Last year, Microsoft BizSpark was launched to catalyze the success of startups by providing access to Microsoft’s end-to-end software solutions with no upfront costs. BizSpark also connects startups to a global community of more than 2,000 technology veterans and entrepreneurial experts who can help navigate the challenges of growing a new business. Since the launch, the program has reached more than 25,000 startups in over 100 countries, and through BizSpark, software startups around the world are choosing to develop on the Windows Platform.
This week, at PDC 2009, Microsoft will announce multiple extensions to its BizSpark offerings. Most notable, is the launch of BizSpark One, the newest expansion of the BizSpark program. BizSpark One has been developed to accelerate the growth of selected high potential startups through a one-on-one relationship with Microsoft and a global community of network partners. This unique, invite-only program is currently available in ten countries: Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Israel, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Another notable announcement is an offer for free Windows Azure Platform cloud computing use. To kick-start developers on this powerful platform, BizSpark partners will receive 750 free compute hours per month for 8 months.
Please go here to learn more about the new offerings and to read about Startups who are succeeding with BizSpark.
Microsoft Research has been working on several innovative mobile device technologies. These technologies are ready for you to develop into market leading products. Without the need to ramp-up a large research and development team. Check them out: More than 500 companies have already licensed technologies from Microsoft Research and brought them to market as their own products. At a fraction of the cost of developing technologies internally. See www.microsoft.com/iplicensing/
When vast amounts of business data are being collected, the data is often presented in difficult-to-understand tabular or text formats, and not accessible in a context that promotes understanding.
There is good news with some super technologies that can be easily licensed from Microsoft. These technologies can be used in a wide range of applications to show a variety of data.
Visualization Components for Displaying Data in .NET Applications can display information graphically, bringing clarity and understanding to rich sets of underlying data.
These tools provide structured, multidimensional business information that is easier to read, interpret, and translate into actionable insight.
With Visualization Components for Displaying Data in .NET Applications, users can easily analyze related sets of data in a unified manner.
Here's one example of the technology below, but click here to learn more.
BubbleChartGenerator
BubbleChartControl
Display a bubble chart with control over each bubble’s location, color, and size.
Microsoft Intellectual Property Licensing. www.microsoft.com/iplicensing. Create Your Next Big Thing.
I have one of the best jobs at Microsoft. Why? Because I get to work and meet with our amazing partners. What does that mean exactly? Well, there is a whole group of people (hundreds!) that work in the partner group at Microsoft in Redmond and in local offices all around the world. Our main goal in life is to help our partners drive business growth.
The Microsoft partner program and our partner ecosystem are critical to our success. When I meet with software companies looking to become a partner I often get asked the same two questions:
- Why would I want to join?
- What do I have to do to become a partner?
So let’s start with the first question. Why would you want to join? Let’s start with some fast facts on this point:
- 96% of Microsoft revenue comes from partners – Our partner ecosystem is core to the company and everything we do.
- 400,000 partners in our ecosystem – the largest of any other company and provides software companies with a unique opportunity to network and do business with a wide array of companies in the channel.
- We invest approximately $2B dollars a year in partners – as part of the partner program we provide free training, software, marketing and sales resources, business planning, technical support and early adopter programs.
With the ground set for why you should join let’s move onto the “how”. I’ve been told, many times, that finding information on how to join the Microsoft Partner program and find information on the partner site can be daunting – especially if you read our 45 page partner program guide. So, I’m here to tell you it’s not as complicated as we make it out to be –really. While I know you may be a bit skeptical it’s actually quite simple.
There are three levels within the Microsoft Partner Program – Registered, Certified and Gold Certified. You can become a registered partner today for free. It only takes 15 minutes and gives you access to online training and technical support communities as well as sales and marketing tools. To become a certified or gold certified partner, you will need to earn partner points. The following three steps help you become a Certified partner by earning 50 partner points. To become a Gold Certified partner you will need to earn 120 partner points (more about points later!).
Step 1: Enroll in the Microsoft Partner program as a Registered member (partners.microsoft.com) – you’ll need to have a windows live ID, hotmail or passport account.
Step 2: Test your solution - you can pick from different software tests – The entry test for many new software companies is The Platform Test.
Step 3: Submit three customer references – this is an email that is sent to your customer for approval and you can find out more information about the process on the partner site.
You’ll do all these actions in the Partner Membership center. This is the one place for you to manage all your partner program account actives –like customer references and tested solutions.
After you’ve tested your solution and your customers have approved your reference, you will have earned Certified partner status. To become a Gold certified partner you will need to earn additional partner points. Learn about partner points and how to earn them.
I've always been a proponent of doing conference calls and video calls. Driving to the airport, parking, boarding an overbooked flight and the many more hassles can make business travel well, a pain. Have you noticed in all the futuristic TV shows, movies nearly everyone is communicating via phone call or video call? Well, audio and video conferencing technology is catching up and catching on. Fast. I usually get shouted down when I mention drastically reducing travel budgets and doing more audio and video conferencing for meetings, events and tradeshows. The ones doing the shouting have more wrinkles and gray hair than me. Microsoft released a codec porting kit for some established technologies that are remarkably easy to license. The RTAudio codec is designed for both high quality wideband and narrowband voice over IP (VoIP) applications, including applications such as, games, audio conferencing, and wireless applications over IP. The RTVideo codec provides high quality, efficient, robust real-time video communication over IP networks. Check them out here. For more technologies that are also remarkably easy to license, visit the Microsoft site at www.microsoft.com/iplicensing I like the idea of licensing a technology versus spending months trying to figure out what to build and how to build it. This approach can lower risk and speed up the return on investment. Some technologies that Microsoft has just made available for licensing might make entrepreneurs and startups really sit up and take notice. Check out these exciting new areas. You next big thing could be just around the corner. There are many more research and technologies available at www.microsoft.com/iplicensing . I’ve got some good news for developers looking for a fast return on investment (ROI). There is some Microsoft Research out there that you need to take a serious look at. You could be creating your next big thing. The Microsoft Detours research provides the mechanisms to allow developers more flexibility by intercepting and modifying some system behavior at the API boundary. Windows APIs govern everything from how memory is allocated to when applications windows can be displayed on the screen. While this Windows API control may work well across many applications and many scenarios, developers often find the need to change these controls for a specific application or a specific scenario. Detours provides the mechanisms to allow developers more flexibility by intercepting and modifying some system behavior at the API boundary. - For example, you can use Detours to enforce web browser behavior to allow only the current browser tab to pop up new Windows.
- Other uses of Detours have included a system that changes the policy for how COM objects were allocated between a collection of computers and a system that changes registry access policy so that application do not overwrite local registry settings.
- Software developers can use Detours to create an automatic distributed partitioning system.
- Developers and architects can use this technology to instrument and analyze the DCOM protocol stack, and to create a thinking layer for a COM-based OS API.
Detours is available for commercial use with 32-bit and 64-bit applications via a simple licensing process here. There are many more research technologies, protocols and components easily licensed from Microsoft. Visit the Microsoft Intellectual Property licensing site here I often get asked what the “IP” in the Microsoft IP licensing team I work in stands for. It’s “intellectual property”. IP licensing is a possible way to innovate, creating new products. It is also an opportunity to interoperate, finding ways to make products work together. Drilling down a little further IP licensing offers a way to innovate by using the latest research and technologies from Microsoft without spending years trying to create your next big thing alone.
The IP licensing team also offers protocols, protocol specifications and components for licensing to help companies interoperate. This help might be especially important for companies developing high value add-ons and feature-rich solutions that run on Microsoft products. Innovation is being driven hard in Microsoft Research. Helping companies “interoperate” with our licensing of protocols, protocol specifications and components is also high on the list and complements the efforts around “ interoperability ” and “ standards “ Intellectual property licensing might suggest a licensing process mired in legalese and lawyers. We’re working hard to make that not the case. Take a look at the research, protocols, components and technologies available today for licensing. An area of technology we've licensed out recently addresses the issue of backing up encrypted data without decrypting or manipulating the data. Why such a big deal? Maintaining multiple versions of encrypted documents that can be unique for each user based on different encryption keys can be a storage capacity killer.
A company called Datacastle has developed a "block level" backup solution for encrypted files. "Block level" is where the actual 1's and 0's are captured from the hard drive typically eliminating backup failures related to open files. Datacastle's approach is to represent a specific document by a Data DNA map. This map states what Data DNA is needed and in what sequence it needs to be stitched together to give you back what you think of as your version of a document at a specific moment in time. It is this Data DNA that is backed up into a backend vault.
Datacastle further improved on their approach by licensing a Microsoft research technology called Convergent Encryption that allows the Datacastle solution to share Data DNA elements across all the users within a vault. This is important because each user device has its own cryptographically random encryption key.
It's another example of an ISV that is licensing Microsoft technology to create a market-leading approach without spending endless months trying to figure out an in-house solution. Datacastle may well have created their next big thing.
Check out more research, technologies, components and protocols available for licensing at www.microsoft.com/iplicensing | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /v2/Blogs/marketingmemo/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /v2/Blogs/marketingmemo/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /v2/Blogs/marketingmemo/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /v2/Blogs/marketingmemo/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is crowdzone (mobiTeris), based in the US. Below you will find an interview with Murgesh Navar, CEO of mobiTeris. All the best to them and congratulations for being the startup of the day!
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