(By Brindaa Lakshmi & Vikas SN) Microsoft Ventures Accelerator has inducted eight startups for the third batch of its accelerator program, termed as the 2013 winter batch. The four month program started on July 29, 2013 and will end with demo day on November 29, 2013. The eight startups inducted in this batch include: AdSparx provides an in-stream video advertising platform for streaming Internet videos. It claims the platform is device agnostic and provides video content distributors and internet video publishers with options to monetize their video inventory using pre-roll and mid-roll ads by aggregating advertisers. ShieldSquare is working on building a platform that will help websites and online businesses provide protection their users against account breach. When we checked the website, we noticed that the website is not fully functional yet. However, interested people can sign up to get updates on their progress. Frrole is building a social intelligence engine that analyses millions of data points in real-time to build a local buzz graph, which offers news updates to users on a neighborhood, city and country level. It also offers a social newspaper app on the web and on iOS and Android, which aggregates tweets to offer news updates across various categories like Technology, Business, Sports and Entertainment among others. The company claims to offer separate news editions for 55 cities, 6 countries and the world and claimed to have close to a million monthly users as of February 2013. Native5 is building a cloud computing platform which will apparently help create, distribute and monitor applications across desktop, mobile…
