Sponsor: Thanks to Microsoft BizSpark, a Microsoft program for startups, for supporting Silicon Prairie News. The program will be providing posts each month throughout 2013.
About the author: Taylor Cowan is a Microsoft liaison to startups in the central U.S. region.
If you visit Silicon Prairie News often you may have seen a banner for BizSpark. As I engage startup communities across the central U.S. I’m often asked to help founders maximize their BizSpark membership, or to explain what it’s for and how it’s relevant to software startups. That led me to a 25 day series of posts during December that details specific aspects of BizSpark and practical ways to leverage each benefit. If you are curious about what BizSpark is all about, or an existing BizSpark and want to know if there are aspects you may have missed, please browse the series titles.
Founders and business thinkers often miss some of the ways BizSpark is particularly relevant to helping them run a business. Three of the posts that stood out in this respect were “Day 1: Access free training on pluralsight,” “Day 5: BizSpark positions your company to access even more benefits,” and “Day 13: BizSpark can help you get the word out about your business.”
Thanks to our sponsor
A clear differentiator between the startup and corporate environment is that each member of a startup team is, more often than not, required to perform many roles. A developer may play the role of QA, sysadmin, and even salesperson. A business person may find themselves doing QA. Pluralsight has a plethora of high-quality online training courses that help startup teams learn new technology skills quickly. If you’re the founder and want to help your team, let them know that they can get free training via Bizspark’s Pluralsight offer.
Day 5’s post talks about how BizSpark is part of a larger set of programs Microsoft offers to startups. BizSpark Plus and BizSpark One have more to offer BizSpark companies leveraging Microsoft’s marketplaces and platforms. BizSpark can also help you get the word out about your company through social media and feature stories on the BizSpark team blog.
Another group of people I interact with assume there’s nothing in BizSpark for them because they aren’t .Net developers. Here are 3 of the 25 posts that are specifically relevant to developers who are not .Net focused:
- “Day 7: Build mobile services for iOS apps and run them free for three years“
- “Day 9: Learn, Deploy, and Scale Node.js“
- “Day 2: Run your blog, a wiki, and a marketing site“
Windows Azure has a new feature in early access that makes it easy to build services for your mobile applications. It’ll even generate the Objective C client code necessary to access these services. Day 7 shows how you can use Azure Mobile services to back a mobile app, and do so for free for your full three-year BizSpark membership term.
If you are a server side developer hopefully you’ve caught wind of the cool new Node.js platform gaining popularity. Node.js is particularly suitable for HTML5 apps that leverage web sockets. My post on Day 9 shows you how to leverage BizSpark in learning Node.js as well as having a place to deploy it.
If your startup reaches out to developers, you need a website to host a wiki for developer documentation. You also need a blog platform to keep customers informed and in touch with your product. Day 2’s post shows you how to use your BizSpark Azure benefit to run a wordpress blog or media wiki site.
BizSpark isn’t just a benefit or program, it’s also a community of about 45,000 members-strong worldwide. If you are a founder or team member of an early stage startup (less than 5 years old) and haven’t done so already, join BizSpark. Then join the conversion at facebook.com/bizspark or twitter.com/bizspark , or reach out to me directly (Twitter: @tcowan).
This blog post has been authored by our sponsor, Microsoft BizSpark.
About the author: Taylor Cowan is a Microsoft liaison to startups in the central U.S. region. With a love for community engagement and software architecture, Taylor helps startups leverage cloud computing, application marketplaces, and BizSpark. When he’s not helping start-ups, you might see him speaking at international conferences like Øredev or Jazoon in Switzerland or U.S. conferences like the Big Design Conference or SXSW in Texas.
About our sponsor: BizSpark is Microsoft’s startup-specific program designed to get software and server products directly in the hands of people building technology companies. Joining the BizSpark program also gets you access to professional technical and business support as well as the option for visibility of your products into new markets; best of all it’s available for no fees.
