National Entrepreneur Week Blog Post

National Entrepreneur Week Blog Post:
For those of you who are unaware this week is National Entrepreneur Week, and given that we have spent some time over the past couple months shining focus on young entrepreneurs I wanted to take the time to acknowledge the importance of entrepreneurs.
I’ve said before and I’ll say it again, small businesses, and the entrepreneurs who start them, are often referred to as the back bone of the United States and a key driver of our economic growth. Microsoft may be a big company today, but has deep entrepreneurial roots as a company. We understand starting from the bottom up and that’s why we want to do everything that we can to build new technology like Windows 8 Pro that can help advance entrepreneurial dreams and allows companies to stay competitive.
One of things that we’ve been doing over the past couple years is partnering with bloggers to host Windows Young Entrepreneur contests, where entrants are asked to submit a video highlighting their big entrepreneurial idea and why a new PC loaded with Windows would help them. This year we partnered with DrivenForward.com and I wanted to take a moment to highlight the four winners.
Grand Prize Winner: Christopher Lane, CEO of Procity
“[Procity] is a donation network exclusive to campuses, which gives users a unique value for items that are donated. The network encourages the reuse of items in a civil environment and is the first network to benefit campus, community, and charity. The Samsung Series 900x has brought me great joy, tremendous ease, and popularity. Every time I take the laptop out of the case people around me are amazed at how thin and sleek it is. We are in the stage of promoting/marketing and gaining a user base. We are using the laptop to house the graphic design and Photoshop programs (due to the beautiful resolution).” – Christopher Lane
First Place Winner: Geoffrey Wang, Synopsis Business Networking
Geoffrey is working on turning his ideas and dreams into a reality by further developing his software program called Synopsis Business Networking, which is a cloud-based supply chain integration and collaboration software focused on supplying small to midsize enterprises with software that has the ability to manage inventories and supply chains at an affordable cost. We hope that his new Dell XPS 13 will help him get his business off the ground!
Second Place Winner: Christopher DeVore, Father Nature Outdoors
“My business idea is a company called Father Nature Outdoors and it is based around a product: an integrated sleeping bag. It incorporates a self inflating sleeping pad into the base of a sleeping bag. Our goal as a company is to sell this product online and in independent retail stores. The main concept of my business model is the ability to work remotely and have access to my customers, suppliers, and my partners from anywhere. [The Toshiba Portege Z830] is quick and functional, and allows me to do just that.” – Christopher DeVore
Third Place Winner: Rasan Murtza, Learn Cuisine
“My company idea is Learn Cuisine, which helps restaurants train their new employees without wasting time and money. [The HP Folio 13] will help me because I can use it to create the app!” – Rasan Murtza
Huge congratulations to all of the winners of the Windows Young Entrepreneur Contest with DrivenForward.com and thank you to all of you who submitted videos. To see all the entrants and watch the winning videos please visit DrivenForward.com. Keep the ideas flowing.

DIGITAL JUICE