By Betsy Aoki (Senior Program/Product Manager, Bing)
Bing is honored to sponsor the Women 2.0 PITCH competition and conference for female entrepreneurs as part of its Bing Booster program for startups this year. We have seen the shortage and lack of visibility for female startup entrepreneurs in the tech world and we’d like to give them a boost -– in this case, by sponsoring the first 100 applicants to the Women 2.0 PITCH Startup Competition!
The Bing Booster for Startups program takes on three cities with strong or emerging startup ecosystems -– San Francisco, Boston, New York –- and makes resource kits, additional promotion, and business/technical mentoring available to startups in those cities. For more information on this program, and advice shared by fellow startups, click here.
We are doing this startup program for several reasons:
- We believe we should encourage technology innovation especially in spaces that can move search forward
- We want to better stay in touch with what is happening in new technologies
- Being more engaged with startups give us early opportunities to forge partnerships to improve Bing
- If folks ask, we can help people who want to learn more about the Bing API, our awesome maps SDK and developing with the Bing API
- It’s fun!
We hope this sponsorship of PITCH applicants removes some barriers for good startups with females in the founding team and we look forward to seeing you at PITCH 2012!
Editor’s note: Got a question for our guest blogger? Leave a message in the comments below.
About the guest blogger: Betsy Aoki is profiled in Fast Company, Mary Jo Foley of CNET called her a “Microsoft Woman to Watch” for launching Microsoft’s corporate blogging platforms, the Live QnA consumer question-and-answer site, and the Xbox Live Indie Games platform. Lured to marketing for Bing, she devised social media strategies and launched REDU, a Webby-winning campaign site for education reform. Her current Bing projects include community outreach to startups. Follow her on Twitter at @baoki.
