Sparking Small Businesses
November saw the launch of the eagerly awaited new program for start-ups - BizSpark is now widely available across US and Canada, Western Europe, Central & Eastern Europe, UK, Germany, France; major markets in Asia Pacific from Indonesia and Malaysia to Australia; and Latin America.
Leading up to Christmas, there was a great turnout at LeWeb in Paris and the TiE summit in Bangalore. Microsoft India managed to get Ravi Venkatesan and C K Prahalad to open the proceedings and TiE Bangalore (with over 1,000 members) firmly reinforced their centre’s position as “the Silicon Valley of India”. Over the three days over 1,700 start-ups attended and there is still a great buzz in the media about this new program.
Middle Eastern countries will launch in February with Turkey ahead of the game launching early December at the Microsoft Turkey Developer Summit with 500+ developer attendees. They got some great coverage (I do not understand Turkish but Mehmet in the team tells me it is positive!)… Turkey also feature very high up in the league table of downloads of Microsoft’s program for student programmers, DreamSpark, announced by BillG in February 08. It is clear that the next generation of software companies will not just come from China and India.
I am really looking forward to seeing the reaction to this new program for start-ups in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi, Gulf, Pakistan and through Africa in Nigeria, Senegal, Kenya and South Africa.
Happy New Year!
