Cold pizza and Mountain Dew at 2 AM, intermittent XBOX 360 game breaks, 24 hour off-shore development, impending VC pitch at the end of the week. It sounds like another startup incubator, which it is, but this one packed it all into one week.
One week, and BizSpark, is all these companies needed to have complete Proof of Concept solutions and investor presentations, and perhaps to realize their dreams. This was the first Microsoft Dynamics CRM Startup Incubation Week that I participated in and WOW, what an experience.
A couple of months ago, Sanjay Jain, who is one of our DPE ( Developer and Platform Evangelism ), field architects, started to pitch the concept of building a startup incubation event around Microsoft Dynamics CRM as a platform. I worked with Sanjay to help build-out an investor panel ( huge thanks to Yi-Jian Ngo on my team for helping with this as he was in the DC area ), and to help promote the event and get applicants. Two days before Thanksgiving, Sanjay and I had a coordination call and we were both pretty worried about the event. We had a few panelists and only a few companies, but then, the flood-gates opened.
We received 50 applications for this event, Sanjay and his team filtered through and selected 5 companies that represented a good cross section.
I showed up on Wednesday evening, and I was very interested in seeing what was going on and honestly, I had pretty low expectations. There were many moving parts to this event, the MTC ( Microsoft Technology Center ) infrastructure & space, getting all the right people from each company there, the quality of the ideas, orchestration of off-shore Indian development, technical barriers in the tools, etc., etc. I thought, hmm, I might see some good ideas, but I was real worried about the investor presentations on Friday because we had fielded a very strong investor panel and I did not want to disappoint.
Well, as soon as I arrived, about 4:30 PM, Sanjay took me on a tour and sit-down with each team. Here's my experience with first team, one advisor, one business focal and two tech guys. Business guy, looking at me with a big grin, flanked by two tech guys, looking at me with more grins. Grins, Dr. Seuss like, we're bad ass, you're gonna love this grins. The advisor quietly faded into the background. Then I get the product description, a discussion of how they evolved into it over the past few days and praise for the Microsoft platform and the resources provided here to allow these companies to build their solutions. I thought, sure, Sanjay brought me to the best one to get me all warmed up. Nope, next team, grins – the application had just started working an hour ago and they had a functioning prototype. Next team, grins. And on, and on. I left at 11 PM, to get some other stuff done, but many of the teams stayed up through the night refining their applications.
Sanjay had assembled a RockStar team of advisors, most, like Sanjay, volunteered much of their time for this event:
- John O'Donnell, Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist – these are the Microsoft folks who help our ISV's prosper on the Microsoft platform,
- Jim Steger, a partner at Sonoma Partners consulting in Chicago, CRM developer extraordinaire and co-author of the book "Working with Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0",
- Dan Blake, founder and chief architect of CourseMax, a training management solution built on top of Microsoft CRM 4.0,
- Girish Raja, Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist, and
- Nikhil Hasija, a senior product manager from the Microsoft CRM team and also an experienced entrepreneur ( both consultancy and product ).
In addition, Sanjay had arranged for specifications to be passed to the off-shore development firm, Proteans, on a nightly basis, using a SharePoint site for each team, and then had a 9:00 AM call with them to receive the completed code. The intent was to leverage them for development while the rest of the team slept, but nobody slept, so it just ended up being more parallel development capacity.
Here is a quick summary of the solutions, in order of their final presentations:
- DubMeNow, a Microsoft Startup Accelerator company and a BizSpark participant showed off their bi-directional Dynamics CRM integration that they built in two days,
- Support4U, a solution that let's sales prospects collaborate on a proposal document and then leverages analytics on that interaction to optimize the sale,
- ChannelBlade, a leading vertical solution in Marine OEM and distribution, that built a new lead management solution on top of Dynamics CRM,
- Highland Martin, build a developer platform that allows easy web based data collection, cleansing and loading into Dynamics CRM, and
- PrimeTime, who leveraged a tailored sales model for newspaper and advertising media sales, to build a sales engine for media on top of Dynamics CRM.
Well, I need to pick a favorite. Support4U and PrimeTime were the two true startups that had nothing but an idea at the beginning, and ended up with a functioning solution. PrimeTime was my favorite though. They are a super deep domain solution for media sales. This is a huge market, and the guys who built it have decades in the industry and teach sales personnel how to increase effectiveness. With some CTO help and strong guidance, I think they could turn that IP into a solution selling into a huge multi-multi Billion $ market.
Note, Paul Greenberg, author of "CRM at the Speed of Light", one of the panel judges on the last day ( judging the event on his birthday no less ) wrote a great blog providing more detail on the companies.
One of the Microsoft CRM field architects, Sanjay Jain, has set-up a one week boot-camp on how to create an application on top of Microsoft CRM and launch a business. We call these solutions XRM, and they are a fast growing segment of the CRM space. From tracking pot hole repairs to high net worth wealth management, many solutions can use the Microsoft CRM solution as a platform and then customize the application, extend data with Microsoft SQL Server and even integrate a portal solution with SharePoint. In fact, my own team, the Emerging Business Team, uses a customized version of Microsoft CRM with SharePoint and custom data analytics to manage our deal flow and startup partner interaction. Here is an excerpt from Sanjay's blog posting: Microsoft Dynamics CRM Incubation Week is designed to offer following assistance to entrepreneurs. · | Learning and building next generation business solution on Microsoft Dynamics CRM Platform (a rapid application development platform to reduce the cost and Go-To-Market time) with help of on-site advisors (Microsoft Dynamics CRM experts). | · | Getting entrepreneurs coaching from a panel of industry experts (academic and angel investors) | · | Generating marketing buzz for their ideas |
The 1st CRM Incubation Week is being held at Microsoft Technology Center, Reston, VA from Mon 12/15/2008 to Fri 12/19/2008. 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 Sanjay Jain. So there you have it. Free training, coaching, and if your company qualifies, we will throw in BizSpark which will give you all the software you need to launch your business for 3 years ( all for a paltry $100 ). There are slots for only 5 teams, so act quickly, very quickly! One of my favorite aspects of this job is that I get to see some of the most innovative companies in the world, and all I have to do is show-up. Carsten Rudolph, who runs the German form of the Microsoft Startup Accelerator Program, unternimm was, visited our team this week in Mountain View with a innovative group of startups, here are the highlights: - mediber, www.mediber.de, a healthcare records management solution, with a unique learning capability. One of the big challenges in deploying records management in the healthcare industry is that you have to choose between structured forms or free form text and pre-define the data entry. mediber evolves with use. For a particular diagnostic area it finds patterns in entered text and structures that data for analysis. This results in easier deployment, more diagnostic flexibility and improved care for the patients. We did not see a demo, so I could not see exactly how this "evolution" works. But getting explicit data to feed diagnostics solutions is key to improved automated assistance. Monetization is subscription.
- Weblin, www.weblin.com, a social browsing experience with animated avatars. As you know if you have read my blog, I am a fan of Me.dium ( recently re-launched as OneRiot ), which gives you a chat/browser interface for friends who are surfing with you and an all-up radar map showing total volume and activity, but weblin takes a more dramatically social and "gamey" approach to the same experience. Your friends create avatars that represent their persona. When you install weblin the avatars overlay your browser along the bottom. Then as you browse, you will see the avatar's of your buddies that are on the same site. You can chat with them and do some basic interaction between the avatar's. Because of the overlay, branded ads can be run around and on top of the browser ( you have to download and install the client app ). Monetization is advertising and avatar sales ( i.e. you can be Johnny Depp from Pirates of the Caribean, but it will cost you ).
- VIOSO, www.VIOSO.com, optimizes image projection on any surface. This is some hard core technology packed in a surprisingly elegant manner ( this would be a consistent pattern with German software companies – think BMW ). With VIOSO you can project an image on any surface, and it will adjust the projected image so that it looks like it is supposed to. For example, one example was showing a movie on a cliff ( jagged rocks and all ), no screen needed. And it looked great. Emanuel Zuger explained that he had brought a fake rock wall to demonstrate it, but it got lost with their luggage. No problem, we did funky things with a couple of flip charts and some PowerPoint presentations and yep, it works. It's primary application now is on the high end, with theatres and rock concerts, but the applications are quite broad. I can only imagine there is a ton of math making this work. BTW, VIOSO just announced they have received funding from Hasso Plattner Ventures ( Hasso Plattner, the founder and ex-CEO of SAP ). Monetization good old buy once perpetual model.
- Visumotion, www.visumotion.com, a 3 dimensional viewing monitor, camera system and editing software. Every once in a while I see some technology this is just eerie, it is so new. This would be the case. You know those holographic pictures that you walk past and wink at you or whatever, its like that, live motion, on your PC. The video recorded with their camera system leapt out of the monitor. Like a 3D movie with the glasses but better, more detailed. Video games, which are rendered natively in 3D, look great. We played a car game for a bit and I felt myself urging to look sideways as the landscape rushed past. We were doing this on a 22 inch display. I want one for my XBOX and Halo on a 60 inch in my basement. No special video hardware is required, just the software and a filter, which can be added to your monitor or you can buy a monitor with a built in filter. Monetization is software applications and royalties for media using their technologies.
All of these solutions leverage the Microsoft platform in creative ways. I was a bit wary of posting a blog on these cool solutions because, well, quite a few execs at Microsoft think they are pretty cool too, but the world needs to take a look at them and help them prosper. Also of note, German solutions are typically very mature in their technology. They build and refine their solutions first before showing the world. A huge thank you to Carsten Rudolph and the Microsoft Germany team for finding these great companies and bringing them to us in the Silicon Valley to take a look. This was my second year at Defrag and the first year that I really got it. Last year I attended and was disappointed with lack of pragmatics in many of the topics. Yes, I got them, but I felt like I was in another debate with a Phd student trying to explain that it was great technology, but we can’t make money with it for another 5 years. This year was different. I manage the FOB space on our team. That is the Fat Old Bald-guy space, which includes ERP, BI, Supply Chain, CRM and payment. Boring, hard hat, deep domain, applications that when they get traction, make a ton of money. Needless to say, Defrag is getting much closer to the FOB space. I may even have a few companies to show off that are almost as “cool” as the latest twitters or Loopt’s my peers Beti Cung or Christopher Griffin are digging up. On Sunday night I sponsored a dinner organized by Chris Wand of the Foundry Group that posed the question, “What is the future of e-mail?” It was a great discussion. We had 3 tables of experts and I had the chance to chat with each one as the energetic discussions ensued. Here were my takeaways ( note heavily edited based on what I thought was impactful): · The generation divide:
Our kids, don’t use e-mail. They use it about as often as we use faxes. They text, or they IM. And more often they use video conferencing since their Mac’s and PC’s all have built in video cameras. So the future of e-mail is beyond e-mail. It is some form of communication control panel where different modes of communication are streamed together. Yammer is an example of capturing a twitter like threaded conversation and putting it to task. · One channel, for one mode of communication:
Pick your communication channel. Twitter, texting, IM, e-mail, voice phone, video “call”, blogging, facebook, Linked-In, etc. Each one has developed an implicit culture of use, which is even more refined inside of each channel. In addition this culture is localized by corporate culture and even within subcultures inside of large organizations. A large part of training new employees, and this is not usually explicit training, is how to apply the appropriate mode for the appropriate task. Fuser is one example of a consumer oriented aggregator, and I had discussions regarding a few in process for the enterprise. · Mine the data, and do something with it:
At every table, I had a discussions on how our legacy of e-mail and communication data can be mined to refine empirical evidence regarding how the organization actually works and therefore, can be optimized to work more efficiently. This includes eliciting experts, social graphs, response lifecycles, project organization, and sensing community “intonation” regarding corporate initiatives. Socialcast is one such solution and one that I enjoyed learning more about. I was only able to attend about half the sessions during the rest of the Defrag conference, due to other meetings, but with the context I had from our dinner discussions I was able to do a much better job of aligning discussion points to initiatives that we have going on inside of Microsoft. I am still most enamored with identifying long tail, micro-experts, inside of the enterprise, but now see a broader view now of significant enterprise productivity impact of efficiently orchestrating the interface between the corporate user and the modal communication channels. Thank you Chris and Brad Feld for putting the dinner together and thank you Eric Norlan for creating the Defrag event. I look forward to next year. This year at DEMO 08 I met with a company called Silobreaker. They showed off a cool new search tool that was fun to play with. Recently, during a Europe tour I took with Don Dodge, I met with Per Lindh, the CTO of SIlobreaker in their Stockholm, Sweden office. It was not a real formal meeting, but whenever I am in the neighborhood, I like to see as many cool startups as possible. I chatted with Per regarding some of the Microsoft platform challenges they are having, Silobreaker is 100% on the Microsoft stack, and I was telling Per how I have been using Silobreaker, mostly reading what political news I ever do read. Per gave me some tips but then he said, hey, you can create and share your own personal pages. I said really? How cool is that. Yeah, you can do this with iGoogle, but Silobreaker has some very cool features. My favorite is the relation network diagram. Silobreaker takes your key words and searchs for high very active references. It focuses on current, temporal news. Here is the diagram that Silobreaker created for Parature (it works best for unique names): 
You can drag nodes that don't make sense off into the garbage can and hone down the network diagram to the news that interest you. Right clicking the line connecting nodes will bring up the news item that is creating the connection. Hovering over a node will light up the entire network of news relationships that are related to that node, for example Accel Partners lights-up all the related funding news. You can create a tab focused on a specific company in your personal page area. This can include blog search, news search, top news items, analyst research and YouTube videos. Oh, yeah, and you can share the pages you build with your friends, here, take a look at the page I built for Parature. Oh, yeah, and about Parature. They are a leader in self-help solutions, you know when you go on a web site to figure out how to configure that graphics card you just stuck in your computer ( Parature does this for ATI, now part of AMD). Parature just received $16 M in funding from Accel Partners, who have backed other little startups like Facebook. The quality of the companies, the quality of the attendees, the quality of the execution, it just keeps getting better. I just got back from the 2008 Venture Capital in the Rockies Conference which was held at the Park Hyatt Beaver Creek. This was the 25th anniversary of the conference and I am sure there will be a few more. Kudo's to Chris Onan for orchestrating the event. The event spans 3 days, with check-in and a cocktail party on the first evening, a packed day of keynotes and company presentations on the second day and time for follow-up meetings, and 'um, skiing on the third day. Since I am sitting here typing this, I am not on the slopes. I was impressed with the breadth and scope of investors in attendance. From Boston, Atlanta, Austin, Phoenix, Santa Fe, North Virginia and Palo Alto, there was a great selection. Some of the firms that attending included Fidelity Ventures, Battery Ventures, 3i, NEA, Austin Ventures, Altos Ventures and Sierra Ventures. Well, there is something to be said of the recruiting power of 12 inches of fresh powder in Beaver Creek. The Colorado contingent was there in force as well: Brad Feld and his relatively new Foundry Group; Mark Soane, Don Parsons and Chris Onan from Appian Ventures; Ryan Pollack and Tracey Kerr from Meritage and folks from Sequel, Boulder Ventures, Vista Ventures and Centennial Ventures. One of my Accelerator companies, Newmerix, did a fine job presenting and is making good progress in their current funding round. Newmerix provides full lifecycle systems management for ERP solutions, like SAP and PeopleSoft, built on top of the Sharepoint platform. Unfortunately I was not able to see the Newmerix presentation because I was on a conference call with the Microsoft ISV Coordination Council clearing the way to get many of our Accelerator companies integrated into the mainline Microsoft partner programs. But I was able to catch-up with Dan Gannon, Newmerix's CEO later at one of the many events. You can learn more about Newmerix at http://www.newmerix.com . Another interesting presentation was by DAZ 3D. DAZ 3D, based in Draper, Utah, has been making 3D animation tools for some time. What they announced here was their social/marketing solution which provides a marketplace for artists leveraging DAZ. This new site, called http://Artzone.com , allows artists to post works, many which can be used in online role playing games. The images were stunning, but what is exciting is that you did not need $20 M and a game studio to create them; they were created by folks working part time in the evening, just messing around. I talked to Dan Farr, their CEO, about combining what DAZ 3D is doing with Microsoft's newly created XNA Creators Club, http://creator.xna.com . It would make it much easier for anybody to create or enhance XBOX games. Perhaps you would be able to create your own vehicles, weapons and characters for HALO… that would be a hoot. It was great to see two TechStars companies presenting. TechStars is the summer incubation program run in Boulder by some of the regional Colorado entrepreneurs. First up was filtrbox, which lets you track a keyword or a search phrase, evaluate the volume of hits, and get notifications via e-mail or RSS. filtrbox has a unique query refinement UI with a tag cloud and add/remove boxes. I used it to build queries for all of my Accelerator companies. Here is an example of what you get, and Congrats to filtrbox for landing their first round. 
Then, there was SocialThing, which allows you to aggregate your social networking sites into one user interface. I am not a huge social networking consumer, but I have teenagers, so I get it. SocialThing aggregates all of your social networking content AND posting (that is what I thought was quite cool), into one application. So if you use Twitter, Facebook and MySpace, as my son does, then you have one central hub for your content. Great too for promotion purposes – he has a band and people can keep up with what they are doing with their social tool of choice. SocialThing is still working on the product but you can read about their progress on their blog at http://blog.socialthing.com . I am looking forward to next year's Venture Capital in the Rockies 2009 and I can only imagine the view getting better from here. FactOn is the kind of company that I always expected to find in Germany. So here is the story. Two brothers, one is an accountant, the other is an engineer, both are working at Daimler-Chrysler. One is complaining about getting decent production cost estimates on new product designs and the other is describing what a pain it is to create these custom, and soon worthless, spreadsheets for every one of their new development projects. Ba-ding, light-bulb goes off, Dr. Hassno Plattner, who built a little company known as SAP, steps in with some funding and advice, and you have FactOn. FactOn is purpose built for estimating the cost on things you build – mostly widgets or whatever for cars, lawn mowers, airplanes, etc – this manufacturing segment is known as discrete manufacturing. I was happy to dig into an hour + demo of the product. At first, it looks like a spreadsheet – or one of the many spreadsheet like budgeting planning tools, but then you drill into a product for costing and you see the good stuff. Just to set the context of the review, I was an engineer undergraduate and was hired into Boeing right out of college. My first job there was building manufacturing systems for graphite epoxy production on the B2 bomber. So, what is the first thing a rookie engineer at Boeing does? Cost studies. You watch folks putting planes together with a stopwatch and a clipboard. Then, working with the aircraft designers, you put together detailed "Manufacturing Plans", pull out all of the cost data collected by you and all of your other rookie friends, and you build meticulous cost analytics reports – which get rolled up by hoards of accountants into the product costing of an airplane, or car, or backhoe, or other large device. So, what Facton's James Denman demonstrated to me, was exactly that, all online, doing in clicks what had taken us months. Now, the German part. Drill through any one of the steps and you get details behind each machine, set-up processes, cycle times, maintenance allocation… there is a place for every detail. FactOn is working with a variety of data suppliers so that planners can start with the data already in FactOn. As data is developed for your own manufacturing process, FactOn also can make that available to the rest of your company or to your customers, for use in their own planning activities. But, the benefits of FactOn do not stop at the creation of a cost estimate for a newly engineered part, that is only the beginning. FactOn allows you to collect manufacturing data and compare it to your estimates so that the actual cost, or the key cost impacts, can be evaluated and refined allowing very accurate costing of production runs. This ability to see and continually refine accurate costing in a discrete manufacturing company is often the difference between profit and loss. Effective cost management also allows more accurate pricing and a more competitive company overall. FactOn just opened an office in Detroit, Michigan, and you can sign-up for a free demo version of their solution. Our Microsoft EBT focal in Germany, Carsten Rudolph, has been supporting FactOn in Germany. With their recent entry into the US, I am working with them now to get more global visibility. FactOn is a Microsoft application and has extensive integration with Excel. With the recent launch of Microsoft's PerformancePoint, there would be some natural integration scenarios, allowing a manufacturing company to see actual cost vs. originally forecast and refining the data to optimize both future development activities and current production runs. All in an easy to use online and Microsoft Office based environment. Sometimes you feel that you are witnessing a little bit of history. These last two days at the Workday Rising event in San Francisco had that feel. On the surface, Workday is a SaaS ERP solution, founded by PeopleSoft veterans Dave Duffield, Aneel Bhusri and Stan Swete, that is taking aim at the upper midmarket, but actually, they are much more than that. Now, wouldn't it be nice, to take decades worth of tacit knowledge in how businesses operate, and how they can best – note "BEST" – leverage information technology, then, pull out a clean sheet of paper and ponder, with all that we have today, bandwidth, Web 2.0, agile dev methods, mash-ups, dozens of deployment options, etc, and how would I build this today? That is exactly what Workday set out to do and has delivered. With deep pockets, a seasoned, passionate and innovative developers, a new crew of Web 2.0 young'ns, and the 'ol PeopleSoft, people first culture, Workday has lots going for them. I am also proud to say that they are one of my Accelerator companies. Microsoft is working with Workday to create extensive Microsoft Office integration scenarios. In one breakout session I was able to demonstrate Microsoft SharePoint 2007, with data published, and dynamically updated, into the Business Data Catalogue and into an Excel analysis spreadsheet which was published into Excel Services. Workday gave us a "sandbox" environment that provided us with data and web services to create our demo. The demo developers at Softagon, the contractor we used to build this solution, said that it was the easiest integration that they had ever done, by some margin. The demo worked well, punching through the hotel firewall, refreshing the data, and showing the SharePoint mash-up of data. This was a proof of concept, but now we are taking it to the next level, tying it around some specific customer scenarios, bringing together a few SaaS solutions, a few on-premise ERP pieces and some custom applications, and creating a role focused composite SharePoint solution that brings these disparate systems together into one view. Whilst we at Microsoft were creating our SharePoint creation, the folks at Workday were busy building Excel integrations, a mail-merge, etc. What Workday built into their 2.1 product, due out in November, is the ability to publish any report as a REST based web service. So, whenever a user runs a report, there is an URL down below the report, cut it, go to Excel-Data-From Web- paste. Now you have a nice data table that you can pivot, sort, format, etc. Save it, open it, and the data refreshes, after user authentication. Paul Gustafson from Workday showed some great solution scenarios to a packed house of eager Excel users. Workday has over 20 customers now and has recently added Financials to their offering. What is interesting is that Workday is building financials with the worker as the core business entity, not account. The GL chart will not be hard coded in the system, but rather created as data is reported. This will be done in a GAAP compliant manner, but people and process are the core attributes and financial execution and history are the byproducts. This has been tried before but has often stalled due to the tacit knowledge legacy of numeric, multi-segment, chart of accounts definitions. But, if you do achieve it, your business is no longer controlled by the definition of a chart of accounts. If you need to re-org, just do it, and the cost centers will adjust to your new organization model. Same with products, geographies, and everything else that is coded into most company GL's. There are many complexities here, but with the object oriented, in memory database platform that Workday is building on, and their knowledge of the old and new, my bet is that Workday can pull it off. After my own 20 years in ERP systems deployment and development, Workday has delivered a truly innovative, but usable solution, that breaks the molds of the past creating the productivity potential of a next generation of ERP systems. Oh, yeah, and by the way, Workday and Office 2007 absolutely rock together, perhaps one of the industry's best examples of Software (Office 2007) + Services (Workday). Me.dium is truly breakthrough. I have been using it since I first saw it at DEMO 07, on the FireFox browser. Now they are through the third beta on the Microsoft Internet Explorer and it is getting pretty stable and even more fun to use. Go to Me.dium.com and sign-up for an account, it's free. Once you get an account, you can add friends, for example, if you want to add me, my Me.dium user name is MSFTdave. Of course I have a chance to accept you, so if I have no idea who you are, well, I can get rid of you. You can also look folks up by their e-mail and invite them as friends. See what your friends are up to… Once you have established your friends network, and they have Me.dium installed you can see what web sites they are on in the little friends tab. The friends tab is in the Me.dium side bar that is installed when you install Me.dium. If you want to chat with them about a particular site, you can click chat, or you can just click the site referenced and see what they were looking at. The other day, I noticed one of my friends shopping at Thomas Pink shirts, and since I was in the market for shirts too, I clicked to check it out. I have always been a Brooks Brothers guy, but those Pink shirts look pretty nice. Every month, as part of my work here at the Emerging Business Team, I look at every business application company that gets funding and is reported through VentureSource. Since we just brought in feeds from Europe as well, I had a big pile this month, 50 companies. Now, my standard practice is to open-up Me.dium as I browse through to each company. You can see where people are coming from (what they browsed prior to visiting) and where they went after – notice how the SAP site showed up here, SAP had just published new benchmarks – which I noticed and went on to investigate. Me.dium goes beyond tracking what your friends are up to. When you install Me.dium, it installs an add-in that keeps track of what you are doing in the browser and reports it back to Me.dium. Ok, yes, there is some trust involved here. It also turns off automatically when you go to your banking site or any secured site. But, based on the tracking of all the Me.dium user behaviors, they do some very, very cool stuff. Me.dium creates this radar view of where you are, where your friends are, and where the world is. The world is filtered down to users that show browser behavior similar to yours – which scopes the radar view down to a few web sites. 
Navigation tracking and attention at a whole new level: Because Me.dium is entertaining and useful enough to have a very large audience actively use their application; they are able to gather a tremendous amount of detail on user behavior. Thus individual preferences and navigation trends are available for add placement and market research as well. Well funded and rapidly adding users, near 20,000 downloads, Me.dium recently raised $15M, led by Waltham, MA, based Commonwealth Venture Capital and joined by Colorado based Appian Ventures and Boston based Spark Capital. That brings their total backing to $20.275 M based on VentureOne. Me.dium.com Last week Dan'l Lewin and Don Dodge joined me for a tour of cool ISV's in the Boulder/Denver area, a visit with the tech startup incubation initiative, called TechStars, and a VC Roundtable which included many of the influential tech VC's in the Colorado area. A big thanks to Brad Feld for helping coordinate, find the right people to meet and coaching us through the meetings and events – here is Brad's post. The cool ISV's we visited were, Electric Rain ( www.erain.com ), Newmerix ( www.newmerix.com ), Lijit ( www.lijit.com ), Gold Systems ( www.goldsys.com ), Rally Software ( www.rallydev.com ), Me.dium ( me.dium.com ), IP Commerce ( www.ipcommerce.com ), Accellos ( www.accellos.com ), and Newsgator ( www.newsgator.com ). There were a few standouts, Don Dodge fans, and plenty of follow-ups from the visits. But, consistently high quality companies with very interesting solutions. We stopped by TechStars ( www.techstars.org ), and had a great chat with some budding entrepreneurs. Fortunately, we were able to help one of the companies, SearchToPhone , resolve some issues with Tellme, so they could get their demo live. Only one of the companies is using the Microsoft stack – largely because their lead developer is a veteran Microsoft developer. SearchToPhone is using a mixed platform + Tellme. We had a great conversation concerning why – mostly because of perceptions around cost and control. David Cohen posted a good summary on the TechStars blog. Don Dodge had a chance to join Brad Feld and 100 other Boulder technology entrepreneurs at the Boulder New Tech Meetup on the University of Colorado campus. Here is some of the blog coverage from that event. Don had a chance to pitch the EBT to the group and had a few fans in the audience. Dan'l and I headed to Denver for a darn good meal and greeted the ISV of the year and ISV innovator of the year award nominees. Since WWPC was in Denver we were able to fit in the ISV nominee event. Digipede, one of our EBT sponsored companies, won the ISV innovator of the year award – which is a pretty big deal. I met with John Powers, the CEO of Digipdede the next day at WWPC and he couldn't be more pleased. The Colorado VC Roundtable was a good re-introduction of the EBT to the Colorado VC's. Most of their activity is early stage and the startup community is not slowing down, so this was a good opportunity to make sure Microsoft was in the platform selection process for their companies. I now have a few Microsoft startup day's scheduled at the local firms. Thank you to Sanjiv and Nav – for creating much of the materials that I copied. Thank you Nicolas for coaching me through Silverlight, Live and Popfly. Thank you Dan'l and Don for coming out and bringing the crowds. | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/david_drach/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 255 | | View in Web Browser | /_layouts/images/ichtmxls.gif | /Blogs/david_drach/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&DefaultItemOpen=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 255 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/david_drach/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsx | 256 | | Snapshot in Excel | /_layouts/images/ewr134.gif | /Blogs/david_drach/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?listguid={ListId}&itemid={ItemId}&Snapshot=1 | 0x0 | 0x1 | FileType | xlsb | 256 |
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Dave Drach
Managing Director, Emerging Business Team, Microsoft Corporation
Dave Drach is a Managing Director for the Microsoft Emerging Business Team. Dave works with venture capitalists and early stage start-ups helping them to develop their businesses and effectively partner with Microsoft. Recently Dave has been actively engaged with SaaS companies in the ERP, CRM, SCM, BI...
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Recent Posts
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Friday, February 29, 2008
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Featured Startup
The company of the day is ShowNearby.com, based in Singapore. The company's mission is simple: to show you what's nearby. You will find below an interview with Douglas Gan, Founder of ShowNearby.com. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
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