Friday, June 20, 2008

New Microsoft software incubation program offers developers inside access

By Christopher Calnan

Caffeine and computer code flowed freely at Microsoft Corp. in Waltham last week during a first-of-its-kind crash course for enterprising software developers.

The software giant selected the Bay State location to launch its inaugural “Incubation Week” — an event conducted for teams with startup ideas that are given all the development software they need, Microsoft engineers to teach them how to use those tools, and the chance to pitch their plans to early-stage investors.

The program, held at the Microsoft Technology Center in Waltham, also included business advice from angel investors and an academic.

Microsoft plans to host another Incubation Week in Mountain View, Calif., later this month, but it’s too early to tell how often and where the company would host subsequent events. Microsoft is, however, considering another Boston-area Innovation Week within six months, depending on the tech community’s reaction, said Larry Gregory, the organizer of the new program and senior director of Microsoft’s U.S. independent software vendor evangelism team.
All three teams relied heavily on Microsoft’s Silverlight, a cross-browser software for incorporating rich Internet applications on their websites.

A team of students from Boston University and Wentworth Institute of Technology, which had previously used just Adobe Systems Inc. Flash and HTML, spent the first two days of the week learning the uses of Silverlight, Visual Studio, Expression Blend and other applications, said Jason De Lorme, a Microsoft ISV architect evangelist.

Among the entrepreneurs were recent Harvard University graduate Derek Horton and business partner Alexander Blank, a Harvard junior. The two spent the week designing and writing the code for their website Votika.com, a list-making website that Horton conceived of nine months ago. The idea is for users to vote and rate items like the fastest type of car or the best pizzeria. The application then slices the data to find what type of user voted which way.

During Incubation Week, Horton and Blank worked 16 hours to 20 hours a day learning how to use Silverlight to create a website with more features than the two initially had planned. Being devoted for a whole week to the project, while Microsoft gave them access to everything they needed from software to sushi, was a drastic change for Horton. “We don’t have the experience and never have the time to spend on the idea,” Blank said.

Microsoft declined to pin a dollar value on the program, but said its engineers who served as mentors for the entrepreneurs generally work with enterprise clients or commercial software vendors with annual revenue of $15 million or more. And all three teams won free access to development tools for a year, according to Gregory.

While Horton and Blank worked maniacally on their project, the climate was calmer a couple of doors down the hall as a three-person team from Wellesley-based Traverse Corp. developed its enterprise-level social networking application. The 2-year-old Traverse’s software was designed to enable customers to share recommendations within a business on whom they should seek for problem solving. The company had already attracted paying customers such as Honeywell International Inc., Pfizer Inc. and Fidelity Investments, but cofounder Jim Caruso said it was time for Traverse to expand beyond the corporate firewall and enable users to incorporate the Traverse tool with consumer social applications like Facebook. The Incubation Week program, along with its suggestions, could improve the company’s product and broaden its potential audience, Caruso said.

Pitching the plans

Microsoft selected Waltham for its first Incubation Week because of the density of local entrepreneurs, according to Microsoft’s Gregory.

“Boston was a natural first choice to engage this,” Gregory said. “This is our way of kicking off our renewed interest in enabling students and startup entrepreneurs.”

After four days of training and development, the three teams (eight entrepreneurs total) presented their plans to a panel of three angel investors — eCoast Angels Network, Launchpad Venture Group and Common Angels — and Kenneth Zolot, a senior lecturer in entrepreneurship at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. The program demonstrated to the participants that an ecosystem of innovation exists for them to tap into, Zolot said. “It’s a good way to show the students they have access to mentors and possible future collaborators,” he said.

For Microsoft’s part, the program is a good way to fight the perception that Microsoft is not open to interoperability, he said.

Traverse’s Caruso said he hoped to get two things out of the final day’s presentation: Angel investment and validation that Traverse’s product and business plan are solid.

The BU/Wentworth team, meanwhile, developed Dooit.com to aggregate calendars with users of Facebook to arrange meetings at events. Team member Andrew Sarratori, a BU junior studying computer science, plans to commercialize the website.

“You’ve got to give it a try,” he said. “Look at what they did with Facebook.”