Artificial ignorance

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: Continue reading

I’m off to Palm Springs this evening to attend DEMO09. The BizSpark team will be there, so feel free to come by our booth if you want an invite code, or if you want to play with Live Mesh or some of our other technologies.

Which one of these  companies do you think will win DEMOgod status (list borrowed from Brian Solis):

7 Billion People, Inc.; Austin, TX
Always Innovating, Inc.; Mountain View, CA
AppZero Corp.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Asurion Mobile Applications, Inc.; San Mateo, CA
Avaak, Inc.; San Diego, CA
BitGravity, Inc.; Burlingame, CA
bluBuzz, LLC; Holland, MI
Cc:Betty, Inc.; Palo Alto, CA
Citrix Online, Goleta, CA
Coveroo, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
deskNET, Lausanne, CH
Document Depository Corp., LLC; Wayne, PA
eFormic, Ltd.; Stuttgart, DE
Ensembli, Ltd.; Sheffield, Great Britain
Evri, Inc.; Seattle, WA
Gazaro, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
HAM-IT, Inc.; North Andover, MA
Home-Account, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
HowSimple, LLC; Huntington Beach, CA
Jadoos, Inc.; Sunnyvale, CA
Kutano Corp.; Burnaby, BC, Canada
Liquid Media, LLC; Arvada, CO
Ontier, Inc.; Portland, OR
Primal Fusion, Inc.; Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Promptu Systems Corp.; Menlo Park, CA
Purewire, Inc.; Atlanta, GA
Qualcomm MEMS Technologies, Inc. San Diego, CA
Qubes, Inc.; Taipei, Taiwan
Silverstone Solutions, Inc. San Francisco, CA
Skout, Inc.; San Francisco, CA
SmartyCard; San Mateo, CA
Symantec Corp.; Mountain View, CA
Technicopia, LLC; Carmel Valley, CA
Transformyx, Inc.; Baton Rouge, LA
Vokle, Inc.; Santa Monica, CA
Xandros, Inc.; Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
XMARKS; San Francisco, CA
Zipadi Technologies, LLC; Bluffdale, UT
Zuora, Inc.; Redwood City, CA Continue reading

Startup2Startup is an event Dave McClure (now at Founder’s Fund) puts together here in the valley. I first attended this event several months ago, and fell in love with the format, the caliber of the speakers, the content and the attendees. S2S is more than just a networking event, it’s also a great learning opportunity. Past speakers have included Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston from Y Combinator, Reid Hoffman from LinkedIn and Matt Cohler from Benchmark Capital, Matt Mullenweg and Toni Schneider from Automattic, Naval Ravikant from VentureHacks, James Hong from HOTorNOT among others. The attendees comprise of entrepreneurs, press, corporate development folks, lawyers, investors etc.

Microsoft BizSpark is a proud sponsor of Startup2Startup. Through our partnership, we get two free passes* for startups that are registered BizSpark companies to attend the dinner in Palo Alto, CA. The next event is coming up on January 29, 2009 and Amy Jo Kim from ShuffleBrain will be speaking. If you are a BizSpark company and are interested in attending the event, shoot me an email at anand.iyer [at] microsoft.com. The first two interested parties to reply will be allocated the passes. Continue reading

I attended the Crunchies on Friday the 9th of January, 2009. The Crunchies is kinda like the Academy Awards for the technoverse. The event was hosted by TechCrunch, VentureBeat, GigaOm and Silicon Alley Insider. The atmosphere was surreal, it really did feel like everything I’ve seen on TV with other awards ceremonies. By now, you’ve probably read TechCrunch’s and VentureBeat’s coverage of the event and the winners. Our (Microsoft’s) very own Live Mesh won the award for the top Technology Innovation and Ray Ozzie, our Chief Software Architect, and David Treadwell, VP of Live Services, attended the event and accepted the award from Steve Gillmor.

I was reading Dan Farber’s report from the event, and I found the following excerpt extremely interesting: Continue reading

This week, TechCrunch reinforced itself as the most powerful tech blog on the planet. TechCrunch50 was everything it was made out to be. Startups, press, speakers – these guys were the crème de la crème of their respective contingents. The TechCrunch50 crew received over 1000 applications from startups wanting to demo their product at the event.

My favorite startups

Most of the companies that made the 50, were consumer facing software products. Here are 3 of my favorite startups (when I was picking these, I was thinking of products that I could use right away):