This is a guest posting by the Tech All Stars premier sponsor Microsoft BizSpark. Ruud de Jonge is the Director Technical Audience Evangelism & Startups, Western Europe, Microsoft BizSpark.
Microsoft BizSpark is delighted to announce that it is the premier sponsor for the inaugural Tech All Stars in Europe, organised with the European Commission this month. Why are we doing it? Because we love opportunities like this to help promote some of the amazing work that start-ups within the BizSpark program are doing in the region. And of course, I admit that it’s also a great chance to promote the benefits of BizSpark to start-ups (more on that later).
The Tech All Stars event comes hot on the heels of our own BizSpark European Summit, where we selected the crème de la crème of our 16,000+ start-ups in the region and I’m delighted that some of them will also be taking part at the Tech All Stars ‘RAW’ pitch competition on June 20th. They include France’s Commerce Guys (winner of this year’s BizSpark European Summit, with a very innovative Drupal-meets-cloud solution suite) and Roozz, a Copenhagen-based cloud company that in only 48 hours, converts software to run online in any browser, without users needing to downloading anything.
If our own events are any indication, the judges on June 20th are going to find the selection process pretty tough. Myself and my colleagues talk to start-ups pretty much every day of the year and we continue to be awed by the incredible calibre out there: not just great tech ideas, but ground-breaking and disruptive business models. These start-ups are the hero companies of the future.
So what is BizSpark? I’ll keep it brief. Launched in 2008, the program gives qualifying start-ups free technology (no licence fees and includes access to the Windows Azure cloud platform), support (access to our tech guys, but also business advice, mentoring, useful introductions) and visibility. At the very least, this includes information about a start-up on our website, but also includes invitations to events like these.
We also work closely with partners all over the world to create great offers and opportunities. Tech All Stars is already an important strategic partner for Microsoft in the US, so being the premier sponsor for this exciting new event is a natural evolution of that. And, it shows that both organisations believe that entrepreneurs in Europe not only have a great future, but that we need to pull together to help them have the best possible chance.
Ruud de Jonge
Director Technical Audience Evangelism & Startups, Western Europe, Microsoft
