Microsoft quietly bangs Bing's big bucks drum

Microsoft has created an angel investment fund for startups using its Bing.com search and ads platform.

The Bing Fund is described in a Microsoft job posting for a creative director as “a small team working with start-ups and accelerators to bring a wave of innovation to OSD”. OSD is Microsoft’s Online Services Division.


The creative director job post states that the Bing Fund, first reported here by Mary-Jo Foley, has a portfolio which includes "startups working on the web, desktop, mobile and console".

It appears that funding is not reserved for projects which solely use Microsoft technologies – a program manager job posting here says Microsoft wants engineers with broad experience of HTML, Javascript jQuery, the LAMP stack, AWS, Heroku, Google App Engine in addition to C#, ASP.NET and Windows Azure.

Heading up the Bing Fund is Rahul Sood, a former general manager for Microsoft’s Xbox and founder of PC maker VoodooPC, which was bought by Hewlett Packard in 2006. Sood joined Microsoft in 2011 and became a general manager at Xbox, which is part of Microsoft’s entertainment unit that is also home to Bing. Sood took over Bing Fund in March this year, according to his LinkedIn bio.

Microsoft hasn’t officially announced Bing Fund and everything seems to be in stealth mode. But there have been job postings, a cryptic Twitter feed – since the end of June – and now a website. A recent tweet from Sood suggests that his "new project" will launch in mid-July.

It's not unusual for tech companies to invest in startups to promote their platform or technologies: SAP, Intel and Google all run funds. Microsoft has run a programme called BizSpark under Silicon Valley veteran Dan’l Lewin since October 2008. BizSpark gives startups free access to Microsoft tools, technologies, and services and is open to private companies which are less than three years old and have less than $1m revenue. Microsoft claims more than 30,000 startups have joined the programme so far.

One beneficiary of BizSpark is IssueLive, co-founded by Bing Fund senior programme manager David Raskino.

Bing, along with Microsoft's online services business, are the weakest performing areas of Redmond’s empire. Despite pouring billions into building Bing, the business still earns Microsoft relatively little cash – $700m in the company’s most recent quarter – while it also reported a loss. The outlook is not great either: Microsoft just wrote off $6.2bn on the failed aQuantive acquisition from 2007, saying expectations for the future growth and profitability of OSD are lower than previous estimates.

Microsoft will likely use its annual Worldwide Partner Conference this week to rally both new and existing partners to Bing, asking them to build businesses and services on the platform. It wouldn't be the first time chief exec Steve Ballmer has begged partners to show Bing some love.

Windows Azure Recipe: Software as a Service (SaaS)

The cloud was tailor built for aspiring companies to create innovative internet based applications and solutions. Whether you’re a garage startup with very little capital or a Fortune 1000 company, the ability to quickly setup, deliver, and iterate on new products is key to capturing market and mind share. And if you can capture that share and go viral, having resiliency and infinite scale at your finger tips is great peace of mind.
Drivers

Cost avoidance
Time to market
Scalability

Ingredients

Web Role – this hosts the core web application. Each web role will host an instance of the software and as the user base grows, additional roles can be spun up to meet demand.
Access Control – this service is essential to managing user identity. It’s backed by a full blown implementation of Active Directory and allows the definition and management of users, groups, and roles. A pre-built ASP.NET membership provider is included in the training kit to leverage this capability but it’s also flexible enough to be combined with external Identity providers including Windows LiveID, Google, Yahoo!, and Facebook. The provider model provides extensibility to hook into other industry specific identity providers as well.
Databases – nearly every modern SaaS application is backed by a relational database for its core operational data. If the solution is sold to organizations, there’s a good chance multi-tenancy will be needed. An emerging best practice for SaaS applications is to stand up separate SQL Azure database instances for each tenant’s proprietary data to ensure isolation from other tenants.

Worker Role – this is the best place to handle autonomous background processing such as data aggregation, billing through external services, and other specialized tasks that can be performed asynchronously. Placing these tasks in a worker role frees the web roles to focus completely on user interaction and data input and provides finer grained control over the system’s scalability and throughput.
Caching (optional) – as a web site traffic grows caching can be leveraged to keep frequently used read-only, user specific, and application resource data in a high-speed distributed in-memory for faster response times and ultimately higher scalability without spinning up more web and worker roles. It includes a token based security model that works alongside the Access Control service.

Blobs (optional) – depending on the nature of the software, users may be creating or uploading large volumes of heterogeneous data such as documents or rich media. Blob storage provides a scalable, resilient way to store terabytes of user data. The storage facilities can also integrate with the Access Control service to ensure users’ data is delivered securely.

Training & Examples
These links point to online Windows Azure training labs and examples where you can learn more about the individual ingredients described above. (Note: The entire Windows Azure Training Kit can also be downloaded for offline use.)

Windows Azure (16 labs)
Windows Azure is an internet-scale cloud computing and services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services which can be used individually or together. It gives developers the choice to build web applications; applications running on connected devices, PCs, or servers; or hybrid solutions offering the best of both worlds. New or enhanced applications can be built using existing skills with the Visual Studio development environment and the .NET Framework. With its standards-based and interoperable approach, the services platform supports multiple internet protocols, including HTTP, REST, SOAP, and plain XML

SQL Azure (7 labs)
Microsoft SQL Azure delivers on the Microsoft Data Platform vision of extending the SQL Server capabilities to the cloud as web-based services, enabling you to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data.

Windows Azure Services (9 labs)
As applications collaborate across organizational boundaries, ensuring secure transactions across disparate security domains is crucial but difficult to implement. Windows Azure Services provides hosted authentication and access control using powerful, secure, standards-based infrastructure.

Developing Applications for the Cloud, 2nd Edition (eBook)
This book demonstrates how you can create from scratch a multi-tenant, Software as a Service (SaaS) application to run in the cloud using the latest versions of the Windows Azure Platform and tools. The book is intended for any architect, developer, or information technology (IT) professional who designs, builds, or operates applications and services that run on or interact with the cloud.

Fabrikam Shipping (SaaS reference application)
This is a full end to end sample scenario which demonstrates how to use the Windows Azure platform for exposing an application as a service. We developed this demo just as you would: we had an existing on-premises sample, Fabrikam Shipping, and we wanted to see what it would take to transform it in a full subscription based solution. The demo you find here is the result of that investigation

Windows Azure CTP January 2009 Released

At the 2008 Professional Developer Conference, Microsoft unveiled its cloud operating system, Windows Azure. Azure is the operating system that acts as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. This platform aids developers in publishing services and applications on the internet. Microsoft has released the latest CTP for Azure.

This latest Community Technology Preview updates the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure tools for Visual Studio. The CTP brings several improvements:

The Windows Azure SDK offers improved support for the integration of development storage with Visual Studio, including enhanced performance.

For each Windows Azure SDK sample that accesses the development storage Table Storage service, a database name is now defined within the associated Visual Studio project. When the sample service is started from Visual Studio, the named database is created and the development storage Table Storage service is configured to use this database for the running service.

The StorageClient sample includes the following improvements.

The ASP.Net Providers sample now supports a search syntax similar to the ASP.Net SQL-based providers.

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Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Microsoft has recentky launced the development tool support for Windows Cloud Computing - Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio extend Visual Studio to enable the creation, building, debugging, running and packaging of scalable services on Windows Azure.

Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio includes:

*C# and VB Project templates for building Cloud Services
*Integration with the Development Fabric and Development Storage services
*Debugging Cloud Service Roles running in the Development Fabric
*Building and packaging of Cloud Service Packages
*Browsing to the Azure Services Developer Portal
*Role configuration
*SSL Certificate selection

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Run ASP.NET MVC on Windows Azure

If you’ve purposefully been ignoring the announcements out of PDC, I don’t blame you one bit. Everybody knew it would be the unveiling of Microsoft’s “cloud computing” initiative, and just about the only thing we didn’t know was the official name of it: Windows Azure. And of course I pronounce it wrong every time (I say “ah-jour”, as in “soup-de-jour”). It’s hard to call it “initiative” when they’re the 3rd one to bring a product to the table. ;)

One thing I was looking forward to was hearing about the ASP.NET MVC story on Azure. So color me surprised when I found out there wasn’t one. Since ASP.NET MVC is bin-deployable it shouldn’t be impossible, and doing some quick searches didn’t retrieve any results showing anybody else having tried this. Of course later I discovered that Phil and Eilon had whipped up a sample app that ran ASP.NET MVC on Azure, but was pleased to find out that the downloadable sample app didn’t work. In fact, it seemed to just be MVC stuff slapped into a WebRole project. (I’m guessing something got “lost in translation” since it wasn’t Phil or Eilon that posted the code.)

Anyway, here’s how you can get ASP.NET MVC up and running on Azure. I’ve created a Visual Studio template for this to make it easy to set up - download it here. To avoid distributing code that isn’t my own (i.e. Windows Azure SDK Samples) there are a few steps you’ll have to take. I’m presuming that you’ve already installed the Windows Azure SDK and the Azure Visual Studio tools.

One thing that running a web application “in the cloud” means is that you can instantly scale higher by adding more “instances”. This means the leaky-as-a-sieve abstraction of “session state” isn’t immediately available (finally!) since any given HTTP request could be going to a different server. The default session state provider for ASP.NET is an in-memory provider. This assumes that every request comes to the same physical machine. Session state providers have varied in their reliability and handling of scalability, but the other built-in providers include an out-of-proc provider (still same machine, but more resilient to IIS going up and down) and a SQL Server provider. None of these are enabled on the Azure platform, for good reason.

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