Hot Topics in small business: Pioneers Festival, History of Windows Phone & a 17 year old App developer

Pioneers festival

Everybody loves a festival don’t they?

Whether you are partying hard, or, indeed, meeting new people, they are of real benefit. The Pioneers Festival was an initiative by STARTeurope to bring together entrepreneurs, investors and business angels to one place to discuss business and future trends.

Sounds like a mad one.

STARTeurope was founded in 2009 and has its headquarters in Vienna. Starting out as a group of driven, entrepreneurial-minded people with tech and business backgrounds who share a common practice, STARTeurope wanted to be the driving force for a better social climate.

Not only do they highlight the importance of courage and spirit of entrepreneurs, they want to offer a path to harness its powers.

Sounds incredibly interesting, and if anybody can make one of these festivals, it’s definitely worth its weight in gold. Everyone who attended seemed to have had a good time.

Microsoft Mobile: From Pocket PC to Windows Phone 8

Following Microsoft’s new launch of Windows Phone 8, our friends at Mashable decided to showcase Microsoft’s era of mobile technology.

It’s fair to say, that technology has moved on considerably: from the Pocket PC, the grandfather of Microsoft’s UI to its current form of Windows Phone 8. The Pocket PC appeared in 2000 before the initial launch of Windows Phone 7.

However, before there was Windows Phone 7, there was Windows Mobile. Remember that?

Microsoft first used the name for an OS in 2003. It initially powered Pocket PC devices, but eventually expanded to other brands. The final version, Windows Mobile 6.5, appeared in September 2009.

The first devices running the Windows Phone 7 OS — HTC Surround and Samsung Focus — hit the market in November 2010 before Nokia and others released devices running Windows Phone 7.

With the codename “Mango,” this was the most sizable update to the Windows Phone 7 OS. Microsoft announced the update in May 2011 and began rolling it out later that year, in September. It brought “hundreds of new and improved features” to the OS.

Are you planning on getting a device that runs Windows Phone 8? Tell us what you love about Microsoft’s OS in the comments below.

 

App developers

A teenage entrepreneur has launched a new app that summarises news articles into 400-character paragraphs, and has secured a $1m investment and gained the backing of celebrities like Stephen Fry and Yoko Ono. Lucky git!

Nick D’Aloisio said he wanted to "dramatically improve the mobile news reading experience" with his free Summly app.

This unbelievable story of a 17 year old shooting to fame should act as an inspiration to help others in similar field. This instantly reminded this blog of this catchy
YouTube video below. Enjoy!

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE]

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