Face Time with the Blue Monster (In Canada)

Those wild and crazy kids at Microsoft Canada have put together an award/contest called Blue Sky -ISV Innovation Awards.

What is the Blue Sky Award?

"The Blue Sky Award represents an exceptional opportunity for you to showcase your great idea. If you think your application is the next big thing, and have the business plan to prove it, this is your chance to demonstrate your solution to a panel of Microsoft and other industry experts."

You've got until May 15th to get your proposal in so click here and get cracking.

So you're probably thinking to yourself, "Self, this is really cool. I can take my cool Java widget creation business that is riding on Red Hat with the coolest Firefox plug-in ever, pitch this, and get a trophy with love from Microsoft."

Not exactly.

This is a bit focused on Microsoft technology where you apply to the program with a Windows Live ID and you have to use Internet Explorer to even register.

 

Lots of people are going to be snarky about this but, leaving the anti-Microsoft rhetoric aside, efforts like these are important for the eco-system of developers out there that code up add-ons, like Xobni, or other big time applications.  Some free PR from Microsoft isn't a bad thing when you are working hard inside the eco-system.

Okay, now go sign up.

 

Technorati Tags: Blue Monster,Microsoft,Start-up

Comments

[BPAndrew]

I had a poor experience with one of Microsoft's last ISV programming competitions. However this one is at least being run by Microsoft itself and not some marketing company.

It was called the Code Master Challenge - an attempt to drum up some cool apps for Vista before it launched.

Here was my entry - http://www.istartedsomething.com/20060802/dradis/ I even got some buzz from someone on the Vista team - http://windowsvistablog.com/blogs/windowsvista/archive/2006/08/07/445403.aspx

Sadly, when the competition came to a close, there were no offical annoucements - the winners were not officialy disclosed and the www.codemasterchallenge.com domain was dropped soon after.

Just be weary I guess - I got what I wanted out of it but I wouldn't rely on it for PR.

[Mark Relph]

"BPAndrew" - I wanted to take a second to respond to your feedback. I know the Code Master Challenge, but it was run by Redmond not Microsoft Canada. I would like to appologize on behalf of Microsoft for your experience.

Now, we do things a bit differently here in Canada. So, in the spirit of full disclosure - here is the timeline from the Blue Sky Award. I hope this helps you understand how we are trying to ensure what you described in the other contest doesn't happen with our award: (Note, these dates are from our internal plans so they could shift by a day or so)

- Each entry receives a Thank you for your submission to the Blue Sky Award
- There are ongoing communications to those entries that are incomplete, encouraging them complete by May 15th
- Personal email response from me to all Blue Sky alias enquiries
- May 16th – email to all those submissions that were incomplete indicating that they are not eligible for the award
- May 16th – an email to all completed submissions that their submission will be judged
- Week of May 19th – email to all submissions not chosen as one of three finalists
- Week of May 19th – phone and email to the three finalists
- Week of May 26th – announcing the three finalists. Post on Blue Sky web site, blogs
- June 5th – announce Blue Sky Winner. Posts on the Blue Sky Web site, blogs and Press Release

Thanks.

Mark Relph
VP - Developer & Platform Group
Microsoft Canada Co.

[BPAndrew]

Mark,

Thanks for the open reply but I realize now didn't clearly make my point in my first comment.

It's the competition aspect of this venture mixed in with the vague incentive model that I take issue with. If you look at the competitions run by MS in the past few years (CodeMaster, Express Challenge, Invasion of the Robots, The MS Money / Business Idea Competition, The Amazon Web-services / Visual Studio 2005 Competition) where are they now? and what results have they yielded your organization as well the competitors - winners and the others? How do I know this isn't more of the same? Is there another way to get the results the competitors and Microsoft both want? I don't know the answer but let's take a step back and look at what Google and Apple are doing in the mobile space (iPhone and Google Android). They both offer free SDKs and development tools. Apple has created an 100 Million dollar iPhone development fund to spur innovation. The Google Android competition promises to hand out $10 Million dollars to the top 50 developers, not a small handfull.

I hate to be negative but you need to take it up a notch. Microsoft has deep pockets, a huge PR problem with Vista and some pretty hot/open/free competition right now. You should be at least matching Google and Apples ventures if you want to get young developers excited and take some risks - or at least not lose them to those competing platforms.

Andrew