After a small hiatus, the popular event StartupSF is now back! I’m pleased to announce that BizSpark is now a proud sponsor of this event series. We’re all about supporting the startup ecosystem in the Silicon Valley, and through this event entrepreneurs will have a great opportunity to connect with and learn from other entrepreneurs.
StartupSF
StartupSF will debut at its new location in Microsoft SF on June 4, 2009 from 6-9pm. And our guest speaker for this opening event is Loic Le Meur, Founder and CEO of Seesmic. Loic’s presentation is titled “How to Launch a Product with your Community” - learn first hand how to use various community building techniques to build your product, service or brand from the ground up.
Date: June 4th, 2009 (Thursday)
Time: 6-9pm
Location: Microsoft, 835 Market St, Suite 700, San Francisco, CA 94103
Registration Link: http://startupsf0609.eventbrite.com/ (see below for a chance to win free passes)
Price: $10 online in advance / $20 at the door (StartUpSF is a not-for-profit event with all proceeds going to charity. All proceeds from this event will be going to GreenPeace)
Note: Food & Drink included
Open Mic for Startups
A few startups will have the opportunity to utilize 5 minutes of “open mic” time to give their company’s elevator pitch, as well utilize demo tables where they can showcase their product or service. We are currently accepting applications for Demo Companies for this event and those interested should fill out the Contact Form over on StartUpSF.com.
Free Passes?
Would you like a free pass to StartupSF? I have a handful of passes, if you’d like one please email me: anand.iyer@microsoft.com. First come, first serve.
Follow us
To keep track of StartupSF updates:
“ai” I’ve been a fan of Joel Spolsky’s for a while. Even today, I tell potential Microsoft recruits stories from the article Spolsky wrote back in 2000 about his time at Microsoft (which was actually what convinced me to interview at Microsoft when I was still in school, and then join Microsoft years later): At Microsoft, if you're the Program Manager working on the Excel macro strategy, even if you've been at the company for less than six months, it doesn't matter – you are the GOD of the Excel macro strategy, and nobody, not even employee number 6, is allowed to get in your way. Period. I’ve also previously confessed my bro-mance for Jeff Atwood. Smart, witty, great writer - love the guy. Anyhow, I digress… It is no surprise to anyone that StackOverflow is a roaring success due to the combined efforts of Jeff and Joel. As many of you may know, StackOverflow is built using the WISC (Windows, IIS, SQL Server, C#) stack and StackOverflow is also a BizSpark startup. It’s always comforting when someone praises your products, especially when it’s unsolicited. So when my good friend, Greg, sent me a link to this video of Spolsky speaking at Google about StackOverflow, I was really intrigued. In the video, Joel talks about StackOverflow and it got really interesting starting at around 24:56 in to the video ((I did my best to transcribe what Joel was saying): “We were really obsessed about performance – we knew that getting fast answers and the site being “snippy” and “snappy” and quick and stuff like that was important. So here’s the technology stack that we actually used – [we] built on the Microsoft stack. The performance, I know you guys don’t use it that much here, but the performance of C#, which is a compiled language is just ridiculously good. This entire site is serving 16million pages a month and we’re doing it off of 2 servers, which are almost completely unloaded. So we’ve got a ton of headroom on those 2 servers – one server is a webserver, the other server is running Microsoft SQL Server 2008 and they’re both 8 core Xeons. But, there were a lot of oppositions that went in there but no matter what people say this is a pretty good stack. And one of the things that I’ve always been concerned about is if you start building a technology like this using the Microsoft stack you are going to pay for a Windows Server license, lots of SQL Server licenses, which are 5000 bucks for every box that you put out. And the idea that you could possibly use a larger number of cheaper computers and use Open Source products which are free certainly occurred to us. On the other hand when I compare our performance to similar sites that are running on the open source stack, we are using about 1/10th of the hardware that they are, unfortunately, and maybe that’s because they are not good programmers. But just in terms of the types of queries we are doing and stuff, the Microsoft stack is actually, appears to be paying for itself - in terms of reduced hardware.” Since StackOverflow is in the BizSpark program, they are entitled to all kinds of software, including Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2008 (specifically what Joel calls out the costs for) to use in production for pretty much no cost (companies pay $100 when they exit the program) for 3 years. Can you beat phenomenal performance, reduced CPU usage and great productivity which now comes at no cost up-front? “ai” [Update: Corrected a broken link]
Today we are launching “new CloudApp()” a US-based developer challenge to promote applications running on the Azure Services Platform. This contest will have three categories of winners for applications running on the Azure Services Platform –
- a best .NET application,
- a top PHP application, and,
- a community winner.
What could a contestant win?
The winning submissions will:
- Be featured on www.azure.com as well as at major Microsoft events
- Be featured in a video interview on Channel 9 with the application author
- Winners will be announced at Structure 09
- Receive cash ($):
- .NET Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
- PHP Applications Category winner: $5,000 Visa gift card
- Community winner: $2,500 Visa gift card
Who are the judges?
The .NET and PHP category of applications will be judged by industry leaders, Om Malik and Michael Cote. We are inviting the community of web and software developers to decide the third overall community winner via online voting.
- Michael Cote is an analyst at RedMonk covering primarily enterprise software, specializing in open source, IT management, software development, collaborative, the web, and social/collaborative software. He is RedMonk's IT Management Lead. Read more about him on his blog.
- Om Malik is the founder and senior writer for the GigaOM Network. Prior to that venture, Om was a senior writer for Business 2.0 magazine in San Francisco writing telecom and broadband related stories. Visit Om's blog.
- You are also critically important and will decide the overall Community winner. Community voting will end on June 29, 2009 and the winners of the community voting will be announced on June 30, 2009. Recruit your friends and fellow developers to vote for your application and spread the word by sharing your experiences during the contest through your blog or use "#newCloudApp" as a hashtag on Twitter.
How will the winners be judged?
Entries will be evaluated based on
- user experience and user interface,
- innovation and creativity of the application,
- applicability to cloud computing, and,
- real-world applicability of the application.
From Steve Martin’s blog:
For the .NET application category, we want to see a great .NET application running on Windows Azure using ASP.NET or Silverlight to incorporate additional Azure services such as .NET Services and Live Services. Incorporate other Microsoft, 3rd party services, or other cloud services and author a unique web, mobile, or desktop application.
For the PHP contest category running on Windows Azure, we want to see a PHP application taking interoperability to the next level by integrating with other Azure services, 3rd party web services and APIs, and services provided by other cloud providers.
What are the contest dates?
Monday, May 4: Contest Open
Thursday, June 18: Submission deadline
Friday, June 19: Community voting starts
Thursday, June 25: .NET & PHP category winners announced at Structure 09
Monday, June 29: Community voting ends
Tuesday, June 30: Community winner announced
How do I get started?
- Join BizSpark if you’re a startup or an entrepreneur, to get access to tools for development and test (email me if you need a invite code)
- Register to join the contest
- Sign up for the Azure Services
- Download the SDKs and Tools
What are the rules?
- Valid submissions are limited to residents 18 years and older of the 50 United States and District of Columbia.
- Contestants may only submit one entry for either the .NET or PHP applications category.
- Microsoft employees are not eligible to participate in this contest.
- Azure applications that have already been built can be submitted for the contest. However the contestant cannot have previously submitted or publicly released the application or service. In addition, the application cannot have won any previous awards or been submitted in any other competitions.
- Voting is restricted to one (1) vote per person, per email address and per household per day.
- Please read the full list of official rules.
Also, learn more about Azure services:
Check out the FAQ for more details.
“ai”
This is a guest post by Suresh Sreedharan, Sr. Architect Evangelist in the ISV Evangelism Team based in Southern California.
 Incubation Week   ![clip_image002[1]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0021_thumb.gif "clip_image002[1]") ![clip_image003[1]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0031_thumb.gif "clip_image003[1]") ![clip_image002[2]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0022_thumb.gif "clip_image002[2]") ![clip_image003[2]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0032_thumb.gif "clip_image003[2]") ![clip_image002[3]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0023_thumb.gif "clip_image002[3]") ![clip_image003[3]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0033_thumb.gif "clip_image003[3]") ![clip_image002[4]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0024_thumb.gif "clip_image002[4]") ![clip_image003[4]](/Blogs/anand_iyer/Lists/Posts/Attachments/63/clip_image0034_thumb.gif "clip_image003[4]")
The current economic downturn is putting many entrepreneurs under increasing pressure, making it critical to find new resources and ways to reduce costs and inefficiencies at the same time growing the business. Windows 7 will create new market opportunities for software vendors to build richer application experience with more natural user interaction like Windows touch (ink, gesture support and handwriting recognition), new taskbar, rich animation framework and extensible ribbon. Windows 7 provides a solid development platform and innovative tools in addition to providing the best of Windows and the web by enabling rich web experience and extending web services to client applications.
The incubation week will provide an opportunity to:
· Learn and build next generation application on Windows 7 platform with the help of on-site advisors.
· Listen and learn from experts about successful ventures and legal issues
· Generate marketing buzz for your ideas
· Create potential opportunity and exposure to be highlighted at the Windows 7 launch
We are inviting nominations for the incubation week from startups interested in building Windows 7 applications that targets the following scenarios:
· Windows touch( ink, multi-touch gesture support, handwriting recognition) applications
· Sensor network applications(GPS, light, motion)
· Rich client/animation applications
The Windows 7 Incubation Week will be held at Microsoft Technology Center, Irvine, CA from Mon 4/27/2009 to Fri 5/01/2009. This event consists of ½ day of training, 3 ½ days of active prototype/development time, and a final day for packaging/finishing and reporting out to a panel of judges for various prizes.
This event is a no-fee event (plan your own travel expenses) and each team can bring 3 participants (1 business and 1-2 technical). To nominate your team, please submit the following details to Suresh Sreedharan or Woody Pewitt. Nominations will be judged according to the strength of the founding team, originality and creativity of the idea, and ability to leverage Windows 7 Platform.
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You may also want to enroll in the recently launched Microsoft BizSpark, an exciting new offering that enables software startups to leverage Microsoft development and platform technologies to deliver next generation web and Software + Services applications. For details see here.
For more details on Windows 7, visit Windows 7 MSDN site
This is a guest post written by Wade Wegner, Sr. Architect Evangelist at Microsoft based in Chicago. This article was originally posted on Architecting with .NET on March 23, 2009.
I recently returned from MIX09 – what a fantastic event! So many great things were announced; so many that there’s no way I can list them all here. Please visit http://live.visitmix.com/ for access to the keynote videos and all the breakout sessions. I would also recommend reading the day one recap and the day two recap.
One of the major announcements was new capabilities for the Windows Azure CTP. This includes the support for FastCGI, Full Trust, and Geo-location. Please take a look at the Windows Azure team’s blog for all the announcements.
In this post, I want to walk you through the step you need to take to run a PHP application on Windows Azure. As you’ll see, it’s quite simple and straightforward – after a few configuration updates and additional steps, you can run nearly any PHP application. This walkthrough assumes that you have installed the latest bits for Windows Azure. If you are just getting started with Azure, please visit http://www.azure.com/ – this is the primary landing page for the Azure Services Platform. If you want to get the updated bits that allows for Full Trust and FastCGI, you can grab the bits at the Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio March 2009 CTP page.
- Create a new project. Select File –> New –> Project.
- Select Cloud Service project type and select the Blank Cloud Service template. Specify the name/location, and click OK.
- Add a Cgi Web Role project. Right-click the project (e.g. CloudService1) and select New Web Role Project.
- Specify the Name and click OK.
- By default the Web.roleconfig file is opened in the new project. Remove the comments and update the application fullPath to "%RoleRoot%\php\php-cgi.exe".
- Now we need to actually grab the PHP executable that will bet invoked. Browse to http://www.php.net/downloads.php and grab the non-thread-safe Windows binary (at the time of writing, it is “PHP 5.2.9-1 Non-thread-safe zip package”).
- You might as well configure PHP to run on your Windows environment. Rather than specifying all these steps, please see Simon Guest’s post on hosting PHP applications in 5 easy steps. Follow the steps in his post, and at the end you should be able to confirm that PHP works in IIS 7.
- Copy all the files in the \PHP folder you downloaded into your Cgi Web Role project. XCopy works really well. For example, open a command prompt in the root of your Cgi Web Role project and type:
xcopy /s \php php
When asked, specify “D for directory”. This will copy everything from c:\php into a folder called php in your Cgi Web Role project. Note that this is where we pointed Windows Azure to in step 5.
- Select your Cgi Web Role project, show all files, and add the new php folder into your project. This way it will get packaged up with the rest of your application and deployed to Windows Azure.
- Open up the Web.config file and specify a new default document. This will tell Windows Azure to open up our PHP page by default. Under the <system.webServer> element, add a <defaultDocument>:
- Additionally, we need to setup a handler in the Web.config file. Add the following code to the <handlers> element in the web.Config:
- In order for this to function, we have to enable native code execution in Windows Azure. To do so, open the ServiceDefinition.csdef file and set the enableNativeCodeExecutiion flag to true:
- Now, let’s create a new PHP file. Right-click on your Cgi Web Role and add a new item. Select the Text File template and change the name to index.php. Click Add.
- To test, create some PHP code. A quick, but effective, test is to simply echo “Hello World”. In the index.php file, write the following code:
- Press F5, and your browser should open and show you the following page:
And that’s all it takes!
While this is a simple demonstration, I hope it impresses upon you the impact that allowing native code execution has in Windows Azure. With native code execution, and fast CGI support, you can now leverage all the rich content created in the PHP community on Windows Azure. The story even gets better with the new relational capabilities of SQL Data Services, but I’ll save that for another post.
I hope this helps!
Wade
Note: This article was originally posted on Architecting with .NET on March 23, 2009.
StartupWeekend brought together around 200 of the most talented people from the San Francisco Bay Area together at Microsoft's offices in SF this past weekend - all with the common goal of building a startup in a 54 hour time span.
Andrew Hyde, the founder of StartupWeekend, kicked off the event at 7pm on Friday which was followed by an introductory discussion by a set of speakers, some very familiar and popular names in the valley - Connie Chan, Dave McClure, Katherine Barr, Mark Jacobsen and Christine Herron. Tyler Willis, one of the main organizers of this event, did a great job of moderating this discussion.
[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]
Following the discussion, Hyde moderated a series of lightning pitches from the audience - essentially anyone who had an idea for a startup got the opportunity to propose their idea to the audience in a short 30-60 second pitch. There was absolutely no shortage of ideas (there were probably around 30 pitches). What made this lightning pitch session exciting however was the real time feedback the expert speakers provided to those pitching. There was some great learning to be had here. For example, Antonio Altamirano describes McClure's style of an ideal pitch: "Take 80% of the time to describe the problem and 20% describing the solution." Once the ideas had been pitched, the originators of each of the ideas went around seeking team members to work on these ideas with over the weekend. This was a stark contrast from StartupWeekend last year, where everyone voted on one idea to implement over the weekend and split up in to groups of development, project management, marketing, biz dev etc. This go around, there were several teams working on several startups.
[photo credit: antoniocapo, kyeung808]
About 50 or so hours and several cups of coffee and later, the teams pitched their ideas to another full house. There were 23 pitches in all, and honestly, I'm in complete awe with the number of ideas that were implemented this weekend. This is truly the startup capital of the world.
| FounderShack is a website that helps you find co-founders. It’s for people who are passionate about solving a common business problem. The website looks trivial to use – users submitting ideas have to short videos of their pitch and to be matched the other party has to do the same thing. Hopefully the next StartupWeekend will use FounderShack to connect people at the event. http://foundershack.com |
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“Digg for Deals” (working title) is making bargain hunting easy. The site helps you narrow down on the deal you love. The opening page shows you deals, with an initial filter. Then you click on either “Warmer” or “Cooler” and you get two more products that are similar in nature, but are probably more like deals you may be looking for. When you click on an actual link for a product, a little built-in toolbar appears on the top of the webpage (like the new Digg toolbar). |
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BigPonzi– this was more of a demo for the sake of a demo. Huge shout out to Dylan Field and Daniel Brusilovsky, a couple of teenagers for putting the demo together. |
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DemoClarity helps bring clarity to the process of ‘democracy’. The site offers a summary of different legislations, media relevant to the legislation, discussions relevant to the legislation etc. At the bottom of the page are two buttons using which you can either Support or Oppose the proposed legislation. You can also sign a petition and spread the word with your friends. The site also lets you stay informed, and see more issues that are related to the legislation you are perusing. The site provides real value by serving public interest and educating the public. http://democlarity.com |
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| Hubb.Me is like bit.ly or tr.im, but it lets you share more than just one link. You can create a ‘hubb’ on the site, and share it via twitter. When users click on the’hubb’ link they can then check out each of the links in that hub. Hubb also provides an easy tab navigation bar as you start visiting each of the sites in the Hubb so that you know the next site you need to visit. The site integrates with Google Analytics, and you can create a ‘Hubb’ in seconds. http://hubb.me |
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| TwitFitLog lets you use twitter to send fitness logs using pseudo tweets ("@fitlog #run 3 miles” for example). Twitfitlog then records your tweets and presents it to you on a website in a clean manner. FitLog will eventually introduce some game elements, like challenging yourself or challenging someone else, which I believe will draw users to the site as well as retain current users. http://fitlog.pbwiki.com has a lot of what the team has thought about. http://twitfitlog.com |
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| SnoozeMail lets you “snooze on your email”. Users can go to snoozemail.com, register on the site, authenticate (IMAP is a requirement at the moment). Emails that you have snoozed will re-pop up in your inbox (via another email) thereby sending it to the top your inbox. I seem to be the only one in this boat, but this is a service that I don’t see myself using any time soon and that may be because I have (unfortunately) found the most efficient way to work through my email. I think services like these, while very clever, are still band-aids on top of this very broken problem called ‘email’. The presenters mentioned that they may look at a ‘freemium’ model for monetization in the future. http://gosnoozemail.com |
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| OurBlockTV provides a crowdsourced approach to “neighborhood watch”. The idea seems to have cropped up when one of the founders tried this himself by setting up a webcam outside of his apartment window. The hope is that a community based network of webcams will empower citizens to help fight crime and save lives. Users of the service can upload their videos, which will go in to a moderation queue and eventually get published on to the site. Apparently users can get weatherproof cameras for fairly cheap ($49). I can see some legal problems cropping up here, but apparently the initial feedback seems to have been really good. http://adamsblock.com |
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| Img.gr is a photo tagging tool for twitter. It is very similar to facebook photo tagging, but you tag users in their photos using their twitter handles. Once on the img.gr website, you can draw a rectangle around what you want to tag, which brings up a drop-down of your twitter friends so you can tag them. Here is their presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/driveafastercar/imggr-san-francisco-startup-weekend While questions around untagging and some other concerns arise, regardless, I can see myself using this service in the very near future. http://twitter.com/imggr |
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| LiveCut is an ambitious project that helps you get legal downloads of music from the concerts that you see. Let’s say a group of friends go to a concert, on either side of the stage will be a song number or a ‘performance id’ that you can then text message to LiveCut. LiveCut will then respond with a viable way to acquire the song. The model has been well fleshed out with monetization capabilities (and therefore incentives) for artists to want to use it. LiveCut wasn’t developed this weekend, the founder was simply pitching it this evening. http://livecut.com |
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| FeedTheChef is an RSS reader for an average internet user. The interface looks nifty, with an inbox feel in the left pane, and a view based on “importance”. There isn’t a requirement to know about feeds or RSS – you simply key in the URL on the website, and it automatically brings in the feed for you. FeedTheChef is basically bringing together an online version of a personalized newspaper. If the UI is done right (and I think we got a sneak peek of a very slick horizontally scrolling UI), I think they can easily attract users. http://feedthechef.com |
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| MonkeyCalling lets you ask questions and get answers instantly by calling phones of people you want to survey thereby helping you get ‘fresh responses’. MonkeyCalling works on the basic premise that the phone is still very much the most immediate form of communication. The founders described the service as a “personalized call center in the cloud”. MonkeyCalling has used @twilio for the voice integration, and as creepy as the text to speech sounds I can’t wait to start spam-calling my friends through this service. http://monkeycalling.com |
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| RadioKi shows you radio stations online that are currently playing the music that you want to tune into. Once on the site, you can simply type the name of an artist or a band, and the site automagically sifts through several radio stations to show you which radio station (online or not) is currently playing that artist’s song. The founders are using Yahoo Pipes underneath to exercise a giant workflow to sift through all the different channels. Eventually, they want to pull in information from other sources like Wikipedia etc. to show content relevant to the music being played. My big question is, if you know the name of the artist or the song you want to listen to, why not use imeem? http://radioki.com |
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| Gabi is a native desktop application that is about “Greater Access, Broader Independence”. Gabi provides technology for aging independents. Gabi plans on selling subscription services to care providers which provides basic video conferencing, mobile components (to help track via GPS), a video assistance center that contacts care providers in case of emergencies and much more. Gabi was another company that wasn’t developed this weekend and was simply pitching. They are looking for $300K in seed financing. http://Gabinow.com |
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| CheapParking is a mobile application for finding low cost parking using location based services on your mobile phone. The application provides mobile applications to find real time parking information. There are solutions out there help you find garages, but not necessarily the cheapest garage. Using the app, you can find the cheapest one based on proximity, with the list always sorted by the cheapest match first. Their first cut is an Android based app. It is likely for large events (like ballgames) that cheap garages are sold out, but the founders tell me that they plan on incorporating capacity information as well soon enough. The app will sell for $1.99, and $4.99 for “multiple” cities. http://cheapparkingapp.com |
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| KivaiPhoneApp does exactly as the name sounds. The application allows anyone with an iPhone to become a social investor. The app gives existing kiva users a cool way to stay in touch with their investees. http://kivaiphoneapp.com |
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| ProdNv lets you give better gifts, and get better deals. Their first implementation is using BestBuy’s APIs and a Facebook application where you can track products you want to either get or give. Using the application, you can navigate to bestbuy.com, and add a product to your “envylist” for example. This will add the item to your Facebook productenvy page, which you can share with your facebook friends. The founders also demonstrated a twitter based app, whereby you can send a tweet to the twitter bot, @prnv which processes your pseudo-tweet. http://prodnv.com |
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| Encritter tries to solve the twitter privacy problem – wouldn’t you like to twitter something to just a subset of your friends? Encritter tries to introduce layered privacy on top of twitter (the founder calls it ‘EaaS’ – encryption as a service). Using the web app, you can encrypt (using 128 bit AES) a message that will look something like this: “?encritter_XXX” that you can tweet to the twitterverse. Your friends would have to know the key that was used to encrypt the message to decrypt and read it. The real question is, how do you share the key (or password) with your friends? Or more importantly, what happens when twitter introduces “groups”? http://encritter.com |
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| Beer2Peer – ugh, I spilled my coffee and totally missed this demo L I heard a lot of cheering and rara from the kitchen though. http://beer2peer.net |
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| TinyUPC lets you register every UPC for every product you make or use or distribute so consumers can easily find out all information about that product. The site lets you generate a Tinyupc.com/UPC. I didn’t quite gather the practical application of this or why producers out there would want to use something like this however. http://tinyupc.com |
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| indinero is Mint.com for businesses. That’s it. I couldn’t tell what was unique about the service for businesses per se, but the founders tell us that ‘cash flow analysis’ for example is something that Mint.com cannot provide you with today. http://indinero.com |
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| Yoola is Yelp for EULAs. The founders of Yoola claim that you’ve probably accepted over 1000 EULAs not having read them entirely. Yoola gives you the facts of a EULA in 0.03 second. All you would have to do is copy-paste the EULA from a site on to Yoola.com and click on ‘Get Facts’. If the site has a similar EULA in its repository, it will tell you what the pros and cons of the EULA are. The refreshing fact about Yoola is that the information about the EULAs is crowdsourced. I’m very transparent about my favorable bias towards Yelp, so when the founders mentioned that they were a Yelp for EULAs, I was immediately sold. If a certain EULA is not already on the site, you can create the thread. |
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| Spelunkr (working title) lets you get detailed information about your twitter friends. It lets you analyze your followers and more detailed analytics will be provided in future releases. |
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So there you have it - approximately 200 people, 23 (or so) startups, one weekend.
"ai"
PS: Maybe the event should be called "StartupsWeekend"?
This is a guest post by Shaherose Charania from Women 2.0. Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of Women 2.0 and Pitch.
The Women 2.0 team and Judges are all gearing up for a third year of Pitch, Women 2.0’s startup competition. We launched this competition to support the mission of Women 2.0 which is have more women launch tech startups. Simple mission with a complex and long term path to change.
Pitch provides a platform for startups to connect with investors and CEOs, gain valuable feedback and ignite the growth of their startup. This is a high value, unique opportunity and we are excited as submissions are already starting to pour in!
"Pitch was a game changing opportunity for me last year. After I applied, I gained feedback that has helped me grow my startup faster than I imagined! I am definitely applying again - we are still in beta so this is perfect!" – Danae Ringelmen, CoFounder, IndieGogo.com, Semi Finalist, PITCH 2008
Are you running a startup in beta? Maybe you are looking for feedback or funding? If you have at least 1 female co-founder, you should apply to Pitch 2009, gain valuable feedback  from investors and CEOs and compete for the chance to win a meeting with iconic investor Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital (lead investor in Google, Yahoo! and more)
Our judging panel includes investors and experienced startup executives who will provide valuable written feedback on your business. Five startups will be chosen to pitch live on Pitch Night, May 7th, 2009. ONE winning startup gets a meeting with legendary investor Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital in addition to free office space, legal services, marketing support, PR support, and more – everything you need to win with your new idea.
Entering the competition is easy. Just fill out information about your startup online, record a 2-minute video pitch, and snail mail us a cocktail napkin with your business plan scribbled on it. Deadline to submit your startup is April 10th, 2009 (firm deadline) — time to get started!
Are you in? http://pitch.women2.org
Shaherose
This is a guest post written by Tyler Willis who is the lead organizer of Startup Weekend in San Francisco (which Microsoft BizSpark is hosting) and works as the Director of Marketing at Involver. You can follow him on twitter, he's @tylerwillis.
Startup Weekend San Francisco is an event that brings members of our local tech community, with all different skill-sets, together over 54 hours to create a working version of an idea the group decided on at the beginning of the exercise. This weekend (April 3rd-5th), over 150 entrepreneurs will gather to create over a dozen new ventures. Silicon Valley is the home of innovation, and I'm pretty sure there has never been an event that so directly embodies that tradition.
That tradition of innovation is what makes my co-organizers and I donate our time to bringing together the community. It's also what attracts fantastic entrepreneurs, like Jessica Mah to anticipate the event. It brings venture capitalists like Dave McClure and Katherine Barr out to give advice to attendees. Because building a company in a weekend is a great way to get a feeling for how people work. It's a nice kick-start for entrepreneurs who are just getting started. It's about the community being involved, helping each other create, and giving everything they have to get that alpha launched. And sometimes, when the stars align, that glimmer of a product you just built, becomes your full-time job.
I realize I have a bias, but I hope you'll take my word for it when I say that in a city where you can attend 3 tech events everyday of the year, Startup Weekend is the standout for me -- and has been the standout for many others, as the best event of the year. It's the one event where talking the talk doesn't get you anywhere, and passion is everything -- to me, that counts for something. I hope I'll see you there, cranking out the next big idea!
I'd like to thank Microsoft BizSpark for providing the venue for this event, without their commitment none of this would be possible. I'd also like to thank our other sponsors: SVB, Sun, PaloAltoSoftware, American Airlines, and Women2.0.
To sign up to participate in Startup Weekend San Francisco, please register here: http://sf2startupweekend.eventbrite.com/
Tyler
Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of the Web 2.0 Expo LaunchPad. The LaunchPad is an avenue for startup companies to pitch their ideas to the Web 2.0 Expo audience, which includes press, investors, corp-dev folks and others. Of the several submissions that were made by startup companies, my co-judges Marshall Kirkpatrick of ReadWriteWeb and Matt Marshall of VentureBeat picked five finalists to present their ideas. What we will be looking in a winner is how a product can focus on what is essential and transformational in today's market.
Each of these companies will get five minutes on stage to pitch:
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80legs provides a web-scale platform for content discovery and analysis. Developers will use 80legs to analyze the Internet at blazing fast speeds (2 billion pages/day on a 50,000-node supercomputer) and very low costs ($2.00 per million pages crawled; $0.03 per CPU-hr). With 80legs, the Internet is yours. |
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zeaLOG is a place to collect and visualize personal data. Users graph their data alone or in groups, tracking everything from weight and exercise to drinking habits, mileage, movie watching, even sexual activity. Collaborate, compete and measure up. If you can quantify it, you can zeaLOG it. |
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Created by Nitobi at iPhoneDevCamp 2008, PhoneGap is an open source development framework for building mobile applications with JavaScript. With PhoneGap, you can author apps in HTML and JavaScript and still take advantage of native mobile device capabilities like geo-location, camera, vibration and sound. PhoneGap applications run on iPhone, Android and Blackberry. |
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Bantam allows business teams to create secure social workspaces to share information, track activity, and manage contact and company relationships inside and outside the organization. Status updating, auto-posting, following, notifying, messaging, and profile pointing features weave purposefully into business workflow objects (activities, CRM, events, project management, etc.) for users to become aware and interact with their colleagues and contacts. |
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DUB gives you a simple, smart way to exchange contact information from your mobile phone. Your contact’s info loads directly into your existing mobile address book and is automatically updated whenever your contact changes their information (phone, email, address, etc.). Create your mobile business card with DUB at www.dubmenow.com. |
The LaunchPad will be held in the keynote room on Thursday, April 2 at 1:15pm and will be emceed by John Battelle, Founder/Chairman/CEO of Federated Media and Program Chair of Web 2.0 Summit. See you there!
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The Azure Services Platform team is delivering on its commitment to providing an interoperable, comprehensive and flexible cloud platform.
Windows Azure
At MIX09, the Windows Azure team is updating its CTP to include feature updates which will allow developers to take advantage of:
- FastCGI: allows developers to deploy and run web applications written with 3rd party programming languages such as PHP. This provides developers using non-Microsoft languages the ability to take advantage of scalability on Windows Azure. (Read more here: Using 3rd Party Programming Languages via FastCGI)
- .NET Full Trust: provides developers with a level of flexibility in Windows Azure that removes limitations on .NET Libraries which require full trust (including .NET Services) .NET Full Trust, via spawning process and p/invoke, also allows developers to utilize existing investments in native code or legacy components that they will now be able to invoke on Windows Azure. (Read more here: .NET Full Trust)
- Geolocation: provides developers with the ability to specify a location for their applications and data to build responsive services with lower network latency as well as the capability to meet location-based regulatory and legal requirements. This feature will be available a few weeks after MIX 2009. (Read more here: Geo Location Enables Developers To Choose Data Centers and Group Applications & Storage)
A new version of the developer SDK and Tools for Visual Studio will be available for download to enable developers to take advantage of the new features. The SDK update will include:
- Managed Full Trust support (including Native Code support via P/Invoke and spawning native code processes)
- Support for FastCGI applications.
- Support for rewrite rules via the URL Rewrite Module. Creates URLs so developers can lead users to shorter, search engine friendly, and easier to remember URLs.
- Support for SQL Server as the data store for Development Storage - move from SQL Express to full SQL Server for backend developer store.
In addition to supporting the latest Windows Azure SDK, the Tools for Visual Studio will offer:
- Native debugging of roles called via PInvoke running on the Development Fabric
- FastCGI starter template
- Chained install of both the Tools and SDK (one install)
- Update notification for newer releases
To summarize, this is what Windows Azure entails as of today:
Computation Services
- Ability to run Microsoft ASP.NET Web applications or .NET code in the cloud
- Service hosting environment that includes Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.0 and Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 SP1
- Security supported by flexible Code Access Security policies
- Small runtime API that supports logging and local scratch storage
- Web portal that helps you deploy, scale, and upgrade your services quickly and easily
- FastCGI, a protocol for interfacing applications to web servers, which will allow customers to deploy and run web applications written with non-Microsoft programming languages such as PHP (Developers will be responsible for including the relevant runtime libraries for these languages when deploying applications.)
- .NET Full Trust to allow usage of additional .NET features such as Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).
- From Full Trust .NET, developers can call into unmanaged DLLs
Simple data storage services
- Blobs, tables, and queues hosted in the cloud, close to your computation
- Authenticated access and triple replication to help keep your data safe
- Easy access to data with simple REST interfaces, available remotely and from the data center
Development Tools
- Complete offline development environment, including computation and storage services
- Complete command-line SDK tools and samples
- Visual Studio add-in that enables local debugging
- New SDK Download: a new version of the Windows Azure SDK will be available for download at a time to coincide with the MIX09 conference, which will enable developers to take advantage of the new features offered by Windows Azure, as well as an update to the Visual Studio add-ins.
The SDK and the Tools for VS addin is now available for download at http://www.microsoft.com/azure/sdk.mspx.
SQL Data Services
You may recall seeing this when Azure was first announced:
The SQL Data Services (SDS) team (the 3rd block above Windows Azure in the image above) publicly shared the evolving capabilities in SDS to provide customers with the ability to utilize a RDBMS data model in a cloud-based environment supporting Transact-SQL (T-SQL) over TDS (Tabular Data Stream) protocol (read more here: What’s Next for SQL Data Services…) SQL Data Services is on track to deliver a public CTP mid-calendar year 2009 and be commercially available in the second half of calendar year 2009. At MIX, the SDS team has announced the evolution of SDS capabilities to provide traditional relational database service with T-SQL compatibility over protocols that support data access APIs such as ADO.NET, ODBC and OLE DB.
Related Articles
Here are some other articles covering the announcements made at MIX:
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Anand Iyer
Developer Evangelist
Anand joined Microsoft in January 2005 as a Developer Evangelist, Microsoft's ambassador to the technical community of Northern California. During his tenure there, he has been in the midst of several launches, such as Visual Studio, SQL Server, Vista, Office and many others. He has spoken at over a hundred conference...
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Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is Avetrium, based in Canada. You will find below an interview with Tim Smith, COO of Avetrium. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Read more...
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