Microsoft Opens R&D to Small Companies and Entrepreneurs

At a gathering of venture capitalists today, Microsoft Corp. announced Microsoft Intellectual Property (IP) Ventures, a new program aimed at entrepreneurs and small businesses that will speed the movement of innovative technology into the global market.

Microsoft IP Ventures opens up hundreds of internally developed technologies to entrepreneurs and new businesses by licensing and spinning out Microsoft's innovations to facilitate new product and business development.

"Our research labs and efforts across the company have created a large portfolio of innovative technologies that extend the reach of personal computing today, with much of it going into Microsoft® products," said Rick Rashid, senior vice president of Microsoft Research.

Microsoft IP Ventures opens access to a broad range of technology areas. Currently, entrepreneurs can choose from 20 technologies developed by Microsoft researchers and developers.

As the program expands, so will the number and variety of technologies available for license. A sampling of the technology areas now available is listed below.

IP Ventures was developed in consultation with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Microsoft offers a licensing model that can include royalty payments and equity, and is flexible enough for entrepreneurs raising capital.

One example of the many innovations available for licensing through IP Ventures is a technology for mobile video communication code-named "Microsoft Portrait."

Another project, code-named "Wallop," is an online community technology available for licensing. In addition to standard tools for interaction such as buddy lists, "Wallop" creates inferred social networks, which automatically identify whom a user interacts with, not just contacts the user has explicitly added.

A third representative technology available through IP Ventures, code-named "LaunchTile,"enhances navigation on mobile devices by allowing users to browse information, documents and applications easily single handed.

Unique to the design of "LaunchTile," each application has a dynamic launch tile in the place of a static launch icon, facilitating at-a-glance information retrieval for several applications simultaneously as well as on-demand application launch when users want more detailed information.
Microsoft is receiving positive reactions from venture capitalists worldwide on the technologies and the licensing approach.

"We're encouraged that Microsoft is making its large IP portfolio available to launch new companies and strengthen existing startups here in Europe," said Nick Kingsbury, global sector head of software at 3i plc.

"With its strong focus on R&D, Microsoft has always offered a good deal of technical innovation," said Bill Wiberg, partner at Advanced Technology Ventures.

In April, Microsoft announced that Pacific Northwest-based technology company Inrix Inc. received an exclusive license for a predictive, real-time traffic technology from Microsoft Research that enables Inrix to provide relevant, up-to-the-minute traffic information.