Are you an early-stage startup having an idea so brilliant it burns? You want to make it happen – now? Then apply for the 2^nd batch of the Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in Berlin! It´s an immersive program aimed at squeezing the countdown to launch. During the 4 months of the program you will have access to top-notch mentorship, technical training and support and the opportunity to present at an Investor Demo Day to angel investors, venture capitalists, Microsoft executives, media and industry influentials.

What you need to know:

- The program will start in August 2014 and will run for 4 months

- The business of applicable startups must have a focus on developing software and/or a web based business model

- The Microsoft Ventures Accelerator supports an open platform approach and accepts startups that develop on any development platform. Startups accepted to the accelerator must be willing to try applicable Microsoft platforms.

- Microsoft does not take any equity for participation in the program (and hence the startup will get no funding for participation either)

- This program is not limited to startups from Berlin, however the founding team will have to move full time into our startup center in Berlin for the time of the program

- Only companies with funds raised less than $1m may apply

Apply now until 22^nd June at https://www.microsoftventures.com/accelerators/berlin

We're looking forward for your contact and application!

Microsoft's Startup Team in Germany

Stay in touch with the German Startup Team: On www.facebook.com/BizSparkDE and www.twitter.com/BizSparkDE.  Feel free to send us all your questions and ideas about the Accelerator and all other Startup activities of Microsoft.

You can also alert us to the apps you have worked on by tweeting links to them using the hashtag #bzapps. We've had quite a few today.

OFunnel

OFunnel is a BizSpark startup that went through the Seattle TechStars Accelerator in 2013. They have built what they call the "Google Alerts for Relationships." Douglas Crets also interviewed the founder, Kushal Shah, on The BizSpark Show. You can watch that interview below. You can download the app here.

Business networking tools are in abundance but this is an incredible all-in-one solution to help you find people that are relevant to your business goals using similar alerts to the ones you receive when you set up social network and news media notifications.

OFunnel is a professional relationship discovery tool that monitors all of the connections that are happening in your social networks. It is like Google Alerts for Relationships.
The OFunnel app for Windows 8.1 allows you to monitor connections being made in LinkedIn that are of interest to you. Use OFunnel to find new connections at target companies, hiring new candidates or track who your competitor is connecting to. For salespeople, recruiters and other roles that rely on relationships to be successful, OFunnel enables more effective lead generation.

Features

Setup and monitor connections happening within your network

Update your target accounts by company, person, or role

• View your OFunnel Alerts as they happen via Live Tiles and Daily Emails

POP – Prototyping on Paper

POP (aka known as Prototyping on Paper) is a product manager or creative guru’s dream. If you have ever tried to manage a project, especially an app prototype (aka shooting at clay pigeons from a moving van in the dead of night), you know that this problem definitely needs a solution. This is a hip new way to get your thoughts on “paper”.

Have an app idea? Draw it on paper and use POP to make it running on your tablet and PC!

You can download the app in the store here.

The workflow is ridiculously simple:
1. Design on Paper
2. Take Pictures
3. Link & Play

POP is good for showing someone your app ideas without design or coding skill and demonstrate user flow and concepts to colleagues and clients.

Happy prototyping :)

Qwilo

Who doesn't need to sell their furniture after a holiday spent with in-laws and children who aren't going to school? Kids burning presents with the fondue pot flame, and snowy boots getting tramped into the house?  For some people, the holidays may get so raucous, you may need to find a new home.  Get rid of that stuff. Start life anew, by using an app that makes Craigslist super simple.

Finding a place or selling your furniture couldn’t be easier with Qwilio, a gorgeous Windows 8 Style Craigslist app.

You can download Qwilo from the Windows Store today.

Qwilo is the first and only Officially Licensed Craigslist App for Windows 8.1.

Theneeds

The web has grown a lot more unruly since the days of delic.io.us, one of the social web's first attempts at building a browser and tab-oriented curation tool for making the discovery experience in the web simpler. We've moved on with that and started to use Theneeds, which, as the app indicates, sorts out what you want and what you need, and delivers you The Needs. Well, that's how we see it anyway.

You can download it here to see for yourself.

• Features
• Easily search and browse 8 main categories and 122 sub categories
• Available in over 715 Cities and Countries
• Quickly reply to postings with one click to open your preferred mail client
• Beautifully arranged fully rendered listings photos
• Advanced search filters like price, property type or job type
• Save your favorite listings and keep track of recently viewed items

Wheel of Fortune

A long time ago, we played Wheel of Fortune on an Apple II. That was a bit monochrome for us. Here's the Windows 8 version.

Celebrate over 30 years of Wheel of Fortune – it’s a new spin on America’s #1 Game show, more fun and easy to play than ever before! Step up to the wheel and take a spin through a rich Wheel of Fortune experience. With over 1,000 puzzles from show writers and a variety of gameplay modes, you will feel like a real contestant. 

Wheel of Fortune is available for all Win 8 devices, and has been specially designed for All-in-One personal computers that support simultaneous multiple touch points on screen. Bonus: Challenge your friends in-person with a split-screen mode only available on Dell XPS 18, Sony Tap 20, Sony Tap 21, HP Rove, Lenovo Horizon and the Acer Rio.

In this video, the reviewer says that the Game is hard to find. Well, this should be fixed by now, and we have made it easier for you to find. It's right here!  

And here are few new Windows Phone apps

CRICKit

Are you an analytical person buying or selling a house? This app helps you be as prepared financially as a commercial real estate broker. Crickit stands for a Commercial Real Estate Investment Calculation Kit.

This application might become a Commercial Real Estate Broker’s best friend. It will become a valued tool to use for your business.

You can input numbers on your tablet or Smartphone, while at a property with your client, then have the ability to e-mail your completed Annual Property Operating Data (APOD) or cash flow statement directly to your client before you even leave the property.  The APOD allows you to control the categories you need and enter values based on a price per square foot amount, a percentage of Gross Operating Income or a percentage or a set amount.  You can even decide to make changes in the middle of a 10 year cycle to see how that will affect the outcome.

Everything you input will then carry over into the cashflow section.  This will tell you if a property is a cash flowing investment or you can maneuver the numbers to see what it would take to make the property a cash flowing property/investment.

Your kit comes with a basic calculator with a real estate twist.  The memory section on this calculator can store up to 10 different series of calculations that can be easily recalled by pressing the stored memory slot and view, change or continue on with the calculation.  It also has a convenient acre key that will automatically recall the square footage of an acre.

Let’s not forget the value of money.  Right from the same application you can figure out a payment or what the value of money is in the past or present.  Just input the values that you know and find out the missing value you are looking for.

GIF CHAT

Nobody knows how to pronounce .GIF, but who cares, when you can use GIFs to chat with your friend? GIF Chat is creating a new way to chat.

Join the GIF revolution that brings a new face to ephemeral messaging. GIF is super easy and fun to use.

Send hilarious looping videos like texts. GIF Chat is the first messenger app on Windows Phone that combines animated GIFs with texting. Quickly record videos, add captions and swap them privately with your friends. You determine how many times they can be viewed before they disappear forever. It’s the first app on Windows Phone from Pinger, makers of the #1 free texting and calling app, Textfree.

TEXTING + ANIMATED GIFS = TEXTASY

Live to text? Wish you could easily share videos with your friends? GIF Chat allows you to chat privately with your friends all over the world using a mash-up of animated GIF videos and texting.

PRIVATE VIDEO MESSAGES THAT ARE REALLY PRIVATE

Want to communicate something that you don’t want to post to a social network? Or forwarded to anyone else? GIF Chat allows you to swap private video messages that can only be seen by the receiver. GIF Chat videos can loop forever or disappear when you want them to.

MAKE YOUR GIFS SELF-DESTRUCT

You determine how many times someone can see your GIF video. Set the number of loops and after that… poof, it’s gone!  Not shy about sharing it? You can allow it to loop forever.

BTW, WHAT’S A GIF?

GIFs are 6-second compressed videos that loop over and over. They’re also known as animated GIFs. Not sure how to pronounce it? We say GIF with a soft G, like “jif,” but if you prefer the hard G of “great,” that’s cool, too. They’re hilarious either way.

Motion Math: Hungry Fish

We showed you Motion Math in the last round of holiday season apps. They are back with this classic for kids who love to learn math and play games. If you have a finger you can easily play this game.

Motion Math: Hungry Fish

Feed your fish and play with numbers! Practice mental addition and subtraction with Motion Math: Hungry Fish, a delightful learning game that's fun for children and grownups. Your fish is hungry for numbers. Make delicious sums by pinching two numbers together – instant addition! Keep feeding your fish to win a level and unlock new colors and fins.  

Nintex Mobile

A gorgeous new face to the Collaboration Workspace, Nintex makes it easy for your team to get things done without a version control problem!

Nintex Mobile is now available for Windows Phone.

Nintex Mobile apps help you get more from your business processes by allowing users to interact with them on-the-go. Nintex Mobile apps extend the promise of Workflow for Everyone to your Windows Phone device, improving the user-experience and enabling increased productivity for your whole organization quickly, easily and securely. You built the workflow, you built the form, now make it mobile!

With built-in mapping capability, you can add locations to your SharePoint forms, or add multiple repeating items to your forms, or select a person or a group from your SharePoint user base and bind it to a column in a SharePoint list. This functionality works also when you are not connected to a network, resolving entries against cached values.

Upside

The other day, we were wondering if geolocated discount sorting apps are making a comeback. It's possible, with the rise of the Windows Phone platform and this app, Upside.

The newest entrant in smart shopping with your mobile. Save a ton of money on everyday grocery items or even specialty items.

Like. Save. Share. Love.When you “like” your favorite brands on Facebook, Upside delivers discount offers for those products directly to your phone. Share these offers with your friends to unlock even better deals.Features:• SAVE. You tell us what you want by "liking" products and brands on Facebook. We send you deals for those products and nothing else. It's like coupons, only much, much better.• REDEEM. You scan the digital code right in the store; there's nothing to download or print out.• SHARE. When you see a deal that your Mom would love, you can send it to her -- or anyone else in your social network. All they need is the app.• WIN. Upside is also a game: redeem offers and share them with your friends to score points. Points unlock badges that give you access to deeper discounts and special promotions.

But it is a time of the year when you plan on how you are you going to tackle the new year. For some of you that means more fun. For others, that means more work, or more efficient work.  We have produced a list of some of the Windows 8 apps that have recently been published in the Windows Store. Some of these apps are made by Microsoft BizSpark members. Download them and check them out.

Flight Unlimited: Las Vegas

The leading iPhone & iPad Flight Simulator is now available on Windows.  Flight Unlimited: Las Vegas has great graphics and allows you to not only fly different planes but it also provides a series of missions for a Las Vegas mob boss. The partner is dedicated to creating game updates and will in the future provide street traffic.

 Features

• Enjoy flying over the city of Las Vegas in one of 9 unique aircraft.
• Explore the city or embark on a campaign of missions for the Las Vegas Mob Boss.
• The famous Las Vegas strip includes over 50 hotels that are modeled with photo realism. Fly past the Luxor, buzz the New York New York, or attempt a landing on top of the Bellagio.
• Over 130 sq miles of the city of Las Vegas are modeled in incredible detail.
• This level of detail hasn't been seen in any flight simulator on any platform.
• This is without a doubt, the most graphically advanced flight simulator in the app store. Weeks after flying you'll notice meticulous graphical details for the first time. Tires smoke as the plane hits the ground, aircraft metal deforms in a crash, the Bellagio fountains spring to life, sun glare blinds your view, and more.

FLOQQ

Using your tablet to learn a new language or other skills has never been easier.  FLOQQ is a BizSpark startup and their application provides access to over 4000 courses.

Floqq is a free service that offers the highest number of online video courses in English in order for you to learn whatever you wish, guided by experts in the field. Speak a different language, get a promotion, change your profession, create a company, play a musical instrument, learn a new sport, or impress your friends with an exotic meal:

- Each course is taught by an expert in the field of study

- Learn at your own rhythm, with courses ranging in levels of difficulty

- All the videos are always available on the website and mobile apps

Hotel Guru

Looking for hotel on your tablet? World Winger Travel was featured as a BizSpark Startup of the Day in 2013. They are the same folks who brought you the Cruise alert app we spoke of fondly.

Hotel Guru" is a unique and user friendly app that epitomizes customer satisfaction by providing you the best deals in quality hotels to make your stay pleasant.

Start by entering the travel destination and the travel date. All the available accommodations in and around your destination will be displayed. You also have the ability to modify your search by applying various filters. Trip advisor as well as hotel star rating will guarantee that you get the value for your money.

Hotel Guru is a free app available in the app store here.

iFixit: Repair Manual

Thousands of free how-to guides make it easy to repair your stuff. Fix your own things with step-by-step repair instructions. With step-by-step instructions, you can repair anything! Explore inside thousands of devices—before you take yours apart. Need more detail on a step? Zoom into high resolution images to see all the fine details! Completely free—no in-app purchases. Parts Store: buy parts and tools right in the app!

The most popular repair manual in the world comes to your tablet.  The reviews have been great.

"The robots of the future will see this and murder us all. Thanks iFixit. Thanks a lot."

— Engadget

"Illustrated repair guides that take you step by step through the process."

— Dallas Morning News

iStoryTime

Looking for an application that has narrated children's story books? iStoryTime has been decorated with PTPA Media’s Parent Tested Parent Approved Seal of Approval and the Children's Technology Review's Editor's Choice Award, iStoryTime books have been highlighted in the New York Times, LA Times, CBS Early Show, theiPhoneMom.com, CNET, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and many more.

App includes four FREE full length Read Aloud storybooks - The Giant Smurf, Madagascar, Ice Age and Robin Hood!Reviewers love it: Teachers with Apps, Smart Apps for Kids, The iMums, Kidscreen, AppAble, BSCKids, TUAW and more!

Large library of additional stories to choose from as in-app purchases, with new books being added every week.

In-app purchases only available in the parent’s section. Kids can freely pick and choose from already purchased stories in their library, without being tempted by un-purchased books. We’re parents too and we’re tired of being harassed to make in-app purchases by our kids. Bye-Bye “can we get this pleeeezeee?!”

The iStoryTime library app includes a wide selection of narrated children’s storybooks from your kids favorite films, TV shows and classic stories.  

izik Search

izik (pronounced EYE-zik) Search is a powerful and functional search engine app that is optimized just for tablets. Get your web results in an image-rich layout organized by categories. Stay informed with the latest news, find out what’s hot on Twitter, and watch trending searches.  Izik has been featured in TechCrunch. 

You can download it from the Windows Store here.

Features 

• Search results are organized into categories.
• Swipe horizontally to view more results.
• Swipe vertically to see more categories.
• Quick answer boxes help you find what you need right away.
• Safesearch removes inapproriate search results.

Jamendo

Jamendo is the number one platform for free music in the Windows Store. The Jamendo catalog is published under Creative Commons licenses that allow artists to publish their music and to preserve their rights, while providing users the freedom to download and share it.

The goal of Jamendo is to give all music lovers the best experience possible with free music. The site offers a catalog of more than 400,000 tracks by 30,000 independent artists that anybody can stream, download and share freely and legally. The Windows 8 app brings you the smoothest browsing experience of Jamendo to date: discover our news and artist features, play our Top Charts playlists and sign into your Jamendo account to retrieve all your favorites.

McDroidGame

Looking for a surreal action tower defense game for you tablet? Of course you are! This game includes boss fights as well as resource management. A brand new and original Strategy Action, love child of RTYPE and DUNE2 where Little robot McDROID builds bases to protect its Shuttle while healing its home planet.

Motion Math

Another BizSpark startup wants to educate and help the world with math. We think this is a good thing. Trying to teach your kids fractions? This application makes it easy and fun.

Bounce your way to fractions mastery! For ages 5 and up, Motion Math helps learners estimate four forms of fractions: numerator over denominator (1/2), percents (50%), decimals (.5), and pie charts. Perceiving fractions quickly and accurately is needed for advanced math success.

PROVEN LEARNING IMPACT

In a controlled study, kids who played Motion Math: Fractions! for 20 minutes for 5 days:

• Improved 15% on fractions test scores.

• Improved attitudes and confidence towards fractions an average of 10%.

Dragons Adventure

This is a a great third person adventure game, and it's perfect for the Nokia Lumia devices upon which it exclusively runs. DreamWorks Dragons Quest transforms the family drive into an interactive gaming experience. Inspired by the award-winning 3D animated film ‘How to Train Your Dragon,’ the game transforms actual landmarks along a drive into the fictional Isle of Berk. Roadways, lakes, real-life traffic and weather conditions and even select buildings are mirrored into the game, personalizing it and transforming the drive into an epic adventure.

We will talk with Joni Cobb, CEO and President of PIPELINE, a community of entrepreneurs based in Kansas City. 

We will interview Joni and some of our local BizSpark members and pay tribute to the 75,000+ startups we have helped over the past five years. You won't want to miss it. 

Testbirds s a mobile crowdtesting company.

Why are you building this start up? What does it do?

Our company Testbirds focuses on testing apps for mobile devices, smartphones and web applications. By using the concept of “crowd-testing” Testbirds can supply a large pool of testers, with a myriad of different combinations of devices and operating systems on a short term basis. The crowd finds bugs and offers valuable advice, tips and suggestions for the usability improvement of your software. 

Together with Philipp and Markus (other two co-founders), we considered and evaluated many different business ideas for a long time. However we’ve never tried to put ourselves under the time pressure. For example, we intensively pursued a concept for mobile payment but finally decided against it for various reasons. Around October time in 2011, I came up with the idea of crowd-testing. Time and time again, software projects continue to fail because they are simply “bugged”. Despite every developer claiming that testing is important, very few of them make time for it. Due to this, we had the idea of offering testing as an external service. Finally after several rounds of brainstorming, we could associated this idea with the concept of crowdsourcing, arriving to the idea of crowd-testing.

After a short time it was clear that this idea was promising and feasible, mainly due to the app market being currently one of the fastest growing markets today. The field of web applications is already a very large market with tremendous potential for testing.

For other teams out there, we like to ask advice of founders building technology companies  For example, what does a product marketing team need to understand from engineering about how to sell the products?

For Testbirds, we do not necessary sell products such as apps or software. Instead we focus on being an IT business that provides services to our customers using our own platform. In this case, it is not so much the emphasis of the product marketing team’s understanding, but the sales team. It’s crucial that the sales team work closely with the engineering team, so they understand the kind of things we develop and what we can offer to our clients. As a result, our sales team needs keep up to date with the latest engineering developments and have a good understanding of the IT environment. Similarly, it is also vital that our project management and engineering team have strong communication, to ensure our platform can cater for our customers. As a result, the three teams meet and discuss very regularly, so they know what is and isn’t possible, and how it can be supported. 

 What impact do you hope to make in this market and the business world?

Everything is going mobile at the moment. The challenge is to raise the level of software quality even higher. We intend to be an integral part of this process by enabling companies to use the power of the crowd. With over 50,000 new apps per month in the Apple Store, you need not only a working app but an easy to use function in order to really stand out from the crowd. I believe we can help achieve that now and in the future. I definitely think there is a need out there for this type of service. Our customers already range from start-ups through to agencies as well as many large corporate companies. At Testbirds we believe it’s imperative to listen to our clients in order to make impact, which is why we try to make each project as individual as possible. We only hope to continue to work and provide a flexible service with the different types of businesses out there for the future.

What advice do you have for anyone wanting to start a business in your country?

For our business model, quality plays the big decisive role in our team. Especially in Germany, it’s important for us to hold close customer contact and provide quality in all our customer results. To start a business in Germany, the key is to ensure you provide a product or service that really delivers on what you promise. For our case this is quality assurance. This, combined with flexibility and a strong team community has helped our business take off in Germany. However, we’re also understanding the important success factors in other countries too, especially now that we are expanding and internationalising to the UK and Netherlands.

How do you work with investors, or do you currently use any outside money at all?

When we first started out, we were funded for one year by the EXIST-up grant from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology. Half a year after our launch, we developed a strong relationship with our investors, the WALTER Beteiligungen and Immobilien AG (a medium-sized family business).

During our search for an investor, one of our requirements was to ensure that our start-up business  could have our own operational freedom. This was important when working with our investors in order to gain their trust, but to also develop at the speed we needed to. We work very closely with our investors, where we constantly update them on any progress regarding strategic movement, financial forecasts and changes to our business plans. It is important for us to always have their support and to maintain a close relationship. As a result we work hard to plan regular meetings to ensure strong communication. 

Why would an entrepreneur turn to Microsoft for help in building scale, a team or using software?

For us, Microsoft and the BizSpark program was a great door opener for building the scale of our business and our team. All the software provided by BizSpark program really helped us to get started. Furthermore, we’ve also worked together with Microsoft on regular occasions where we were able to meet influential people in the ecosystem, attend trade shows and test new applications. An entrepreneur turning to Microsoft for help obviously all depends on your business models, but for us Microsoft offered a wide range of opportunities. 

They offer this widget you can put on your site to increase engagement with the brand and also gather collective audience intelligence about the way people think. 

Here's what it looks like. 

This month, BizSpark celebrates its 5^th Anniversary. In five years, more than 85,000 startups have participated in the BizSpark program from 165 different countries around the world. 100,000+ developers have become BizSpark members and we’re partnered with over 1,500 organizations who, like us, are striving to help startups every day.

It has always been our goal to help startups succeed and over the years, BizSpark startups have been involved in big success stories, like Yammer being acquired for $1B and just last week, BizSpark grad, Criteo, raising $250M from their IPO. But, just as meaningful, are the many stories we have highlighted in our Featured BizSpark Startup Series. Through these interviews, we get the chance to hear, first-hand, about the journey of these startups and how they are making their dreams come true. These founders also share valuable advice for other startups. We have recently created The BizSpark Show -- interviews with startup founders and investors from around the world with a focus on BizSpark members who are building the next great companies from the ground up. We are inspired and fascinated by the ideas, tenacity and sheer will startups possess and we invite you to share your own BizSpark story with us: bizspark@microsoft.com.

We hope you will join us in celebrating BizSpark’s five years.  Throughout the month, we will be sharing opportunities to join your local BizSpark team and other startups. Follow us @bizspark and on Facebook so you don’t miss out.  

Another way we'll celebrate this five year milestone is to bring you Twitter Talks: instant, direct conversations you can have with the BizSpark team about topics YOU SELECT. We encourage you to participate! Look for updates on #bizspark. We know our work with startups is never done and we want to always find ways to adapt the BizSpark program to meet the changing needs of Startups.

Many thanks to each and every one of the 85,000 Startups who have joined BizSpark and helped bring us to this five year milestone!

When asked what investment advice Di-Ann would pass along to startup founders, here is her recommendation to founders: start by thinking less about HOW MUCH you’re raising, and spend more time researching and getting recommendations from other entrepreneurs about WHO you’re getting investment from. And don’t just focus on the investment firm. Learn about the INDIVIDUAL investor and, because everyone is great when things are rosy, make sure you know how that person handles things during the DOWN TIMES. Once you’re comfortable with who you’re investing with, then work on the best terms you can get.

Want more great startup advice? Check out this article that covers more of the interview with Di-Ann Eisnor.

Contributed by: Midori Lawler

Midori is the Global Marketing Manager for Microsoft BizSpark. You reach the BizSpark team on @bizspark or @midoril

It's like suddenly there are thousands of planes in the air, but you don't know which plane is going where, or why. And nobody is sitting down at a control tower to make sure the machines are on their way, in the right way.

Enter Crowdnetic, which is a Microsoft-supported startup that hopes to rationalize all of that by being a kind of mission control for the crowdfinancing industry. 

From their website:

Crowdnetic is a leading provider of funding portal platform technology and market data solutions to the private equity and crowdfunded securities industry. We operate the industry’s premier centralized hub for real-time market data aggregated from platforms across the globe.

Founded in 2011 by experienced financial technology and data industry experts, Crowdnetic is committed to creating a productive and sustainable marketplace for web-based private raises. Bringing over 15 years of experience in building complex, data intensive customized solutions, the leadership team has been instrumental in revolutionizing the equities industry through developing market data and analytics solutions. We are now bringing our expertise to the increasingly intricate crowdfunding space.

We sat down with Luan Cox, Founder and CEO of Crowdnetic, to find out her point of view on the industry and technology-enabled financing. 

Why are you building this startup? What does it do?

Crowdnetic has built a real-time data and technology infrastructure for the global crowdfinance industry (including p2p lending and security-based crowdfunding).  Our platform and solutions efficiently connect intermediaries/portals to millions of investors around the globe by providing media portals and financial institutions with real-time, aggregated and normalized online private offerings and transactions data. We provide the much needed market data transparency and deal flow distribution required for this new asset class to thrive.

What does a product marketing team need to understand from engineering about how to sell the product?

A product marketing team needs to understand the various delivery methods for our data feeds solutions in various API formats (XML, JSON, Ruby, and PHP). Additionally, they should understand that we provide hosted data solutions and customizable crowdfunding portal technology (built using Ruby On Rails).

What impact or legacy do you hope to make in the market and in the business world?

By providing this emerging marketplace the much needed market data transparency, our objective is to help ensure integrity in the private markets while striving to bring prosperity back to entrepreneurs and small investors.

What advice do you have for anyone wanting to start a business in your country?

During this remarkable period of history, theU.S.capital markets are undergoing a dramatic transformation where a surge of financial innovation, guided by shifting trends in communications and a changing regulatory landscape, is sweeping across Wall Street and giving rise to a new investing methodology: Crowdfinance. There has never been a more opportune moment for entrepreneurs raise capital from likeminded peers.

How do you work with investors, or do you currently use any outside money at all?

We greatly value our shareholders for they are our biggest cheerleaders. We work for them and constantly strive to earn their trust and confidence.  Although we are a private company, we provide our shareholders with a great deal of transparency and constantly keep the lines of communications open.

Why would an entrepreneur turn to Microsoft for help in building scale, a team, or using software?

Microsoft is a renowned technology leader. It is an honor to have the opportunity to tap into Microsoft’s vast resources including its brain capital.

Watch the video of the Microsoft team's hack here.

It took a team of five Microsoft developers about 24 hours to build AdFree, AdFree allows people to use MapReduce, a programming model for processing large data sets with a parallel, distributed algorithm on a cluster. as an alternative to advertising to make revenue from their websites. It enables site owners to help visitors to power advanced problem-solving processing by leasing out CPU cycles from browsers instead of running annoying ads.

It's probably easier to explain in the video on the TechCrunch site. It's the last video on that post.

The team was composed entirely of Microsoft's technical and developer evangelists from Microsoft's corps of professionals. They included Felix Reiseberg, Helen Zeng, Will Tschumy, Timothy Strimple, Bruno Terkaly, John Alioto, and Steve Seow.

They are headed to the main stage on Wednesday.   

Timothy Strimple (foreground left) explains AdFree while interested developer listens. Helen Zeng (right) and Felix Reiseberg (left) listen in (background)

You can also track them during the presentation and find the outcome by following @bizspark on Twitter and following the hashtag #bizspark.

Timothy Strimple (left) and Bruno Terkaly (right) watch the first users try out the service at about midnight September 8

The Matrix?

If you would like more information about how to work with Microsoft BizSpark to make great hacks, build apps, or start a business, visit Microsoft BizSpark and fill out an application.

Watch the entire video replay of the hackathon below. The team presented as number 229 in a field of 261.

Live streaming video by Ustream