The software on offer supports all phases of your application’s life from design with the Expression suite through development using Visual Studio Team System to deployment on Windows Server 2008. In addition to these core tools BizSpark offers access to Microsoft’s “cloud” Windows Azure and Live Services. All of this is free for 3 years providing applicants meet the following criteria:

• Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business
• Privately held
• In business for less than 3 years
• Less than US $1 million in annual revenue.

 
(To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions, start-ups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet.)

Your solution does not have to be 100% Microsoft but can include non-Microsoft technologies such as integration with third party services (Facebook, Flickr etc) and technologies (PHP, MySQL etc). In fact many of Microsoft’s products and services are extremely interoperable; Windows Server is a great platform for hosting PHP, ASP.NET works with MySQL and you can build great RIAs with Silverlight regardless of your core platform!

To find out more about BizSpark, how it may be able to help you and to gain access to the program please send an email to firstcontact@howardbaines.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

You can also find out more about BizSpark from Bindi Karia at Microsoft and Clive Howard at Howard Baines in the following Intruders.tv video.

For all those who didn’t know what ‘zomg’ meant, VideoJug has prepared a video. Enjoy!

What I like about Mix is that it really brings together a lot of what Microsoft has been doing recently into a coherent strategy. At the same time it is an opportunity to show off some of their cool stuff such as Surface which was definitely the big crowd puller. Another product they were keen to promote comes from their Live Labs team and is called Photosynth. This was released only a short time ago and received a decent amount of press coverage. Unlike Surface however Photosynth is something that anyone can get involved with.

Photosynth uses multiple photos of a location, building, object, etc to generate a 3 dimensional rendering. Through the Photosynth website any one can sign-up for an account and create their own “synth”. The process is incredibly simple, just take as many photos as possible of what you wish to render in 3D and upload them to the website. The Photosynth software does the rest and in a short time you have a 3 dimensional model that you can twist zoom in and zoom out.

We gave it a go and within about an hour had our first synth, probably would have been quicker but some time was spent figuring out what to synth and setting up the photo environment. We probably should have taken more photos (we took about 50) but otherwise the results are good. Photosynth is PC only at the moment and there are a few issues but we’re hoping that it will be integrated into Silverlight like Deep Zoom.

(If you cannot see the Synth below you may need to install the Photosynth plugin available from photosynth.net)

A couple of times a year we like to take a few of days off to do our own thing. No I don’t mean a trip to spain, it’s a working holiday!

Today and tomorrow the phones are off, the doors are locked and no one gets in or out till we have a web app. Yes we are building our own!

So why do we do this? Clive wrote a recent article as a guest author over at TechCrunch explaining why:

As a web agency we spend most of our time working on client projects that cover a range of services from design and development to strategic advice. As a business we face other challenges such as promoting our brand, winning new clients and staying current with the latest trends and technologies. The relentless pace of evolution within internet technologies creates another problem. That is: how to sell clients exciting new concepts when you have nothing to show in terms of previous work.

I’m sure that many agencies reading this will be very familiar with these challenges and often find themselves frustrated in search of answers. When we started Howard Baines we made it a priority to find a way of addressing this. Our solution was to build our own start-ups.

We deliberately chose new technologies or concepts and then used them to design and build web apps. The process not only provided a way of rapidly moving up the learning curve but also resulted in proof-of-concept applications that we could use to demonstrate our experience to clients and act as great PR vehicles for us. The whole process of developing a web application is also a good exercise for learning more about what our start-up clients go through and improving our own design and development processes.

Here are some interesting facts about our web app.

• It doesn’t have a logo
• We are building the API first and the web app second
• It involves Aliens! Yes you heard me right!
• We will have a public API on day one
• Among others it will have a Mac Dashboard Widget, a Vista Gadget.
• It will have a AIR app which will form the basis of my talk at FOWA
• It will be purple and green
• …and the little man at the top of this post still needs a name… Suggestions?

Over the last year I have found myself explaining to numerous corporate folks what Twitter is. The usual reaction is a bemused expression and one question: “Why?” This was often followed by the suggestion that what they would like is a similar service but for use within their team.

So while Twitter limped on like a one legged man with a sore ankle completely ignoring a market that would actually make them some money the boys at Geni created Yammer. Although some parts of Yammer are free there are additional features that companies need to pay for. The brand is not very corporate and their site needs some work but the idea is good and they have a monetisation route not built around advertising. I imagine that if popular Yammer will either get bought or the major corporate software vendors will add this functionality to their existing offering.

There seems to be a tendency amongst some start-ups to ignore the corporate market. I’m not sure if this is because they don’t think the guys in suits will “get” Web 2.0, or they think the sales job will be too hard. I hope it’s not simply down to an aversion to this market through the need to be cool. Bizarrely though I think there is enormous potential here for both existing start-ups and new ideas.

A couple of months ago I attended an event where a number of very well known brands were discussing RSS. It is certainly true that the traditional business world is slightly behind in terms of technology and some were unfamiliar with RSS feeds. Many though had either introduced RSS into their business or were experimenting with it. As they discussed the various challenges that RSS presents I thought of a number of start-ups that I’ve come across who could solve many of these problems.

I am sure however that none of those start-ups would consider approaching this market with their ideas. An exmaple is that despite there being a wealth of RSS readers, many of which have been around a long time, Newsgator rules the corporate market place. These guys took the RSS reader and went corporate with it and lacking much competition has been relatively successful.

Not every web app has a B2B application and it is understandable that for many this market is unreachable without help. However it is always good to see start-ups going down this route and I hope to see more in future.

Last week I wrote a Jargon Buster about XML and so Web Services seems like a natural progression. Not as well known as XML but still often referred to Web Services are just as frequently misunderstood. Web Services have been around for some time and are themselves a progression of older technologies such as RMI, CORBA and DCOM (way too many acronyms to cover here). However Web Services have grown rapidly in popularity due to them being extremely easy to develop and work with and completely platform independent. So what are they?

A Web Service is a way for one application to communicate with another application regardless of the physical relationship between them. In most cases this communication takes place over the internet. For example, if a company has an application holding customer data and one of their partners wants to build their own application that can access that data then a Web Service is way to make this possible. Each application may live on its own server housed on different sides of the world but using the internet to communicate one application can access data within the other. The most common format for data to be transported from system to system is XML however this is not the only format. More and more applications are now using Web Services to allow other applications to interact with them in a wide variety of markets from Web 2.0 start-ups to traditional companies.

More recently the term API (Application Programming Interface) is being used to describe an application’s use of Web Services to expose its functionality.

I was asked to take part in a podcast recently focusing on the choice of technology within Enterprise IT departments and it raised some interesting issues. As we talked about the decision making process around choosing technologies, software and skills it became clear that there is a question about the role of IT. This is not just within Enterprise organisations but companies both large and small.

There was a time when for most companies IT simply meant guys in white shirts that made sure your PC was okay and kept the network running smoothly. Anything concerning technology was their domain and everyone else left them to it. The industry became good at putting the basics in place and keeping everything ticking over.

Within today’s organisation IT is everywhere, sales want their own sales and CRM systems, marketing buys websites and CMSs, there is software for accounting, procurement, HR and so on. Every department is now making decisions that involve technology and the question is where IT is within this?

The answer is often that they are not part of the decision making process but instead have technology solutions forced on them from above. Companies frequently outsource their technology solutions for fear that IT will be too slow to implement and often want to exclude the department as much as possible. Hence many company websites run entirely outside of the companies IT infrastructure and support.

So why is this the case and what can be done? The main reason is that IT departments fail to take a pro-active role within the company. Desperate not to unsettle their carefully crafted and balanced infrastructure they often appear reluctant to introduce new software solutions. There is also a lack of understanding in many cases of the fundamentals of the business that they serve. It is very difficult therefore for them to make key decisions regarding what technologies should be implemented and what skill-sets their people should have.

The solution is for IT to be more affirmative and grow an understanding of the needs of each department within the company. Working with those departments they can create an IT strategy or roadmap. This will allow them to make better choices about new technologies and skills training.

When a department comes to IT asking to implement a particular solution they will then be in a position to know whether another department has already done something similar or be able to guide them as to which technology is best to choose. This can help to avoid departments doubling up on development and the rogue Windows box sitting in the corner of an IT room full of Linux machines.

Rather than having people randomly researching new technologies and developing additional skills which may not fit together a coherent strategy allows IT to provide its people with clear guidance as to where it is best to develop their skill-sets.

IT is in fact extremely strongly placed within the organisation as nearly every department interacts with them. They are in effect a hub through which all of the business operates. This situation will only grow as companies become more and more technology dependent. For IT to waste this opportunity is a great shame.

Beyond being good for the ego of IT why is this important? Money. By having an empowered IT department with a long term strategy a company can spend far more efficiently and effectively.

One of the most powerful ways in which any company can develop an IT infrastructure is by integrating. Why have two systems doing virtually the same thing when an integrated system can serve two purposes. Only by the department best placed to understand the issues taking positive control of the decision making process can this be made possible.

Folks often talk about XML and so imagine that the term is clearly understood. Frequently it is not and so I thought it would make a good entry in this series even if it seems strange due to its familiarity. XML (eXtensible Markup Language) is itself a subset of another mark-up language called Standard Generalize Markup Language (SGML). SGML is little known in comparison to its derivatives such as XML and HTML. Simply put XML is a way of representing data in a human readable form that can also be understood by machines and that conforms to standards. This is achieved by defining tags which contain data, an example is <firstname>John</firstname>. A person can understand that this conveys the person’s first name is John. A machine meanwhile can also be made to understand that to find a person’s first name in this particular case look for anything contained within the <firstname> tag. Where confusion often arises is through misunderstanding XML and its derivatives. For example, RSS is XML, it is simply a predefined set of tags for representing a certain type of data (usually news). By standardising the tags any system that is aware of RSS can understand any RSS feed, hence RSS readers. If everyone who produced news information used different tags then an RSS reader would have to be coded to understand each provider’s data uniquely. By conforming life is much easier. And this is the power of XML, the ability to define sets of tags (a schema) that certain types of data can then be represented in a common way. The book industry has its own schema, as does Music.