When I was a kid I collected comic books. I used to collect Flash comics and my buddy collected the Hulk. You may have as well. Comic books have evolved and now comics and graphic novels are widely popular worldwide. Worldwide the market is around $ 6 B and for every $ in comic revenue, there are a few more in merchandising revenue. Soon, you will be able to get your comics online from Take Comics.
Take had a challenge. How do you make the electronic experience richer, more compelling, more entertaining than the paper book that you are familiar with? Well, Take Comics has done that with their social network enabled and super rich reading experience. With the design skill of Kevin Mann, the technical skills of Thanavath Jaroenvanit and Tony Williams, and the business acumen of Micah Baldwin, Take is delivering.
Fortunately my peer at Microsoft, Anand Iyer, and I were engaged with Take at the TechStars incubator initiative in Boulder. The Take team and their application evolved tremendously over the summer and have matured even further over the last few months. Take also touch enabled their reader on Windows 7, at the Windows 7 Incubation Week out in Reston, VA, here is my post on that event. That engagement evolved into a relationship and now, Take Comics is a BizSpark One company. But, what does that mean?
Microsoft is a partner focused company. We build products that others, ISV’s ( Independent Software Vendors ), use to deliver products and internet services. We have a sophisticated partner management infrastructure, many of you are familiar with that infrastructure, but normally, we engage directly with the largest and most successful partners. But what if, we looked through the 20,000 or so BizSpark companies worldwide and engaged 100 of them the same way we engage the world’s largest software companies. Today, on the one year anniversary of BizSpark, we have launched BizSpark One to do just that.
And I am pleased to announce that Take Comics is a BizSpark One company. You will be seeing what that means.
Stay tuned. Tomorrow I will describe how you can become a BizSpark One company.