Today I spent several hours in Reston, Virginia at the Microsoft office for the BizSpark Incubation Week focused on Windows 7. BizSpark is a Microsoft program to help Startups build their software based application or service. One of the chief reasons for doing this is enabling those startups to leverage the Microsoft platform and reduce their development costs by removing the up front fee for Microsoft Visual Studio via the MSDN Subscription. That’s right, if you’re a startup company, Microsoft will give you all of their software for development for free! OK, not all for free as you have to pay a fee to get out of the program (after 3 years) which will cost you $300. That’s crazy right? Well, it reduces your risk and costs to get going. If you’re successful in your business, you’ll pay Microsoft the standard cost for software when you exit the program (but now you’ll have revenue to pay for it).
OK, now to Incubation Week…
The purpose of the BizSpark Incubation Week is to bring together a select group of startups, pair them with an Advisor (I was one for this week—shameless plug), give them a lab, and provide some development resources. For this Incubation Week the focus was on Windows 7 development. The goal is to help startups learn and build some code that will leverage many of the new enhancements in Windows 7 (aka “Light Up”). Training Content is based on material from the Windows 7 Training Kit for Developers.
Today was mostly an introduction and training (presentations, code samples, and demos) on Windows 7 for Developers. It was a grind, but very useful. Many in the crowd seemed very pleased and eager to get to the lab and get the code churning.
Here are some of the verticals of the BizSpark ISV’s attending the Incubation Week:
- Healthcare Security
- Real Estate
- Media Distribution
- Video Knowledge Management
- Mobile Search and Advertisement for Small Businesses
- Rich Multi-Touch Experience Platforms
Partners – These are the Microsoft partners that attended the event (and some were also advisors)
- Agramont Services – Based in the Washington D.C. area (Fredericksburg, Virginia to be specific)
- Vertigo – Based out of San Francisco area
Social Connections – These are some social networking information for the event:
Day 1 still isn’t over! And we don’t plan to end until around 9 or 10pm as we have some architecture and coding to do. It's going to be a long week, but the people (Microsoft and ISV’s) are a great bunch and it looks like I might be able to do some Microsoft Surface development. I’ll take pictures and post them (ok, no promises but I’ll try)
Intertouch Media is the company I’ll be advising this week. They’ve done some wicked work with Windows Vista + WPF + Multi-Touch (here’s a video) to provide an interactive experience for touch screens. They've focused on large touch displays and have some pretty big name customers. Now we’re planning on porting to Windows 7 and Microsoft Surface. The idea is to provide a multi-touch experience that spans and communicates between Windows 7 and Microsoft Surface platforms!
Should be a fun week
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