Montgomery County Economic Development Director Steve Silverman, holding up his end of the ribbon, is next to Microsoft Federal VP Teresa Carlson and MoCo Chamber of Commerce CEO Gigi Godwin. The trio is joined by staffers for Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Sens. Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski.

Is this a Georgetown lounge? No, try a common area complete with X-Box 360, which we tested. This is just part of the 134K SF Microsoft leases over five floors.

Chamber EVP Barbara Ashe, Gigi, and Microsoft’s Betsy Chapman. The night before, Barbara and Gigi were hosting the annual MoCo Chamber of Commerce 2009 Business Awards Dinner that celebrated the new Veteran Institute for Procurement.

FedScoop president Goldy Kamali and Citrix’s Nancy Binnie.

Last night we were in Rockville for the first ever MIT (like the school) Enterprise Forum. Some of the folks who made it happen: TCM Executive Director Ric Zakour, MITEF’s Harvey Perlstein, Rockville Economic Development ED Sally Sternbach, and MoCo Economic Development Director Steve Silverman, whom you may remember from four pictures ago—we tailed him from the Microsoft event—still looking like Albert Brooks. (We took the liberty of superimposing Brooks on this picture.)

The forum focused on start-up presentations to potential investors. For example, Unyos, a creator of SaaS collaboration tools, gave a presentation to a panel of experts who critiqued their performance. Patrick May, president of AccelerMark, said companies need to look at the plethora of grant money that is available to seed development. He says grant-making agencies love opportunities to help start-ups, but most grants go to scientist types who are innovative but don’t capitalize commercially.

Didn't that used to be called a lightning rod? Yesterday we also ran to the Reagan Building as 1105 held a conference focusing on security. Here Unisys’ Brent Houlahan, Commerce’s Michael Castagna, and NIST’s Ramaswamy Chandramouli talk cloud computing. Brent says when picking a cloud provider, make sure it fits what you need. “A lot will offer a standard service; find someone who will tailor their solution.” One tip, get all your procedures down: “If one of your people touch my data, what happens?” Brent asks.