$150M New Reasons to Explore Cisco Spark

It’s an exciting time to be at Cisco. The pace of innovation and change is astounding, and we’re barely beginning to scratch the surface. And I’m saying this coming from a fast-moving startup environment just 10 months ago.

Many of you are already using Cisco Spark and Tropo APIs to spin up amazing ideas that utilize our communications services in a transformative way. These ideas have the power to shift how people work together in a variety of functions and industries – from sales and marketing, to financial services and education, to IOT.

This week at Enterprise Connect we announced the $150M Spark Innovation Fund. The fund will aim to foster even more innovation on Spark and Tropo within our developer community, through equity and non-equity investing.

The collective power of these agile business ventures with the Cisco Spark platform and the global reach and scale of our customer and partner base will be astounding. Together, we’ll no doubt unlock the innovation that can change the way teams work together anytime, anywhere around the globe.

We have a lot of experience in growing and fostering robust developer communities. It’s not easy, and we have to continue to focus on activities and channels to do this. We’re making it easy to learn more about the Fund and engage with us on our Spark Developer site.

Check Us Out at SXSW
Later this week in Austin, we’re unveiling Spark Haus, a pop-up event focused on reaching new developer and tech audiences. Here, coders, developers, and business minds can connect in a place that feels as comfortable as an old sweatshirt. Born of our new Cisco Spark platform, Spark Haus is all about bringing people, technology, and ideas together.

As an official event of South by Southwest (SXSW), we’re getting hyperlocal and building Spark Haus inside a popular hot dog and beer joint called Frank on Sunday and Monday. With so many brilliant minds in town, we’re bringing a full cast of thought leaders and visionaries from Cisco and our technology friends such as Uber, Dropbox, and Built.io. And of course, you can talk to us about the Innovation Fund, see a Spark for Developers or Tropo demo, and even play a new game using our APIs. If we can create a game in our spare time, we know that you can use our APIs to build the next great application.

If you’re in Austin for SXSW, join us! Badge or not. And if you can’t make it to Spark Haus, tune in to our live stream starting at 11:00 a.m. CST on March 13th to catch all the action remotely.

We look forward to seeing you – in person or through the cloud — soon! And we can’t wait to see all the new ways we can drive unprecedented innovation in the collaboration space, together.

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