Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Week for Windows Azure was held in Atlanta November 9-13. Five teams were selected to participate, and seven showed up. (Not a misprint.) The week was a in some ways a Y-Combinator process on Fast Forward. Each team enjoyed five days of immersion, education, and assistance in either creating a new product or adapting an existing application to Microsoft infrastructure, particularly the Azure cloud platform. They were supported by guest speakers, an array of Microsoft experts, and even an overnight coding team in the Ukraine. Among the promised future benefits for the participants is marketing buzz in coordination with the upcoming promotion of Azure.
Yours truly was one of the Friday judges tasked to pick two winners, one for the most viable business idea, another for the greatest technical achievement during the week. The former award went to Jeremie Desautels and his team for Coremotives, LLC, which adapted its marketing suite for Microsoft Dynamics CRM to the cloud platform. The partners in this company had focused on this CRM product line since 2002 and leveraged their considerable experience to advantage. The judging panel applauded their laser focus in the midst of the generally crowded CRM space.
The second award for technical advancement went to LessMeeting, led by Blake Byrnes of CrowdMind notoriety. He and his compatriots, pictured above, created from scratch an Outlook plug-in whereby a meeting notice could be augmented by an agenda, with a designated time for each agenda item, and a countdown timer to help keep the meeting on track. This was a difficult technical challenge but an easy product to grasp. A suggestion was made that it could be used to track who’s calling the most meetings or doing the most talking and thus identify the true time wasters.
Sanjay K. Jain, ISV Architect Evangelist, and Larry Gregory, Senior Director of US Partner Evangelism, were the Microsoft leaders of the week. Jain’s blog gives all the names and details along with a day-by-day recap. Gregory orchestrated the judging process and kept us judges on track evaluating the relative merits of seven very interesting projects.
Microsoft devoted considerable resources to this week, and we applaud their efforts to embrace the startup community with this traveling incubation week.
Note that TechDrawl is a BizSpark Network Partner, so if you are interesting in the BizSpark program, sign up here and please list TechDrawl as your sponsor.
