There has been much focus on the application development over the last few days so I guess I have been overly quiet on the blog posts but the good news is that things are going well. We have once again completely redesigned out back end and now have locked down the design for our back end accessible...

Gary & the team at IMC have sponsored the last two Startup Weekend Events and are a fantastic support to our many startups in BizSpark. Gary has kindly put together the below advice on the Funding support available to Startups in Australia. Innovation Management Consultants Pty Ltd (IMC) is a professional...

BUSINESS-PLAN-IN-1-DAY (Sydney): Create your own 40-page, Investor Grade business plan in one day. Need to raise capital, get a grant, get a loan or just work out where you are going?! Get it done in one-day at this incredible, dynamic event! (76 business builders can’t be wrong!)  http://www.antmart...

While I was away I got this very exciting news in my inbox I am now planning a trip down to Melbourne to attend the awards!  I think its a fantastic example of why you should take the time to nominate your company for awards – as the extra visibility will be invaluable! I now also have the below...

The first thing I want to point out here about the upcoming posts is that although I am going to mention some of the toolkits & great helpers I have used for the development of the WP7 app I do not consider myself a professional developer anymore so this is NOT a how to build a Windows Phone App...

As I mentioned I have had a bit of time off work (and this project) while recovering from a little accident I had last Tuesday. I got back into things again today and so have a few things to report on today. My biggest concern at the moment is that my week off has meant that the Phone 7 version is way...

Just a quick post to mention why I have been  offline for a few days. One of the hardest lessons I learnt when I ran my own business was that you needed to be sure to take time to look after yourself and keep yourself healthy. In fact something seemingly small can send your business off the rails...

So here we are a good week and a half into this little project and I think it’s a good time to take a few moments to reflect on the feedback I have been receiving from so many of you and to give some guidance on where we are heading as there has been so much positive feedback & suggestions on ways...

Throughout the series of posts on this project to date, I have made mention several times about my plans to follow a lean methodology with the Picknic App. I realised that what I hadn't done was fully delve into explaining what this means in terms of business and particularly in relation to a startup...

Today I swapped my other hats for me developer hat for a few hours. As I have volunteered to do the data setup on Azure & the Phone 7 application development. As I have all my data & use cases now defined it was quite simple to ensure the data structure was set up in Azure. next I decided to...

Accounting Setup It is something I should have done from the very start – as I am clearly outlaying some cash & am not accurately tracking it. I know many companies will use simple solutions like an excel sheet to track their incoming & outgoing expenses. I have always been a MYOB user, but also...

Today was mostly focused on back end developments but 2 key milestones were reached: 1. Our Launch page was made finally live (my own fault on that one as I corrupted the DNS completely! So after a 48 hour (self caused) delay we now have a launch page tied to MailChimp to allow us to recruit potential...

I thought I would make mention of the way I chose Go Daddy as my hosting provider. Besides having them recommended to me, people often overlook that we have a relationship with hosting providers through BizSpark that allows you to take advantage of further discounts – search the list in your BizSpark...

Things really got interesting today! I received the first delivery of the data from my researcher. This means I can now setup my Azure tables and data access layer. I plan on making the data accessible via oData feeds as well as via web services. I use a nifty little tool called Cerebrata Cloud Storage...

Today has been a very good reminder of me running away with an idea. I was at work in back to back meetings again today – almost feel like the universe is against me getting this done! And tonight by the time I had a few moments to sit down & get things done… I was already tired and decided to recommence...

It’s Saturday and am officially taking my own advice and taking the day off to spend the day with my son doing all kinds of fun things like going to the movies (we saw the Smurf movie in 3D and it was actually quite funny!), going to a park, having a picnic & chasing bubbles around the backyard!...

I spend a lot of my time helping startups in Australia and giving them advice on how to get up & running. A lot of the advice comes from running my own company previous to joining Microsoft, sharing battle stories with others, understanding the mistakes I made and the last few years of working with...

I have finally signed off on the last of the updates to the Agenda for this weekends BizSpark Azure & Phone 7 startup BONANZA! I am so excited to bring together such a great range of both Technical & Business sessions for our attendees! Agenda   Day 1 Thursday 24th – Technical Deep Dive...

  Asia Pacific Pitch Fest! Hear governments from around the region with tips on market opportunity and access !   Hear local BizSpark companies pitch their start-up to corporate and regional Microsoft executives ! Connect with peer start-ups form around Asia Pacific ! See top start-ups pitch...

  Australia & New Zealand BizSpark partners! I am busily finalising the details for the upcoming Asia Pacific Startup summit. As part of this event we will be showcasing the top 2 startups in BizSpark Australia and New Zealand to an audience that covers the Asia Pacific region and representatives...

Across the weekend, we selected 10 companies (from the submissions we received) to participate in the first Australian BizSpark Camp. We decided to focus this first event around Azure technologies, so asked the teams to submit how they thought they might use Azure for their solution. The event kicked...

With several successful Microsoft BizSpark Incubation Weeks under our belt ( Azure Atlanta , Win7 Boston , Win7 Reston , CRM Reston , CRM Boston , Win 7 Irvine , Mobility Mountain View ,), we are pleased to announce Microsoft BizSpark Camp for Windows Azure in Sydney! We hope you’re tapping into the...

We have been overwhelmed by the amount of interest in BizSpark across the entire Microsoft Community – but the interest has been especially apparent here in Australia. Personally i think this is because we have a great start up community. To help foster this local community I have kicked off a couple...

You all know how much I love BizSpark … well, I am now so very excited, as last week at Web Directions, the newest member of our Spark Family was announced: WebsiteSpark . In a similar vein to our BizSpark & DreamSpark programs , WebsiteSpark is the new global program, designed to ignite the success...

One of my favorite Women In Technology, Asli Bilgin has just announced a new site: SlingAlibi (can you work out what that’s an anagram for??) http://www.slingalibi.com/ . Now of course there’s an associated Twitter account you can follow for good measure: http://twitter.com/slingalibi The goal of the...