Curse is the largest independent Massively Multiplayer Online Game site in the world. It has over 7.5 million monthly unique visitors, over 1.6 million active Curse client users, and 250 million monthly page views, and is profitable, producing more than $3 million in revenue in 2009.
The company was founded by Hubert Thieblot in 2005. Thieblot’s goal for the company is “to provide gamers with an unmatched suite of tools designed to meet their every need. Curse is a centralized hub for everything MMO - a starting point that empowers gamers in a way no other service can.”
Curse captures – and holds - the Massively Multiplayer Online gaming community’s attention by offering wikis, databases, add-on downloads, blogging, forums, and guild web site hosting - the specialized web hosting service designed to support online gaming communities. The site also offers free PC and Mac Curse clients for managing game add-ons.
Popular games played by Curse gamers include World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online, Aion, Runes of magic and several others. The company also owns several game-specific sites, including DiabloFans.com and AionSource.com. The company has grown by predicting what titles will be hits and setting up hubs for their communities.
Curse offers its users a basic, free membership and a premium, ad-free subscription-based membership. Advertising within e-newsletters generates additional revenues for the company.
Curse has 32 employees and is headquartered in San Francisco CA and Huntsville AL.
I’m sitting here with Kevin Mann, Chief Scientist and founder of Graphic.ly and Graham Morley, Lead Interface Designer. Graphic.ly took their social enabled comic reading platform and brought it to the Windows Phone 7 in Silverlight , with fantastic content such Marvel characters, Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man. The Graphic.ly application let’s you shop for new content on their store spanning many different brands and varieties of comic novels, from mainstream comics to manga and edgier emerging comic artists. Graphic.ly also runs the comic book fan site iFanboy, giving them the most popular social platform for fan collaboration in the industry. The combination of great content, smooth, compelling navigation, direct social fan access and an ever growing comic store create a comic reading experience that is even better than paper comics.
We are watching Mike Swanson demo Graphic.ly and it really shows off the range of Windows Phone 7. I had chance to play with a Windows Phone 7 last night and yes, I was impressed. One of the constant challenges with rich media on a mobile phone is how do you get a large screen experience, onto a small device, that fits on your pocket. Using the Windows Phone 7 device you get a sense of how that is done. You can move smoothly, panning left to right, up and down, so that you feel like you are interacting with a much larger piece of content, viewing it in high resolution. This is called the “panoramic viewing experience”. And the interface is smooth, super smooth, with none of the lag and jitters that I have learned to hate on older Windows Mobile devices. Graphic.ly deployed Deep Zoom in Silverlight to allow you to pan, zoom, and truly experience the artwork in comics.
Here is the demo on YouTube.
Kevin Mann came up with the idea for Graphic.ly after being frustrated with finding the latest edition of his favorite comics. He founded the company back in January of 2009. Kevin applied and was accepted into the TechStars incubator in Boulder, CO. TechStars is one of the world’s leading startup incubators. Graphic.ly, known as Take Publishing while at TechStars, was selected as one of 10 companies, out of 600, for the summer of 2009. Kevin Mann and Thanavath Jaroenvanit joined TechStars for the summer. TechStars is a BizSpark Network Partner and enrolled Graphic.ly into BizSpark. This gave Graphic.ly a broad selection of Microsoft development tools, as well as a free subscription to Microsoft Azure for server side development. Soon after Graphic.ly completed TechStars they were able to close $1.2 M in venture funding led by DFJ-Mercury.
Micah Baldwin, a publishing and social application serial entrepreneur was one of the mentors for Graphic.ly at TechStars. Like most of the mentors at TechStars, Micah is not paid for his participation, and there is no defined “give” for Micah’s commitment of time and effort to the young startups at TechStars, but is part of a thriving startup mentoring ecosystem. This is a classic example of how Microsoft BizSpark Network Partners, like TechStars, are able to partner with Microsoft and provide all of the tools and technology to build the best solutions. Micah continued to engage with Graphic.ly and joined Graphic.ly as the CEO.
Graphic.ly is currently in private beta and will be launching their public beta shortly.
BTW – all development tools for development on Windows Phone 7 – are free for phone application development. Nice.
I often get the question, what does Microsoft do with BizSpark One companies, i.e. why should I care about that kind of engagement? I respond by discussing the companies that I have worked with and helped engage with Microsoft more effectively as well as leverage strategic and tactical Microsoft technologies, like Graphic.ly. BizSpark One represents less than 1% of the 30,000 BizSpark companies, and is focused on giving every opportunity to an exclusive select group and pro-actively working with them to help them maximize their potential.
Graphic.ly, formerly Take Publishing and creators of the Take Comics application, is one of those BizSpark One companies. Graphic.ly is less than one year old, and has leveraged Microsoft technologies such as Windows Presentation Foundation and the extensive touch capabilities of Windows 7. But more importantly they took an idea, "Make comic books as easy to consume as music is with a iPod", and they executed to perfection. Graphic.ly recently announced their funding of $ 1.2 M, which is a very early round and they are in good position to get more capital as they need it in the future.
So what do we, the Emerging Business Team, do for BizSpark One companies, well, here is Steve Ballmer showcasing Graphic.ly in front of an audience of 5,000 technology channel representatives at CES 2010. Those beady eyes peering over Steve Ballmer's right shoulder is the Graphic.ly application up on the main stage.
Now, Graphic.ly's success is because of their own hard work and execution. Leading up to their visibility at CES 2010 the Graphic.ly team has been clocking huge hours getting their private beta to launch and ensuring that the applications was stable and compelling for the Microsoft team to demonstrate and showcase in the Microsoft booth. Here is a shot of the bleary eyed Tony Williams in the Graphic.ly UK development office after 30+ hours of work. I remember working with Kevin Mann, Thanavath Jaroenvanit the Grpahic.ly team at the Windows 7 Incubation Week, where they originally built the touch enabled reader. They leveraged the Microsoft development platform and got the demo done in one week. This demo has evolved into their private beta application. The team is smart, super hard working, and success like their showcase at CES are the results.
And Graphic.ly is moving fast. With the leadership of Micah Baldwin, and the recent partnership with iFanBoy, Graphic.ly is combining the rich graphic viewing experience with social networking tools to create an electronic comic reading application that is more compelling, richer and more entertaining than just paper. Oh yeah, and it is all running on top of Windows Azure, but that story is for another post.
If you live in Outlook, as I do, and need help navigating your inbox and outside of the inbox, then you need Xobni. I upgraded a while ago, to Xobni Plus, soon after they launched the product during the 2009 Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference, back in July. It has been inbox bliss ever since.
In one recent scenario, I had some of our Microsoft PR folks ask for a Bio on some of the executives at one of my managed startups. Off to their web site. Hmm. Still in stealth mode, no executive team profiles. Oh, well, just use Xobni. Search in the Xobni toolbar. Find e-mail contact, and all of the officers, who are likely in their network. Click on the LinkedIn icon, click on view profile, and you have the bio of whoever's e-mail you are looking at.
I am here at Microsoft Professional Developer's Conference and I am pleased to announce that now, all of you enterprise developers have Xobni Enterprise to help you connect your customer systems with Outlook. I remember back in 1999, ouch, a decade ago, when I was at Great Plains, and Bill Gates was showing off a demo I did with some of our dev team where the accounting app built and shipped an order for a networking solution leveraging VBA automation across Word, Visio and Outlook. I know how critical it is to integrate enterprise applications into Microsoft Office and it was a key recipe to our success at Great Plains.
With Xobni Enterprise, not only to you get a centralized management infrastructure for deploying Xobni across your enterprise, you also get an extensibility framework for tying in your enterprise applications, enabled by Active Directory, into Outlook. For example, imagine the LinkedIn scenario that I described above, but if you worked at a hospital and your patient scheduling system was linked to Xobni, you would be able to see a patient's schedule and perhaps insurance profile based on an e-mail inquiry. With every e-mail, you can get the context of that individual, based on your own enterprise system. Of course, some assembly required. For more info on Xobni, just go here to learn more and reach out to contact Xobni if need be.
Oh yeah, and Xobni is a BizSpark One company too. So you wonder what a BizSpark One company looks like, watch Xobni and you should be able to figure it out.
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.
According to my host Gabriel, and reinforced by the 2008 award to Acate.
After 3 days in Sao Paulo, I traveled to the Brazilian island of Santa Catarina and the city of Florianopolis where the Brazilian technology incubation organization ANPTROTEC and the World Bank had a conference on developing new technology companies in rapidly developing regions like Brazil. The conference had participants from over 40 countries, but my focus was Brazil and fortunately, all of the key government and industry influentials were at the event.
In the exhibit area I was perusing what English content was around and entered the booth of the Acate incubator, which is based on Florianopolis, I met the Executive Director, Jamile Sabatini Marques, and she began to describe the Acate. During the discussion, she mentioned that another Microsoft executive was going to be visiting a few of the companies at their offices. I soon discovered that the Microsoft visitor was me. Talking with Mariana, who spoke very good English, in the Acate booth I learned of the German heritage of Santa Catarina island and the tech focused investment in the business community on the island. After a bit, my host for the Acate visit, Gabriel Sant'Ana Palma Santo arrived and we drove off from the resort to the Acate incubation center, which was about an hour away.
During the drive Gabriel educated me a bit more on the Brazilian incubators and how the government supports them throughout Brazil. As a Brazilian citizen you can propose a project and get funding up to $60,000 for your activities. Up to $4 Billion a year are invested in businesses, not all tech, through government and supplemental funding. This is not equity capital; it is a grant that does not need to be repaid. Angels and VC's can then engage the companies as they mature through the incubators; term is between 2-4 years. That is the good news. The bad news is that there is little tacit business knowledge transferred during these initial two years. I showed Gabriel the TechStars.org site and the numerous mentors and coaches that were very successful business persons. He asked how much each mentor get's paid. I said the only one who gets paid is David Cohen and his partners, who founded TechStars, when they get an exit out of one of the companies. But all of the mentors have a vested interest in transferring their knowledge, investing in the companies at some future time or building their ecosystem ( like Microsoft's purpose ). Capitalism at it's best.
Upon arriving at the Acate site I had a quick impromptu meeting with Rui Lauro Linhares, a local successful businessman that is the president of the Acate incubator. The analogy to Acate would be the Plug-n-Play Tech Center in Silicon Valley. The Acate facility has space for 20 companies and each company gets an office that can accommodate up to 6 employees. It looks like a college dormitory for startups. The first company I visited with was a SaaS HR recruiting and placement solution called KOMBO. KOMBO is built on Sugar CRM. It allows you to post a job, manage a pipeline of candidates, interview, hire and onboard the personnel. There were three folks on one side of the dorm room managing sales and three on the other side building product and the president Thiago Tavano Sammartino sitting in between running the business. Business is good and Thiago expects to achieve break even in a few months.
The next company has had some international exposure, BOOKESS. BOOKESS is essentially a publishing platform for both paper books and electronic books, such as Amazon's Kindle. I met Alessandro Ciaffone who walked through their publishing process. They are also in the process of writing a book reader – and since I am the Windows 7 guy on EBT, well, I had a few ideas on that. Again, business was healthy with international demand, and with hard bound binders worldwide and their English solution near completion, you can publish to hardback and kindle through their web based system in the near future. Oh yeah and read it on a Windows 7 tablet.
On to some more cool applications: when I was at the expo where I first met the Acate team, they had a large desktop display, about the size of a card table, that was touch enabled and you could see a profile of each company, touch it, flip it to English etc. I was sure this was WPF and I did notice that the machine was running a RC candidate of Windows 7. The company that built the application was sandbox and I was now sitting with them in their business dorm. They walked through some of the different applications that they had built, but alas, they were Flash and Flex and not WPF – of course I took the opportunity to show off some great WPF applications. Regardless, they are building touch enabled applications, using all kinds of sensory inputs, on top of whatever the client wants. I connected them with the touch and gesture library for Windows 7 which should help down the road.
And finally, I be with TalkAndWrite, who are building a touch enabled whiteboard, that can be used up on a wall like a normal whiteboard, or used at your desktop with a PC. It is peer-to-peer and uses very small bandwidth for instant communication of written whiteboard content on top of graphics being viewed by all meeting participants. They have a custom codec that they used resulted in excellent performance even over low bandwidth connections. This is key for the geographically dispersed population in Brazil and other countries and is the unique differentiator for them. Once again, gestures were key for them and I am connecting them to the Windows 7 hardware certification programs so their devices can get properly certified and get some broad visibility. Also of note that TalkAndWrite is a women led business, with Bruna Rezende and Daniela Baumgarten running the company, and I can respect that as my mother was an entrepreneur.
With a combination of the Microsoft Innovation Centers, BizSpark and our depth engagement programs, Microsoft is reaching out to the best tech companies in the world and helping them succeed. I was impressed and comforted that innovation; intellect and capitalism are alive and well, and even better on a beautiful island like Santa Catarina in Brazil.
Tchau One of my favorite aspects of working with the EBT is visiting different countries and working with our local Microsoft resources learning how Microsoft can help companies prosper in their local economies and worldwide. Over the years I have done this in the UK, Israel, France, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. I have done it to some degree in Canada and China – but not directly in-country like in the other areas. I am always fascinated by the cultural differences in how to build and sustain a business.
I have an uncle who is a successful businessman in Italy ( along with my aunt and all my cousins who also own their own businesses in Italy ), I lived a bit in England, Leeds to be exact, when in High School, and traveled throughout Europe ( UK, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Greece ), studying international business in college. Even though us Americans like to think we have the best free enterprise system, entrepreneurship is alive and well worldwide and prospering today like no other time in history.
So when I go to a new country, what do I do with startups to help them be successful? It's actually quite pragmatic and involves aligning the Microsoft resources and efforts to fit with the local culture and economic trends, especially in the target markets and demographics. Unfortunately Microsoft tends to take a model that works well in Chicago and put that same model into operation in China, only to find out that that model does not work well in China at all.
Once we can support startups effectively in our local offices, then we can leverage our global presence to help startups grow into other markets. With strong local knowledge we can help companies understand how a product that is doing well, in say Brazil, may also do well in France, or Columbia. I have helped companies cross borders from France to the US, from Sweden to the UK and from Finland to China. Global market expansion does not always make sense, and costs much more than most companies predict, but when it does work, expansion can be lucrative.
My meetings here in Brazil are about to start, but I will post later this week with updates.
The teams are cranking away here at the Microsoft Technology Center in Reston, VA. BizSpark and the Microsoft Developer Evangelist team is sponsoring another Incubation Week this week, focused on Windows 7 applications. The teams spent Monday getting training on the features of Window 7, and spent Monday night getting systems set-up and running. For some reason the network was awfully slow on Monday so my team, Take Publishing, built an ad-hoc code management system with Mesh – so the code could be ooze syncing in the background all the time. I love Mesh, there are so many times when your thinking, now how do we, oh, use Mesh. Hopefully some day it will just be built into the operating system and we will have a nice 1 billion machine peer to peer share.
Late Monday night, we were all feeling a bit fried and, well, we had a few beers and kicked back. Now, a bunch of hard core geeks, in an MTC loaded with a few million dollars worth of hardware and a Surface machine can get a little interesting. And lucky for us, one of the leading Surface experts around, Russ Williams was in the house. After wondering how to turn the Surface machine on for about 20 minutes, we found him and he proceeded to show us the latest goodies on Surface. Which included an application that had some advanced physics capabilities so could manipulate the effects of attraction and gravity on objects floating around the Surface. This is where the SuperNova chips come in. Russ pulled out a bag of small round chips, about the size of a quarter, that you would put on top of the Surface. One was a SuperNova chip. It essentially represented a massive push out ( negative gravity ), so all of the animated objects on the Surface desktop moved away from the exact place where the physical chip was sitting.
You may think we were just messing around, but in fact this was all research ( he, he ). The team that I am working with here was a recent graduate of TechStars. Take Publishing is setting out to change the world of comic books and graphic novel publishing and consumption. They have a comic publishing platform, a storefront and readers for different devices. The Take Publishing team was watching how Russ manipulated the different applications on the Surface and started asking about the gestures and how they work in Windows 7. Russ said, well most of all these gestures do work in Windows 7, and that helped the team immensely in planning how a casual reader would flow through a comic book with a variety of simple gestures.
Now the Take Publishing team, and their consultants, Vertigo ( visual designers and developers extraordinaire ), have been cranking 18 hours a day putting those concepts into functioning code. You can flip through the catalogue of comics that you have downloaded and synced to your reader, and HP TouchSmart PC with 4 points of multi-touch. You can move, pan, page, zoom, and even scratch the comic to interact with it. It's better than a paper comic and in super high resolution full color so you can appreciate the artwork as well as the story. I used to have a huge collection of the Flash and Hulk comics – I would love to have those again on top of this platform. Remember when you went on iTunes and downloaded all those Deep Purple records that you threw away but never really got around to buying the CD ( if you have grey hair like me). Well you are about to do that with comics, when the Take guys are done with this application.
Tomorrow we get to play with the demo. Wait till you see it.
The scope of innovation going on today continues to absolutely amaze me. Last week I helped out with the Windows 7 Incubation Week in Irvine, CA, at our Microsoft Technology Center facility. I was interested in helping out with the event because it was focused on leveraging some key new features being delivered in Windows 7.
- Touch:
Think 22 inch, full size monitor iPhone. Just a bit smaller than a surface, but just as easy to use. We had two devices available for building solutions. The first was an HP portable/tablet/touch convertible device. The HP TouchSmart tx2z. It uses a conductive grid embedded into the glass and is very responsive to multi-touch. And the second was an HP TouchSmart IQ800t . This was an integrated montitor/computer, with a camera based touch sensor built into the monitor. An attractive machine with remote, and built in Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Great machine for the kitchen because you could store the keyboard, use as a TV/DVD/DVR and leverage the glass case and highly sensitive touch interface ( which since it is camera based works even if you touch it with a pencil eraser, a gloved hand, or spoon ). All of the companies were building solutions that leveraged touch in an innovative way. Note that Windows has multi-touch capabilities natively integrated into the API – but hardware vendors are free to implement the user interfaces in a variety of ways.
- Windows Sensor and Location Platform:
Windows 7 has significantly improved the SDK for integrating sensors, such as GPS devices, WWAN radios, accelerometers and ambient light sensors into a device, allowing it to respond to the environment and use that input to interact with the user more effectively. A few of the companies leveraged this capability in their solutions. This broad platform for sensory integration should lead to some compelling industrial and focused vertical solution. When combined with touch, it enables some powerful scenarios, as we will see.
- Scorching & Flexible 3D Graphics:
One of the big challenges with the recent evolution of Windows is that major subsystems, specifically the entire driver architecture, has been completely re-written. Much of the pain of the Vista roll-out was due to this fact. The good news is that the new architecture is allowing a balance of hardware and software graphics acceleration that allows excellent performance across an even broader array graphics implementations from net-book super ultra portables to the triple monitor dual graphics card configuration that I am writing this blog upon. You can read a bit more about the depth of work, specifically WARP ( yes there are a few trekkies at Microsoft ) here.
And now for the companies. Our Incubation Week events are a bit experimental. For this event we were looking for companies that were creating solutions leveraging touch, device integration and advanced 3D imaging. Needless to say, the slew of social whatever ruby applications were not exactly the right target for this event, and thus, we were challenged to get a big pile of companies, but we did get a few great ones and they showcased a little slice of the future for us.
Winner of Best Business: Ingenium Care
All-up winner for the best solution was Ingenium Care. Their solution combines a few innovations into one integrated offering that is in the sweet spot of the "Silver Tsunami" wave of aging baby boomers. The Ingenium solution provides a very simple to use touch interactive device in the home of the elderly, special needs or injured who need nearly constant supervision. The monitor would mount on the wall or be positioned in a small apartment as a TV. There is also a pendent, think "I've fallen and I can't get up", that an individual could wear, which Ingenium has prototyped. That pendant device includes two way voice communication, an accelerometer for determining positioning, a GPS ( to keep track of grandma ), and medical device monitoring support. Here is a picture of the device being demonstrated and the 3D animation on their solution showing the current position of the patient, as shown in the Orange County Register. Ingenium is distributed by Control 4 technologies and allows the monitor to integrate with lighting, heating, etc, to ease control of home devices as well as to use things like lighting to alert an injured veteran to take his medication.
Jim Wolf, the President and Chief Scientist of Ingenium, who is a veteran of this space, demonstrated the pendant indicating the position of a fallen individual, which then uses AI technology to predict whether this is an emergency. Laying down for 2 hours in the afternoon may be a nap, but laying down on the stairs early in the morning may mean a fall. This data is processed and a social network integration alerts friends and family while a caregiver solution may alert a local nursing home or VA hospital. In every scenario, the features were well thought out and extremely easy to navigate using the large, bright, HP TouchSmart IQ800t interface. Note that the camera sensing capability of the TouchSmart was perfect for this application because the elderly could punch the large, easy to read buttons, even with a pointer if needed. Kellerey Lohman, the VP of Marketing at Ingenium did a smooth and compelling demo of all of these applications.
Winner of Best Technology: TEAM 5
Ok, this is a great story, and a great team. We had an open slot due to another cancelation, so some of the LA area Microsoft team members, Woddy Pewitt and Lynn Langit, tweeted the community and we love what we found. Kim Schmidt and Michael Roth were "between jobs" and were interested in joining and learning about Windows 7 development. They were joined by experienced Silverlight developer Gerardo Gonzalez, who was working remote in Mexico City ( and we were ok with that considering the H1N1 concerns ). On Monday Kim was describing the Windows 7 capabilities to a friend who was a neurosurgeon. He felt the technology could be applied to medical imaging to make it easier to navigate images. The rest of the team suggested integrating ambient light sensors so that the solution could be used more effectively on a mobile tablet for battlefield medicine or emergency room triage. Big ideas for 3 developers, who had been trained the day before, to build a solution in 3 days, but, THEY DID IT.
The solution loads standard medical images, it was demonstrated on a 2D XRAY, but could easily be expanded to navigating 3D images and even time-lapse views. All of the navigation can be done through touch from zoom to pan, fly-in, etc. These are standard Windows Presentation Foundation capabilities that leverage XAML and skills of web savvy developers to pull together. By tying touch gestures and hot spots, touch navigation can easily be integrated. Kim did a solid presentation for TEAM 5 ( with a little help from her friends ) and Mike did the demo. The panelists were impressed and felt that the medical imaging market held serious potential and one of the panelists noted it was amazing that they were able to pull the application together so quickly. I believe Mike has found a job, but Kim was truly impressive, so if you are interested in contacting her you can find her on LinkedIn here.
Winner of Coaches Award ( Greatest Progress ): Quantellia
Quantellia is a solution built on the principle that it is easy to discuss and collaborate on complex models if you can effectively document the models and interact with them. In architecture we have new 3D walkthrough modeling capabilities, in aerospace we have full 3D rendering and definition, but how do you do that with your web of compensation spreadsheets? Quantellia is focused on solving exactly that problem. The founders, Lorien Pratt and Mark Zangari have extensive scientific and academic background and they have brought their knowledge to solving tough business modeling problems. Have you ever attempted to get unified agreement on a complex business model, say a tier distribution network, with only a spreadsheet to work with the model. With Quantellia you can define the model and represent it so that individual collaborators can comment on each aspect, and you can even see how the model functions. Lorien wins the Coaches award because she burned the midnight oil converting their 2D environment to 3D leveraging Microsoft Expression and integrating in touch navigation. Now you could have multiple sites worldwide, move in and out of model components, through touch interaction, refining a model to be truly optimal. Too bad the Wall Street risk analysts were not using a tool like this back in the early 2000's, we could have saved ourselves some taxes.
CookEatShare:
One of the other solutions developed at Incubation Week was an add-on gadget for the popular social networking site, CookEatShare. First of all, the solution scenario for them was pretty compelling to me. My wife has her computer at a small desk in the kitchen on the opposite side of the food prep area. She is an avid chef and researches recipes on the internet often. The typical cycle is find the recipe, print it out, make notes on the recipe while preparing it, get goop all over the paper, throw it out with the clean-up, and repeat. With something like the TouchSmart, you could have it in the corner between the sink and fridge. Navigate and find recipes, prepare them, save your edits and feedback, plug this feedback into the social network and get feedback from others, the world is an easier and tastier place. Since a device like the TouchSmart also has a TV, it makes it a convenient device for the kitchen. Mihir Shah, one of the co-founders of CookEatShare demonstrated their solution. CookEatShare built a widget on the destop so that you get notified of new recipes in your areas of interest. Touching the gadget would open the full screen version of the application. They are still working on some added custom touch interaction, but I was impressed with the basic browser interaction through touch without any keyboard or mouse. If you made your text and images large enough, most of the navigation could be done natively using a goopy finger on the screen. I also joined CookEatShare and look forward to expanding my BBQ repertoire.
That's it, I will keep you posted regarding how these companies proceed. We are continuing to expand and modify the Incubation Week format, so looking forward to ideas and insights. If you have innovative ideas or concept around Windows 7, don't hesitate to contact me.
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.
| 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 |
|
|
|
|
|
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 around the world, helping them develop their businesses while effectively partnering with Microsoft. Most recently, Dave’s focus has been on rich client applications built on Windows 7. This includes applications and devices that use new capabilities in Windows 7 such as rich 3D, touch & sensor integration, UI, hardware, home networking, device and cloud to desktop integration.
More | Email
Recent Posts
Curse.com: The Go-To Site for Massively Multiplayer Online Games
March 17, 2010
Graphic.ly brings Spider-Man to the Windows Phone 7
March 15, 2010
Steve Ballmer Demo’s Graphic.ly at CES 2010
January 7, 2010
Gosh, I love Xobni
November 11, 2009
Take Comics – Don’t you like being a kid again
November 11, 2009
Acate – “The best tech incubator in Brazil”
November 4, 2009
|
|
Featured Startup
The BizSpark startup of the day is Avetrium, based in Canada. You will find below an interview with Tim Smith, COO of Avetrium. All the best to them and congrats for being the startup of the day!
Read more...
|
|
|
|
