

This is something that Foursquare can do, because Foursquare is a layer. As I say in this post, I think in the space of opportunity, Foursquare has a very big edge in being a consumer’s weapon of choice in finding daily deals. It can’t be that daily deals find success in being just the offer. The shopping process is exactly that, a process. That requires an app that has a base, and an operation. At the end of the day, daily deals are just coupons. Nobody is loyal to coupons. 

When you take an app like Foursquare, with its massive amounts of consumer purchasing data, as well as its business partnerships with commerce businesses like AMEX, and then mix that with a digital interface that is environmental, as well as mobile, you have suddenly a very new kind of retail experience. 

I was talking with Justin Williams the other day. He's one half of a startup in the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, powered by TechStars. We were talking about the future of pop-up retail, and it looks like this: augmented reality; location awareness; habit tracking; and crowd sourcing preferences and tastes. 

Or, some dude with an AR kit on his eyes. 

Digital storefronts that are hooked to facial recognition software, or mobile location apps like Foursquare. The town square can monitor and aggregate the data cloud of what is happening to whom in the square and then configure its store offerings in the environment to the populace that passes through. Foursquare is actually totally on top of this, if you think about it. With so much data, and a realtime awareness system, we realize that everything -- stores and their shoppers; cities and their citizens -- are all momentary pieces of an ever changing data landscape. 

Heraclitus never completed his original thought. It's not that you never step into the same river twice. It's that you never step in the same river once. The future is a definition of the past, and the trouble with that is that the future has no business being a reflection of the past. it's murky with the present, which is a reaction to the past. I think with apps like Foursquare, used in configuration with new ways to present data and read crowds, we have a bright future for retail that may completely alter what we know about what we want, when we want it, and how we want it served. 

Goodbye Daily Deals. Daily deals were a momentary exercise that showed us that nobody will stick to one category. We will always shift our attention to the next bright and shiny thing. But something like Foursquare will track that change, and make sure we stay consistent in our habits. Retailers will use something like Foursquare to keep up, to make sure retailers develop their own habits in line with ours. 

Robert Oschler, a Microsoft BizSpark member, picked up on this, and we had a brief conversation about this, which I will include here:

@douglascrets - Intriguing prediction and very interesting to mix-in Google Glass into your vision.

@douglascrets @foursquare - Excellent point, especially due to FourSquare's style of interaction with the user.

— Robert Oschler (@roschler) May 6, 2013

These guys won the best Windows 8 Hack award at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013:  Pasha and Pelle.  They built “Big Picture,” which aids developers in keeping track of the state of the design of their front end. You can watch their demo here. “

We interviewed them to get an idea of what inspired this success. 

This interview was conducted by Neha Bhaskar, SR CHANNEL & ECOSYSTEM Marketing Manager at Microsoft, in NYC. 

Tell us a bit about the app you built at the TechCrunch hackathon.

We wanted to make a tool that would aid developers in keeping track of the state of the design of their front end. Requirements usually change so fast when mocking up pages, that it is almost impossible to keep track of the overall progress. There is also no current tool (to our knowledge) that provides such an overview based on in-progress code, and makes it easy for non-developers to inspect the state of the project. The Big Picture tackles both.

What came first for you-the team or the idea?

We initially started working on different projects. Pasha was working on The Big Picture, and Pelle was trying to control the AR Drone with Leap Motion. Toward the middle of the hackathon we joined forces in order to polish the project and to make it into a Windows 8 App.

What inspired you to work on this idea and how do you see it evolving?

The idea came directly from dealing with the pains and quirks of developing web software. We think that if it catches the eye of some good open-source contributors, it could become an awesome designer/developer tool.

Outside of TchCrunch, what are you working on?

Pasha has a startup called Trait, that is attempting to put the power of biometrics (such as facial, fingerprint, and voice recognition) into the hands of every developer. Trait (currently in closed beta) is a biometrics as a service platform that bridges the gap between technology vendors and developers by providing developers with an easy to use API, while taking care of the necessary back-end infrastructure for storage and processing of biometric functions.

Pelle has a startup called circles.io, which is a real time backend as a service. Circles.io makes it easier for developers either on apps or websites can setup there product in no time with a team of people worring about the servers, databases, scaliblity, API, user management , realtime communications for them so they don’t have to hire staff or manage it themselves. They only need to focus on the frontend development, leaving the mundane tasks to us.  

What was the most difficult challenge your business faced this year?

Pelle: We are in the process of raising money, building the product , in addition to servicing clients and trying to bring new ones on it takes a lot of juggling. Having a small team is nice but it seems about the time to grow to give more time to each process.

How do you know when you are failing in product development and how do you make a correction – do you make the decision on your own, or do you consult your team?

Its all about time estimation. If you aren’t meeting your milestones and ship dates, you need to take a step back and decide on whether it is because you underestimated the task or because there is a flaw in your development process. Then you improve one of the two. Consulting your team often confuses the two causes.

Who would you like to be your mentor, and what would you ask him or her?

Pasha: Elon Musk, I would ask him how one would attract the right people in order to quickly revolutionize an industry that before seemed insurmountable.

Pelle: Mark Cuban, I would ask he through his process of building his companies, who or what gave him the biggest push to get to the next level.  

What advice do you want to give for any founder who wants to build a startup in rapid time?

If you think that you’re on to a good idea and you found a market where your product is needed, draw up an executable 6-8 week development plan for your MVP, and put your heads down to build it. Also don't try and do everything yourself as a startup you have limited manpower take advantage of resources others have built!