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Today DreamIt Ventures and Microsoft announced that they are partnering to spur innovation with startups through the Microsoft BizSpark program.
As part of the partnership, startups in the DreamIt programs receive access to software, support and visibility within the BizSpark community – along with technical and other resources, startups have the ability to connect to incubators, investors, advisors and mentors.
In addition to BizSpark program benefits, DreamIt will also select one company from each of its programs to receive additional benefits: known as a ‘BizSpark Fellow’ these startups receive access to Microsoft expert engineers and evangelists to help build out their products and solve technical challenges. Through BizSpark Plus, qualifying startups can also access up to $60,000 in Windows Azure services over two years.
Today both DreamIt and Microsoft are pleased to announce the first of these ‘BizSpark Fellows’ is FlagTap.
Part of the DreamIt Philadelphia Fall 2012 program, FlagTap is building a platform to help websites increase traffic and increase user engagement via the world’s largest game of capture the flag.
“FlagTap is an excellent example of the type of business that the BizSpark program is designed to assist. The FlagTap product is data intensive and reaches across the web,” said Carlos McKinley, Senior Director, Microsoft.
Aaron Dinin, co-founder of FlagTap, says: “We are proud to be selected as a ‘BizSpark Fellow.’ We’ve found Microsoft’s Azure platform to be a well-built, reliable, and powerful tool for running our business. By partnering with Microsoft BizSpark, we can benefit from and contribute to Bing’s data strategies in ways that can help both FlagTap and Microsoft better understand how users engage with websites.”
The next Microsoft BizSpark Fellow will be selected as part of the DreamIt Austin program. The deadline for application for DreamIt Austin was October 26th.
Click here to learn more.
Read the Microsoft BizSpark blog post here.
