Microsoft Ventures Accelerator has inducted sixteen startups for the fourth batch of its accelerator program, termed as the 2014 summer batch. The four month program started on January 22, 2014 and will end with demo day on May 23, 2014. What's worth noting here is Microsoft Ventures' focus on selecting companies with significant consumer traction to its batch. Microsoft Ventures's director Ravi Narayan is quoted in the press release as saying that "most of these companies already have a certain amount of customer traction and the Accelerator Program is well positioned to step in and help them move ahead faster than they would have otherwise." Earlier this month, The Morpheus which is probably one of the oldest startup accelerators in India, had also changed its model to work with older companies rather than working with only early-stage companies. New Accelerator Plus Program: On similar lines, Microsoft Ventures has launched a new Accelerator Plus program, aimed at more mature companies which have already made significant progress and are close to venture funding. The accelerator says it will offer resources to help these companies roll out products and raise capital to fund their growth. Although, note that Microsoft Accelerator doesn’t provide any investment to the participants itself, since it doesn't take any debt or equity from the participating startups. Of the 16 startups, six startups have been included in these new batch. These include MyBusTickets.in, Praxify, Thinxstream, Touchfone, ZingHR and Zoom (More on it below). Its worth noting that Microsoft had also selected four startups in the last batch (HasGeek, Nanobi, Tookitaki and 1000Lookz) which were not part…
