Microsoft chief exec Steve Ballmer's in London today to announce a new startup fund from the company called Microsoft Startup Accelerator Programme in the UK (their initiatives seem as cunningly named as their products).
I'm not at the event, but the idea is apparently to encourage startups and help them to use Microsoft technologies such as Silverlight and Live Services. There are half a dozen participants to start with, most interestingly ViaPost (send documents securely online instead of posting them) and Miomi (which offers "a new way of organising and viewing the Internet on the basis of time"). Let's see what they manage to do with the money and help.
On another note, this is just another one of a large number of seed investments, finance rounds and acquisitions we're hearing about at the moment - and the line between bubble and boom seems to be getting increasingly fine. It feels to me like we're one massive deal - perhaps Facebook, perhaps somebody else - away from falling down that old slippery slope.
