New Bizspark program offers free Microsoft software to startups

If you are a new (less than three years old) startup or entrepreneur developing a software product there is a new program available from Microsoft you should know about. The program, called Bizspark, is designed to accelerate the success of early stage Startups by providing fast and easy access to current full-featured Microsoft development tools and productions licenses of server products, with no upfront costs and minimal requirements.  

If you join the Bizspark program you will be provided with a MSDN Premiere license which gives you access to all of Microsoft development products including Visual Studio 2008 Team edition and production licenses for Windows Server 2003/2008, SQL Server 2005, Sharepoint Portal Server, and Biztalk server. 

 

In order to be accepted into the Bizspark program you must be sponsored by a Microsoft Network Partner.  Last week I applied and was approved on behalf of my department at Georgia Tech to be a network partner for companies located in Georgia.  So if you are interested in participating in Bizspark send me an email or leave a comment (make sure you provide an email so I can contact you). 

Google Docs Rock

I've always been something of a power user of Microsoft Office ever since the release of version 1.0 back in 1993. But more and more nowadays I find myself creating google docs instead. I find the convenience and simple design along with the ease of sharing a document  with anybody either in private or public mode just too compelling to resist. The biggest complaint I hear about google docs (especially from Microsoft folks) is they lack the rich feature sets and sophistication of Office documents, which is very true. My take on that argument is that like most people I rarely use the more sophisticated features found in Excel or Word or Powerpoint.  In fact studies have shown the majority of people use Excel to create lists of "things" which they can then sort and/or add up. And I don't know about you but I'm completely turned off whenever I see a powerpoint presentation designed to overwhelm with attempts to impress by overdosing on all the advanced features.  I read somewhere that "Simple is the new sophisticated" and google docs certainly fit this description. But the real power of google docs lies in the ability to easily share them with others. You can invite others to work on a document with you...even have multiple people updating the same document simultaneously (each persons updates appear in a different color). Documents can be shared privately so login is required to view...or publicly with a URL that opens the document for anybody without a requirement to log in. 

The biggest advantage of docs for me is being able to access them from any computer. I'm so tired of being tied to one particular computer just because Outlook is installed on it or having to physically move office documents from one computer to another via email or flash drive whenever I know I'm going to need them someplace else. This is probably the main reason I'm loving google docs so much now. 

So basically with docs you can create spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and forms that are used to collect data into spreadsheets. You can also organize docs into folders. 

A major concern of some is being able to access docs while offline. For me this isn't an issue as I am never off line unless my internet connection is down...which has become so rare for me I can't even recall the last time it happened. But some people might want to access a presentation at a meeting without a connection or maybe update a document while on a plane. 

Google answered this issue with Gears, a technology that installs onto your local computer and allows access to docs while you are disconnected from the Internet. 

One more major feature I want to mention before I close is that docs can read and save as MS office documents. You can upload a Word document for example and it converts to a google document. You can also save a google document as a Word document or as a pdf. 

Did I mention that Google docs are completely free? And you get several gig of free storage in which to store them? 

Check out docs for yourself at http://docs.google.com

  

Emerging Tech Hype Cycle for 2008

I was just reading about 2008 emerging technology hype cycle published by Gartner. According to Gartner new technologies progress through five distinct stages (1) Technology trigger, (2) peak of inflated expectations, (3) trough of disillusionment, (4) slope of enlightenment, and (5) plateau of productivity. And each technology moves through these stages at it's own pace. Some on a 2-5 year cycle for example while others are on a much longer cycle of 5-10 years. I just located the 2006 curve here and I'm searching for as many as I can find. Since I began my career in technology back in 1980 I've been well aware of this curve. But this is the first time I've seen it published and documented. I can't think of a single new technology over the past 28 years that hasn't gone through these stages...except for the ones that flopped or became obsolete before reaching stage 5. In my early years I would be so disapointed whenever an exciting new technology like artifical intelliegnce for example would enter stage (3) trough of disillusionment. But after a while I realized this stage is inevidable after so much hype is piled on by industry media and consultants who are trying to capitalize on the initial excitement in order to rake in the big bucks while business leaders struggle to understand and are afraid of being left behind. As these same business leaders begin to realize the technology can't possibly deliver the sky high results that were promised...they start a backlash against the technology that always appears very negative. Articles appear with quotes from prominent corporate leaders telling war stories of how the technology failed to deliver. Over time the story fades and all of the get rich quick consultants and vendors move on to the next new over hyped technology. Meanwhile the people who are left are the ones who believed in the technology all along recognizing it's potential and understanding it's limitations. They began to advance it's capabilities and utilize it to solve problems and thus begin the long slow climb back up out of the trough to real value on the plateau of productivity where most decent technologies eventually end up.   

Amazon Web Services keeps on growing with Elastic Block Storage

Amazon just released a major enhancement to their EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) platform with the addition of Elastic Block Storage which provides a persistent storage volume (think virtual hard drives) for use with Amazon EC2 instances. Previously one big downside to using AWS/EC2 for application hosting was lack of permanent dynamic storage capable of hosting a mysql database for example. So if your app needed a backend database you had to host that database someplace else (outside the Amazon cloud). And because they’re virtual you can clone them, snapshot them and benefit from automatic replication.

Eric Hammond has already written an article giving step-by-step on how to setup a mysql database on EBS.

New web 2.0 site helps match Inventors with Retailers

"Anything that won't sell, I don't want to invent. Its sale is proof of utility, and utility is success." ...Thomas Edison

Edison Nation is a new website designed to match inventors with major retailers. Based on the PBS television series Everyday Edisons the new site packed with web 2.0 features is geared to helping inventors take a product from idea to store shelves.

Companies like Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond have signed up to evaluate submissions

If a retailer selects an idea, the inventor will receive $2500 up front and annual payments based on success of commercialization.

This is particularly relevant to inventors who are located in Georgia, which according to a recent study by researchers at Georgia Tech, the state currently has no organization or entity that focuses on the needs of independent inventors. Based on the top needs of Georgia inventors as identified in the study, Edison Nation is a much needed resource for Georgia's community of inventors.

Edison Nation is free to join but the paid membership of $9.95 a month provides extra benefits including being able to search the database for ideas that have already been submitted. It also costs $25 to submit each idea.

New Google Search Analysis Service

Google just released a new service called Google Insights for Search. Similar to its popular Google Trends this new service is geared towards advertisers. It's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world. Using this service you can track how much a term has been googled over time, show where it's most popular on a map, and even see the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are. And you can filter results by geographic region or time frame. If you are into meme tracking or analysis then Insights for Search is the perfect tool for you to use.

.NET University comes to Atlanta

Today I had the opportunity to attend .NET University at the Microsoft offices in Alpharetta. .NET U is a free one day class on new and emerging Microsoft technologies like Biztalk, .NET 3.0, and Sharepoint. The class I attended today was on ASP.NET. I continue to be amazed at the quality of training available free of charge from Microsoft. The two instructors for today's class were both top of their field who you will see presenting in events that cost hundreds of dollars. Microsoft also provided a nice lunch free of charge. The concept of .NET University is to provide all the course materials, handouts, labs, and powerpoint and to encourage it's reuse by anybody willing to take th e time to present. So it's a great resource for internal training or user groups. I look forward to future offerings of .NET U in Atlanta.