I may be the anti-geek but even I am excited to see Win7 RTM made available on MSDN to BizSpark member companies. Check out the latest BizSpark news on Twitter. I finally joined the 21st century and signed up to Twitter myself a few weeks ago. Fascinating. It was down for a few hours today though (hit by DoS attack apparently).
My new-found technological embrace knows no bounds, as I do meetings on Office Communicator and talk to family currently working in Qatar and China, and friends in all corners on Skype. Now I just need a webcam.
Today I met another star at Cisco, Yann de Vries, their head of Venture/Corp Dev in EMEA. We talked about how we might work together to find and support great tech start-ups. I am really encouraged by these kind of conversations - it reinforces the art of possibility. Times might be less than ideal at the moment but we are still inspired daily by great innovation and tales of resilience, growth and prosperity for entrepreneurs and enterprises, against the odds. Plenty of companies are raising capital too.
Some places easier to do business than others, according to this index.
HSBC announced a decent profit for the first calendar half year but a significant decline year-on-year. While some of their business streams may have suffered, we saw great demand for the BizSpark program among their customers - in a few months more than 100 of them signed up in the UK and there's growth in Turkey, India, France, Mexico, Gulf and SE Asia.
Yesterday, Cisco Systems reported results: net income for its fiscal fourth quarter dropped 46% to $1.1 billion and revenue fell 18% to $8.54 billion. Results, though, topped Wall Street's expectations, and shares rose in after-hours trading. Chambers was bullish: saying there are signs the economy has reached a 'tipping point' last qtr and Cisco will return to double-digit growth. Read more on WSJ (ironically a story about WSJ subsciber-only content on BBC News as I write this).
WSJ also published a piece recently saying the 'Tide is Turning' for Microsoft. Yes!
So... 'unsummery' weather in England aside, plenty of reasons to be cheerful. Perhaps I can use the services of one of these nice travel start-ups to find the yellow ball in the sky.
