Team Blogs: Microsoft BizSpark

If there was one tool not made for effective work, it would have to be email. If you take silos of information, and a chronological effect, where old or new is piled on top of each other, slowly or quickly descending and disappearing from view, and then add to that all of the noise of emails that were better off as text messages, or even a phone ca... Read More

You know how you are at the beach sometimes, listening to your portable listening device, jamming to some music and you realize, "Actually, at this moment, that Bruce Springsteen song, Glory Days would be really good." But you can't listen to it, because you don't have that song on your device, because you didn't sync it properly the last time you ... Read More

While web-based video streaming and digital audio has become increasingly sophisticated, the quality of photograph images viewed online has lagged behind.  At the moment, if someone was to try to upload a high quality image for viewing on a PC, tablet or smartphone, the size of the image would compromise the delivery speed.  So, what usually has to... Read More

Charlie Key is the founder of Modulus. He dislikes it when things are not efficient. He dislikes even more that others run into inefficiencies when they develop software and try to get their businesses off the ground. So, he wants to help. Modulus is his way of helping. In his words, "We want to make sure that developers spend the least amount of t... Read More

We are honored that Denis Crowley, Founder of awesome check-in and recommendations app Foursquare, will be sitting down for a live chat with Douglas Crets on May 23.  Biography from his LinkedIn Profile: Dennis Crowley is the co-founder of foursquare, a service that combines social networks, location awareness and game mechanics to encourage peopl... Read More

From Israel, we showcase today's Azure featured startup, Project RAY. Project RAY, according to founder Boaz Zilberman, "uses Azure as the only Internet-based infrastructure for its activity. The main use is in building a repository of audio books with a set of API that enables a wide range of client applications and platform to globally access it ... Read More

Every entrepreneur finds a problem and then builds a company to fix it. Sometimes the solution is an app that really only fixes a "problem" in an entertaining way. Sometimes the solution actually creates a problem -- like the invention of search creating the difficult problem of finding people you don't know you need to know. But with Let's Play Pl... Read More

WNM Live (you can find the Windows 8 app in the store) was founded by Brian Hamachek and Robert Gerleman in a Palo Alto garage – just a few blocks from the garage where HP started.  Brian, an avid tennis player, decided to build a social network for meeting new people after becoming frustrated that it was so hard to find someone to play tennis with... Read More

If you have not seen the work done by the folks at NodeXL, you need to check out how they piece together the fragmented ongoing conversations on the social web and put together very strong graphical images of those conversations. Like this one here.  We believe in keeping the conversation going. We've found that for a big brand, it's not useful to... Read More

Prateek Gupta went out with his TechCrunch Disrupt team to Times Square and found an unsuspecting vendor to try their BitCoin app on.  Here is the resulting video of Pay With Bits, which got them named in a TechCrunch article last night. Having been a denizen of NYC for five years, Douglas Crets, our community manager, was pleased to see that the d... Read More

Feel free to tweet us some questions for our live interview with David Sacks, CEO of Yammer. Tweet @bizspark to let us know you are listening. Read More

We'd like to introduce you to Mark Bower, CEO of HonestyBoxx, The app, in Bower's words: Allows anyone to earn money from their blog or website by providing micro-consulting engagements to their visitors. It works just like the honesty box you sometimes see at small stores - only for websites. When a business adds HonestyBoxx to their blog or websi... Read More

A special offer from Soluto, and some useful tips from a startup that has grown to scale very quickly....(read more) Read More

If you delay now, you will always delay. How Echoboom gets ahead in video game development...(read more) Read More

Silicon Valley Bank released the results of its extensive US and UK-focused Startup Outlook survey today. The result? If you are looking for a job, and you are reasonably endowed with skills in technology, engineering, business development or marketing, you might want to look at a startup as your next future employer. Employers are desperate to fin... Read More

If you are like my parents -- in their early sixties and living in a suburban area of a large Nortwestern US state -- you refuse to shop online because you don't have enough confidence in e-commerce. It's a sad fact that a significant percentage of the population of people who could benefit from shopping online don't do it, not because they don't h... Read More

Great news from Germany. Our BizSpark team in Germany is now offering free co-working space in Berlin, Munich and Koln to startups that are working on building apps on Windows 8, Windows Phone and Windows Azure.   From now until June 2013, right before the European BizSpark Summit, we will offer free co-working desks and intense support for startup... Read More

Wisdom comes from experience, they say.  We agree. At BizSpark, we try to deliver bits of wisdom now and again to the community so that the founders, developers, engineers, and business folks out there in startup land can use it. We saw four founding teams succeed at DEMO Mobile 2013 last week, and we feel that part of that success came from loopin... Read More

This has been the decade of financial hassles. It's become harder for vast swathes of consumers to afford that bright shiny object they want to buy, in order to feel they have achieved some success in life. For many that's a house. For some it's a jacuzzi. Maybe it's a trip to Disneyland with the kids. For others still, it's a car. One of our BizSp... Read More

Guest blog by Alp Tilev It's that time again! Foot thumping music, party glasses, luxurious cars… are a just a few of things that come to mind when … Oh wait sorry wrong post. Let me try that again: Hackers, ruby on steroids, piles of awesome swag, red bull are just a few things that come to mind when we think of tech crunch Disrupt hackathon in NY... Read More

If you are a product manager in the pre-web world, you probably hated having to spend hours a day tracking and analyzing what was happening with the customer's interactions with the products. And now that we have the cloud, it's that much easier to get that data. You're probably still hating how long you have to sift through data in order to find o... Read More

This has probably happened to you before. Someone starts up a presentation with Power Point. Five minutes later you are checking your phone. The person seems to be reading from a script. They are saying the same thing that is in the slide decks. Where's the ingenuity?  Where's the depth? Where's the subtle strokes of art and the craft of profession... Read More

Shopping should not have that far to go to be the leading area of innovation on the internet. Yet, we all seem to know people who refuse to shop online. Whether or not that's a bad thing, we don't know. What we do know is that there is so much innovation available to the retail market these days, and that several BizSpark companies are offering tha... Read More

Hold on, this next featured startup is going to make you think about how you use social, mobile and your identity. Welcome to SOLOMO, a mobile app that makes brands context aware and helps shoppers get personal deals around a digital identity that they manage for their retail experiences. The app bridges a gap between retailers who want to know how... Read More

The new class for Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure just launched. According to Scott Guthrie, a Corporate Vice President in the Microsoft Server and Tools Business, we started the first Azure Accelerator because we wanted to give promising startups full access to Azure, so that they can build and grow. We're doing it again for the next three... Read More

Our interview with Craftbox, makers of an app that launched in the Windows Store on October 16, 2012, introduces you to the mind behind one of the latest apps that makes full use of Windows 8 and its almost cinema-like presentation on devices, especially the Surface.  According to Eduardo Costa, co-founder, "We seek to work with an approach that is... Read More

Today we interview Riccardo Zanussi, founder of listiamo, a social network for lists. But the team's aim is much higher than social lists. According to Zanussi, the team wants to change the daily deals landscape. Listiamo originates from Barcelona. The four founders started their project to accurately curate the lists in social platforms on May 6, ... Read More

You can get the whole overview here:twitter widget Read More

Few things in life leave an impression quite like meeting Dave McClure…. The first time we met in person was at Le Web in December 2011. Here we are at Brian Solis’ birthday drinks at the Intercon in Paris, sandwiched between Oren from Mashery and our mutual good pal, 500 Startups mentor and champion coach to startups, Mike Sigal. At that time Dave... Read More

The web is a pretty cluttered and vicious space. It's an architecture where a researcher can create a botnet out of 420,000 by running a simple binary script. Light Point Security provides secure web browsing solutions that use virtualization and cloud technologies to protect computers from web-based malware. Light Point Web Enterprise, according t... Read More

If you went to South by Southwest this week and were overwhelmed by garish colored posters proclaiming the next big app, then you were not alone. Oddly, it seemed as though there were a lot of pitches and a lot of judgment of those pitches, but that there was not a lot of buzz about any special apps. That's a good thing, I think. Spotted this week ... Read More

Careful what you say in a pitch. Speek CTO Danny Boice, a Microsoft BizSpark member and fully tattooed dropout from Harvard, said at the end of his pitch in front of TechCocktail's pitch contest crowd at SXSW that if they won the pitch contest, then John Bracken, his CEO, would get the Speek mascot tattooed on his rear end. Lo, and behold.  They wo... Read More

This is an interview with the Founder of our Startup of the Day, Mark Burch, about his upcoming "hands-free invoice processing app."  It is not yet out in the app store, but you can monitor their blog for updates. APP: InvoiceSmash Do you build for scale first, or for revenue? How are those things related in your mind? We built InvoiceSmash whi... Read More

When we first met Al Bsharah and Bryan Hall, co-founders of embarke, it was in Seattle, and they were just getting ready to wrap up their time at the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, powered by TechStars. For being bright and sunny San Diego denizens, they did look like three months had taken its toll.  You could tell they had been hard at ... Read More

The team at BizSpark knows that mobile video is the thing this year. So, to make it even more a thing, our evangelist  team asked Chicago-based startup, Sparkreel if we could use their app to promote the awesome stuff that is happening at SXSW. So, if you have a Windows / Android / iphone, download the app or sign up via the window below, and enabl... Read More

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

So, you all have probably seen the Learn to Code video. How can you not be inspired by this?  Well, one of our BizSpark members, Prateek Gupta, is heading to SXSW as we speak, on the Startup Bus. And he and a team of coders and hackers are working on a project called Coders without Borders, a riff on the Medicens Sans Frontiers project. He wants t... Read More

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Imagine being able to whip out your phone anywhere on the planet and with the help of an app complete any number of exercises that are going to get you into shape. Yes, one of the new apps coming to the Windows 8 store does that. Bodeefit's Windows 8 workout app helps you time and keep track of your daily workouts. Log each work after your done and... Read More

When I sat down with the founder of MetricsHub, Charles Lamanna, he drew a graph on the white board behind him. The drawing depicted a convoluted path to enlightenment for someone building a startup. On this path, there are many, many ups and downs, and the point Charles was making in describing this path was that many choices are made in building ... Read More

Gaming has taken more than a few turns and evolutions since the days of Atari and Intellivision, to name just a couple of mainstream favorites.  If you are a gamer, you've grown up and are no longer playing Atari. You are likely building your own games. You probably want to manage and monetize those games. That's why there's staq. This is the real ... Read More

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 of the 500 Startups Demo Day, featuring a few of o... Read More

The Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure powered by TechStars ended its inaugural class last week with a Demo Day in Silicon Valley, but that doesn't mean we should stop showing off the goodness. Here is an interview with Socedo, a social media marketing analytics company run byKevin Yu, Co-founder & CTO and Aseem Badshah, CEO.  Do you build f... Read More

You can find dozens of sites out there that talk about the financial and operational logistics of building a startup. Does anyone really know the answer? Yes, there are technical things that a business needs to run. But most great businesses grew out of moments of clarity and trial and error. Most great startups created their own models. And the co... Read More

Most students graduate facing the challenge of getting a job, but Chai Botta, the CEO of GameIn this isn’t a problem.  He and his co-founders are already running their own successful start-up, with a fast-growing game in the Windows 8 store, even though some of them are still in full-time education, including Chai. The story starts in April 2012, w... Read More

This startup is graduating from the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, powered by TechStars this month, and they will be giving a demonstration of their product in front of a bunch of VCs on Sand Hill Road today. We have written about them before in a great interview and conversation with one of the founders, Jilliene Hellman. What you need t... Read More

Twitter came out with an app this weekend that sends six seconds of video to communicate what's happening in real time to a user's group of friends and followers. Social startup eyeMe has a range of socializing applications for social sharing, including creating voice messages and the option to layer text on to photos in all the social media platfo... Read More

That tag line is key. Elevate Digital, our featured startup today, has done one of those game changing things that you only see once in a while. Remember back in the day when, if you wanted advertising -- or sometimes didn't want it -- advertising would consume your time? It doesn't do that anymore, exactly. Now, with a blend of social and the inte... Read More

Yesterday we wrapped up the Accelerator experience with TechStars in Seattle with our Demo Day. The packed event included more than 400 registered attendees, including 110 investors to watch 10 startups pitch their ventures. The demo day is one of two we are having this month. The next one will be in Silicon Valley on January 31. And once that is o... Read More

BizSpark:  Tell us who you are and your role in the company: Mike Gardiner: I’m the Founder of Lime Rocket and the lead developer for our flagship gaming & engagement product Buzzy.IO. As a founder my role also stretches across product & customer development. BizSpark:  What did you do before creating your company? Mike Gardiner: I worked as a lea... Read More

BizSpark:  Tell us who you are and your role in the company: Sergiy Korzh : CEO and Founder Sergiy Korzh  BizSpark:  What did you do before creating your company? Sergiy Korzh : I have been running another company, Korzh.com (http://devtools.korzh.com). We create .NET components and sell them through the Internet. The most well-known is EasyQuery.N... Read More

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 platforms in the most efficient and simple way... Read More

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 how they have started up their own companies. Here ... Read More

Meet DiXidiaSoft's newest creation, Realms of Swordfall, a MMORPG. They are our first online gaming company in Italy.  Right now they host their gaming servers on Azure, as well as some of their internal management tools, but they have not fully launched yet. For now, we will have to wait to play.  According to Siro Toracchio, Founder, CEO & Projec... Read More

BizSpark:  Tell us who you are and your role in the company: Amine Chouaieb: CEO and founder, Amine CHOUAIEB. BizSpark:  What did you do before creating your company? Amine Chouaieb: Consulting in Strategy, management and IT systems BizSpark:  What is your company’s mission? Amine Chouaieb: Chifco was founded by former members of large consulting f... Read More

Company, Founder & App Information BizSpark:  Tell us who you are and your role in the company: Brian Satorius: I’m Brian Satorius, the founder of Smart Shopping. BizSpark:  What did you do before creating your company? Brian Satorius: I was working in cloud and mobile development at NASA. Prior to that, I worked in technology for different compan... Read More

I sat down and spoke with Tyler Griffin, Co-Founder and CEO of Mobilligy, an app that makes it super easy to pay bills while avoiding fees and controlling expenses. As more and more people use mobiles to do their computing away from the desk, or away fro home, this is the perfect sweet spot for a world that is moving and adapting to mobile payments... Read More

If you have been in any kind of investing and building game while trying to get your startup traction, you are probably aware of the singlemost nagging problem entrepreneurs face: building a startup is just not very easy to accomplish.  Going down the startup tunnel While there may be some structural problems with markets (there is the ongoing deb... Read More

Developers and entrepreneurs can get frustrated over a great many things. But one thing I have noticed that they don't get frustrated about is what people think about them. They are too mightily focused on doing something new to worry what someone's conformity will seem like to them. This post was written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager, Micros... Read More

If there is one thing you check out today, make it this! A video of MIC Belgium's 2012 year in review! Celebrating 3 years of activity, Kinect Camp, panels on how to finance your startup, experienced investors coming to speak, Startup Weekend, Bootcamps, intern programs - SO AWESOME! https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iYZz737wb... Read More

Company, Founder & App Information BizSpark:  Tell us who you are and your role in the company: Startup:  My name is Byron Morgan and I am the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Vinylmint. BizSpark:  What did you do before creating your company? Startup:  Vinylmint was inspired by Byron’s 7+ years of experience in the media & entertainment indu... Read More

Facebook has a really poor way of archiving and curating great conversations. Since Facebook is basically collecting all the data for itself, you can't really keep track of it. That's why every week we take the time to archive the great conversatoins here, so that you can use them for your benefit, and find access to them easily.  You can participa... Read More

It's a good thing we have a company like Distil on the web. The web is so open, and so free, that you never really know what you are going to get when it comes to marketing on the internet.  Let me explain.  You got yourself and three friends together to start a business and used a lot of human capital, photography, great blog writing and great des... Read More

We caught up with ZenDeals co-founders Chris Couhault and Alexi Suvacioglu at the BizSpark CoWorking Lab holiday party last night. It was fortuitous because they were about to launch out of stealth at midnight.  I asked them a few questions about how they got started, and was amused to learn that ZenDeals was born out of a need for diapers. During ... Read More

Here's the best thing about our interview with Alexey Petrov, co-founder and CTO of penxy -- he told us to stop worrying about the interview and said that it was important that startups just use Microsoft BizSpark to start their business.  Seems a fair enough proposition. Interviews are never as fun as getting a full business up and running.  pen... Read More

These three videos explain what many of the digerati fail to mention -- software is not really eating the world. It's really creating new growth. It is now so easy to get software -- you can get free Windows and Azure stuff through Microsoft BizSpark -- and it is so easy to get information about the software ecosystem and the problems faced by cons... Read More

Want an effective way to create real-time multiplayer games using a single suite of services and your developers' collective coding genius? We recently met a Microsoft BizSpark company that is basing just such a solution on Windows Azure. Metal Compass, co-founded by CTO Roman Levin, runs totally on Azure. They are the makers of ATK, which --- and ... Read More

Part of the first graduating class of the Microsoft Accelerator for Windows Azure, MediSafe Project has vital, Big Data implications for pharmaceutical companies. From anonymous demographics, geolocation and patient behaviors to physician trends and other market aspects, MediSafe Project’s broad analytics can help pharmaceutical companies better un... Read More

The MIC Korea does an incredible amount to support the local startup ecosystem. One exciting project this MIC has been working on involves a partnership with the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (Kotra). This partnership, called the "Smart Growth Program," incubates Korean startups. MIC Korea has provided training programs, mentoring and acc... Read More

When my sister got married, she and her husband had pictures taken of themselves dressed up to the nines in front of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. It was a bit of a hassle to drag all that equipment and the wedding party, and the guests, and the family around. I remember that by the end of it, I just wanted to sit down on the party bus and open a ... Read More

Here's a video that explains it. Read More

Back in the early part of November, I cruised around San Francisco looking for developers to talk. 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. The... Read More

Perhaps the biggest question for any company -- from small startup to big corporate brand -- is how do you get ROI from social media? The Chief Technology Officer of Thuzi, a Microsoft BizSpark Featured Startup on Azure, tells us that it is possible to monetize this, and his company's suite of products is doing that while using the Windows Azure cl... Read More

Are you in the matrix? Is the Twitter handle itself a complete distribution system for what you know and when you know it? Is it a time stamp? What is social media, if just a hyper aware network of  nodes that know more than you know, but that are accentuated in their knowledge discourse when you talk to them and add to their information base? What... Read More

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 about to start at Startup Weekend Kirkland. G... Read More

MIC Productivity, based in Spain, is set to hold a workshop on “DevelopingApplications with Windows Azure cloud” on Thursday, November 22. This will be thefourth session they’ve hosted, and this session will include participation fromtrentia (www.trentia.es) and ValidatedId (www.validatedid.com).  About the session:The implementation of cloud solut... Read More

At Microsoft BizSpark, we are dedicated to showcasing startups that impress us with how they try to change old industries and business habits. We use this blog to showcase their business views and the work they have done to solve critical problems. We offer a forum for this in our regular series of Microsoft BizSpark Featured Startups. Today's star... Read More

Brisbane BizSpark EXPRESSWAY Network Forum 21st November 2012 Microsoft Innovation Centre EXPRESSWAY Network forum is a lunchtime forum for board and senior management of innovative SMEs to share ideas, and learn from industry experts about disciplines essential to commercial success. The November BizSpark EXPRESSWAY Network forum will feature a ke... Read More

Worldwide, online auction sites are the way that many people buy a variety of products, but often they lack local feel and focus.  This is one of the main reasons that Switzerland-based ricardo.ch online auction site has been so successful and since launch a decade ago, is now used by over 2 million registered users, pinging 340,000 unique visits p... Read More

I was first introduced to Arie Abecassis, one of the Managing Partners at DreamIt Ventures, back in June this year. At the time, we were doing our bit to support DreamIt programs on the ground in NYC and Philly, a little in Israel, but Arie was keen to do [much] more with Microsoft BizSpark, and told me how much they rated the program. This blog po... Read More

Dave McLure's 500 startups announced their new class today, and since 9 of those 33 teams are members are BizSpark teams, we have reason to celebrate. Percentage-wise, Microsoft BizSpark members made up nearly 30% of those teams.  Here's a rundown of those companies, and what they do. Congratulations to the teams.  Cinemacraft – Produces an intera... Read More

For the Russian speakers out there, here's a very handy series on how BizSpark members AtContent tweaked and worked with Windows Azure to get their company up and running. People who don't read Cyrillic can translate in Bing and enjoy the useful experience. It's important to read it, because they are using Azure as a backend to -- they hope -- tran... Read More

When you are building your company, you always end up facing that one hardest thing, or a myriad of hardest things. Every founder has experienced it, and if they haven’t, they really haven’t been a founder. At the most recent FailCon event, we dove into the hardest things Bing Fund general manager Rahul Sood has ever experienced after his talk to a... Read More

Benjamin Nitschke is the CTO of MobileBits and the CEO of Delta Engine, which is trying to bring a multiplatform game engine to mass market. But more interestingly, Nitschke iscreator of the first commercial .NET game, Arena Wars. Nitschke also writes for this blog. You can also follow him on Twitter @exDreamDuck. Delta Engine uses .NET technology ... Read More

This BizSpark company just finished a term with Y-Combinator and is actively working with large clients in the media space as they scale to 1 million customers. We asked their CEO, Michael Fitzgerald, a few questions about their experience as a team running a successful startup.  First, a little bit about Submittable. I met these guys in San Franci... Read More

We work and live in a startup culture that prizes money, funding, success over things like failure, which is actually one of the most important things that can happen to a founder or a developer. This blog post was written by Douglas Crets, Community Manager for Microsoft BizSpark. For information on how you can get free software and support from M... Read More

We are covering the live stream of the Windows 8 launch in New York City right here. Read More

In a place like Silicon Valley, it can sometimes feel like companies are started simply because it’s the thing to do.  Just as beanie babies were all the rage during my middle school years, I’ve met founders more enamored with the idea of starting a company than the technology being developed or problem getting solved.  I understand this mindset as... Read More

The Windows 8 launch is right around the corner and recently Microsoft and New York Tech Meetup teamed up to host a workshop and hackathon @WeWork Lounge in NYC. There were some really cool demos there with Purpella winning the hackathon with their supercool app and design. Here’s a brief interview with their Chief Designer Lena and Co-founder. Da... Read More

Lucas Carlson is a magician and developer who lost ten years worth of projects when his server melted down. His solution is a little bit of cloud magic.  He came up with AppFog, a Microsoft BizSpark company, which reduces time and helps developers work across any programming platform, and let's operational people and devs work simultaneously on pro... Read More

Andrew Sullivan is right about the death of print. Newsweek print may be a dead beast in the muck - and for the good. What it means for digital, though, is extremely important. Digital media is about delivering people to people, rather than delivering people to a platform where they have to then imagine their next moves with an abstract notion call... Read More

My name is Manoj Nathwani and I founded Price Trakker when I was 17. Price Trakker is basically like a price comparison website. However, instead of tracking prices and feeding the data to the consumer like you or me - the data is fed to the actual company as a B2B service. This means if you are someone who sells digital cameras online, Price Trakk... Read More

BizSpark has grown so large that it now covers over 100 countries and about 50,000 startups. We have recently started a BizSpark Ambassador series, which takes you into the minds of startuppers around the world, and helps you get a view to what is actually happening on the ground in various countries.  The BizSpark story cannot be just one point of... Read More

A startup founder in Bulgaria is trying to make it easier for you to transfer information from ID and other public record documents to paperwork, so that you don't make costly mistakes that waste your time, and get bureaucrats all in a kerfluffle. This interview is from one of our ambassadors in Europe, Dimitar Georgiev, who runs SourceRealms. Mart... Read More

Helping students to become the next generation of start-ups is a huge area of focus within Microsoft right now. So our new lead for start-ups and student projects for Microsoft in Sweden – Therese Thorstorp – is a great fit, not just because of her IT know-how, but because she herself a student until only a couple of years ago, so she remembers wha... Read More

Being a start-up is never easy but some markets are particularly challenging.  The healthcare sector is arguably one of these, because of the (understandably) often complex layers of legislation and scientific validation required, so adoption of new innovation can be lengthy. MiMedication attended health2con.com, held in San Francisco over the past... Read More

When Microsoft first offered me a job at Microsoft to help them manage 50,000 startups that had joined Microsoft BizSpark for the free software and the community support, I had to admit, I wasn't sure what to think. but I talked to the woman who would eventually become my boss, and that entire conversation, which I will remember forever, was about ... Read More

Startup outlook in Brazil Being an entrepreneur in Brazil is a lesson in how to accept excitement and the roller coaster of dismay, elation, frustration and success. Despite the fact that there’s a lot of local problems (most of them well known), there are also a lot of opportunities and good initiatives coming from all sides. Our BizSpark Brazil A... Read More

BizSpark has grown so big that now it's time to say goodbye to a rather limited blogging strategy. It used to be that we would run a couple of interviews every week and then have guest blogs from about three or four Microsoft staff and some startups each month. But BizSpark continues to grow at triple digit percentages each year. It's successful. P... Read More

We walked around and talked to the founders of some of the incredible BizSpark companies presenting in the pavilion at DEMO Fall.  You can get inside information and a free peek at one of the most important conferences for startup, by visiting our live feed page (watch this instead of doing your work at your desk!), or by checking (and getting jeal... Read More