Under the Radar has been recognized as the most important showcase of innovation and deal-making forum in Silicon Valley. In the past three years, 58% of our presenters have gone on to raise funding and/or be acquired by Google, Yahoo, Cisco, BT, Microsoft, Twitter, Fox Interactive, and others. Now it’s your turn!
Categories we’re interested in as it relates to Mobile, Devices, Social, and Real-time:
Advertising/Marketing | Platforms | Location/GEO | Enabling | Payments | Analytics | Content/Publishing | Search | Social Sharing | Real-time | e-Commerce | Business Apps
Criteria for Company Selection:
* Unique value proposition
* Ability to monetize product/business
* Large market opportunity
* Must still be considered “under the radar”
* Company must be an actual startup – not a new product offering from a large company
Are you “OVER THE RADAR” but still have something cool to share?
Apply for the Graduate Circle.
Due to the volume of nominations that we receive, we are not able to respond to your nomination unless we have an opportunity available.
APPLY HERE TODAY!
At Dealmaker Media, we’re seeing a lot of companies popping up that are using barcode scanning technology to get customers more active in their shopping/retail experience. Stickybits, RedLaser, shopkick,BarcodeHero, and Barcoo are just a few in a long list of companies offering customer interaction with barcodes. We think they’re awesome… do you?
Here’s a brief look into 5-options out there today:
1. Barcode Hero: Barcode Hero is a social barcode scanner that works with Facebook. Users share their purchases with friends, scan barcodes to compare prices, follow other shoppers to see their scans & recommendations in real-time, and share tips to help others discover new stuff. There is also a game aspect of Barcode Hero where the most active scanners in various categories are crowned “King” and “Queen.”
BASIC INFO: Founded in January, 2010 as Kima Labs, Inc, by Amazon.com veterans Blake Scholl and Jason Crawford. Funders include: Naval Ravikant, SV Angel (Ron Conway), and Owen Van Natta. Based in San Francisco, CA.
2. barcoo: barcoo links products in stores with independent consumer information. Mobile phones become barcode scanners and show you consumer information. barcoo provides: price comparisons, test reports, health guides, and green/sustainability information. There is also a game aspect of barcoo called “ScanHero.”
BASIC INFO: barcoo was founded in 2008 and is currently run by CEO Benjamin Thym. The company has received Seed Funding, and is based in Berlin, Germany.
Company Description | socialDeck is building a cross-platform gaming technology that enables social gaming on smart phones. Focused on bringing distribution and monetization opportunities that already exist on web social games to the phone, the socialDeck platform allows players to compete against one another on various devices (eg. iPhone vs. Blackberry vs. Web players). Games distributed on the platform all have integrated social networking and community features such as friend discovery, invites, leaderboards, chat, new feeds, plus virtual goods exchanges.
Congrats to the CardStar team on being recognized as the next big thing in mobile!
A $400,000 investment by Verizon Communications Inc. in start-up CardStar Inc. may not sound like much, but it’s a hint that wireless carriers are realizing that commerce is going increasingly mobile, and that there are various ways for operators to get in on the revenue earned by enabling such transactions.
CardStar is the creator of a mobile-phone application that enables users to consolidate all of their membership cards and loyalty programs – be they frequent flier miles or buy-one-get-one free offers from a local merchant – in one place.
“The carriers have long been looking at the mobile wallet idea, especially mobile payments,” said Andy Miller, CardStar’s chief executive. “But mobile payment is not here yet. So, what else is in someone’s wallet? A lot of different cards, and the common thread is loyalty cards.”
Mobile-payment technology has moved slowly because not enough merchants have proper point-of-sale technology to process payments from phones. Verizon is reportedly teaming up with AT&T and T-Mobile USA to test a mobile-payment service that would allow consumers to pay with their smartphones at cash registers or taxis. In the meantime, Verizon’s investment – made through its venture capital arm Verizon Ventures – suggests that major operators are keenly interested in other methods of mobile commerce too.
CardStar is just one of many companies with an app to organize membership and loyalty cards. But the company differentiates by also offering a back-end system that functions like a portal for merchants. Merchants, no matter small, can launch their own promotions, discounts and loyalty programs with CardStar, alerting users to the deals via the application.
CardStar has 2,000 merchants – from major airlines and chain stores to mom-and-pop operations – signed on to use the system. Some of these merchants have point-of-sale scanners that can read bar codes, and others don’t. The merchant portal offers various other options for merchants with low-tech point-of-sale systems.
“We have about 30 competitors out there, but all 30 put together don’t have the numbers [of users] that we have,” Miller said. “A lot of those other companies are just apps.”
In 2009 Motally presented at Under the Radar and today, we are proud to report they have been aquired by Nokia! Motally is a privately-held San Francisco based company that specializes in mobile analytics.
Company Description | Motally is a mobile analytics tracking and reporting service. They use one common interface to track both mobile websites and applications. Their patent-pending technology successfully handles the nuances of mobile tracking – including accurately tracking visitor sessions and identifying the underlying operator and country when users access sites through third-party proxies. By learning more about user behavior, users optimize product offerings, and maximize ROI on advertising campaigns. Motally’s platform is easy to use and customers can be up and running in minutes.
We’re so proud of Matthieu Hug and his team at RunMyProcess for securing 2.2M in Series A Funding! What a huge success for this great small French start-up, and only 9-months after presenting at Under The Radar 2009! Here’s what Matthieu Hug had to say about Dealmaker Media:
“Being invited to present at Under the Radar in 2009 was obviously a great step toward visibility, and ultimately very important in securing financing. I’m sincerely grateful to the Dealmaker Media team for your great job at giving visibility.”
Woohoo!
Read more about their success here! http://www.runmyprocess.com/content/runmyprocess-secures-22m-series-funding
Mytopia, a game developer for mobile platforms, including Andorid and the iPhone, was acquired by 888 Holdings, an online gambling company for $18 million.
Launched in 2006, Mytopia has developed several top Facebook games including Bingo Island 2 and Pacific Poker. Guy Ben-Artzi and Galia Ben-Artzi presented at Under the Radar back in 2008. Here are some of the event photos.
Today’s Under the Radar: Cloud was a smashing success. Over 350 people attended and watched over 30 bleeding-edge startups tell their stories and showcase their technology. With over half of UTR’s past presenting companies having raised funding or get acquired after hitting our stage, something tells me this batch of companies might bump this statistic up even higher. Every single startup hit it out of the park!
Judges included executives from MTV, Bank of America, ING, Virgin America, Zynga, Digg, Salesforce, Intuit, Deloitte, Rackspace and more.
SCROLL DOWN BELOW THE WINNERS TO VIEW ALL PRESENTERS’ SLIDES AND VIDEOS:
So…. who came out on top? ** Audience Choice: BEST IN SHOW NORTHSCALE Check out their video here:
** Judges’ Choice: BEST IN SHOW PUPPET LABS
All Category Winners – Check Out the Slides and Videos
Presenter: SendGrid Category: Communication (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
Charles Babcock, Information Week
Ravi Simhambhatla, Virgin America
Sunil Dhaliwal, Battery Ventures
Company Description: SendGrid is an email service that solves the problems faced by companies delivering email. These problems include email deliverability, scalability, metrics, and the time consuming tasks to implement email features such as unsubscribe links, anti-spam regulations, and corporate branding.
Presenter: Wavemaker (Grad Circle Presenter) Category: Application Development and Management (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: WaveMaker Software™ is the only open source cloud development platform, with a 15,000-strong developer community and a leadership role in the Cloud Quick Start Program in partnership with IBM, Amazon and RightScale. WaveMaker makes it ridiculously easy to build, deploy and customize cloud applications with drag and drop development tools, one-click cloud deployment and end user self-service customization. WaveMaker customers like the Center For Disease Control, Macy’s and KANA have built amazing-looking web applications with minimal learning curve and up to 98% less code
Presenter: New Relic (Grad Circle) Category: App Development and Management
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: New Relic, Inc. offers a SaaS solution called RPM, a web application performance management solution that enables developers to monitor application performance and quickly detect, diagnose, and fix performance problems in real time. New Relic has more than 3500 customers using RPM to monitor and manage production Java and Ruby on Rails applications. RPM Lite is a free, fully supported version for unlimited use. Installation and setup take less than 2 minutes. Investors include Benchmark Capital and Trinity Ventures.
Presenter: CloudKick (Grad Circle – CloudKick is an Under the Radar alumni. They presented for the first time in April 2009. Category: Infrastructure
Judges/ Commentators:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description: Cloudkick is system to manage cloud servers, such as Amazon’s EC2. Cloudkick provides an easy to use monitoring/alerting solution to support your production infrastructure on the cloud. Cloudkick also gives you a window into your cloud deployment by providing detailed graphs on the health of your servers, and tools to categorize and keep information about what each server is doing. Cloudkick’s mission is to make cloud servers easy to use, where ever the customer needs them. Since launching on March 16th, Cloudkick has 1200 registered users and 6000 registered servers.
Presenter: Rivermuse Category: Infrastructure (Under the Radar: Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description:
RiverMuse is the first open source MoM (Manager of Managers) platform for IT Operations Management that uniquely enables IT organizations to maintain the health of their increasingly complex and adaptive environments so they can optimize service levels, drive down costs, and respond more nimbly to the changing needs of the business. RiverMuse’s open source model allows the global community of IT professionals to effectively collaborate in order to fulfill evolving market requirements with new software economics. The company was founded by the serial entrepreneurs who founded Micromuse and RiverSoft and whose innovations assure a majority of all public and private Internet infrastructures in use today.
Presenter: Heroku (Grad Circle) Category: App Development and Management (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: Heroku is a leading provider of cloud computing, offering a Ruby platform as a service focused on ease of use, automation, and reliability. The San Francisco, CA-based company is a passionate and active supporter of Ruby technologies and cloud architecture. Tens of thousands of developers worldwide have deployed over 53,000 applications to Heroku.
Presenter: RightScale Session: Infrastructure (Under the Radar: Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description: RightScale is the leader in cloud computing management. Founded in 2006, RightScale offers a fully automated management platform that delivers the scalable, cost-effective, on-demand power of cloud computing, while providing complete IT control and transparency. With RightScale, you can more easily deploy and manage business-critical applications on the cloud with new levels of automation, control, and portability. To date, thousands of deployments and over 1,000,000 servers have been launched on RightScale for leading companies such as Animoto, Playfish, Sling Media and TC3.
Presenter: Makara Category: Application Development and Management (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: Makara deploys and manages Java and PHP applications on public or private clouds. On the cloud of their choice, business application developers can launch more online services faster. Without requiring changes to their applications, Makara helps businesses respond rapidly to their customers demand for personalization and access. With a self-service solution for application deployment, business applications teams do more with less. Through upgrades, scaling, monitoring, provisioning test environments and troubleshooting, Makara manages applications so developers are free to innovate for their customers.
Judges:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description:
Today’s enterprise IT infrastructures are growing in size and complexity accelerated by virtualization and cloud computing. Puppet Labs is the company behind Puppet, the leading open source datacenter automation solution. Puppet enables staff to manage their IT infrastructure through a model–driven architecture, automating the configuration of computing devices through a simple cross-platform interface. Puppet insulates IT staff from differences between platforms making IT more secure, efficient, and scalable. Puppet is broadly deployed at 1,000’s of companies world-wide such as Google, the NYSE-Euronext, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, Juniper and JPMorgan Chase.
Presenter: AppFirst Category: Application Development and Management (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: AppFirst delivers the first SaaS-based application performance monitoring product enabling SaaS IT operations to visualize, at a glance, the real time physical reality of applications on infrastructure. It is language agnostic, supporting Windows and Linux servers. Within minutes you can get a view and understanding into your application to drive better performance, cost efficiencies and customer retention. Operational excellence can only be achieved when you have complete visibility into your deployed software.
Presenter: Maxiscale Category: Infrastructure (Under the Radar: Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description: MaxiScale’s cloud-scale file serving and storage platform is a breakthrough for Internet data centers and storage infrastructure that fundamentally changes the economics of deploying Web-scale applications. The FLEX Software Platform addresses the unpredictable and expanding data requirements facing companies that deliver Internet applications via public and private clouds. It enables customers to reduce capital and operational costs while improving performance by an order of magnitude over competing solutions. MaxiScale’s innovative Peer Set™ architecture and single disk I/O small file operations allow data centers to linearly scale a single namespace to hundreds of petabytes, eliminate forklift upgrades and reduce disk spindle counts by a factor of 10.
Presenter: AppDynamics Category: Application Development and Management
Judges:
Alan McIntosh, VP Operations, CBS Interactive
Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO, Virgin America
Scott Dale, VP Engineering, Zynga
Sheila Gulati, GM, Application Platform and Developer Marketing, Microsoft
Company Description: AppDynamics is a next-generation Application Performance Management (APM) company that delivers rapid problem resolution for highly distributed applications through easy-to-use transaction flow monitoring and deep diagnostics. Unlike other APM providers, AppDynamics finds the root cause of performance problems without introducing excess overhead or requiring a complex and costly installation. AppDynamics is also the first APM provider to dynamically scale applications in cloud, virtual, and physical environments.
Presenter: CloudSwitch Category: Infrastructure (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
ING | Alan Boehme | Senior VP, IT Strategy and Enterprise Architecture
Digg | John Quinn | VP Engineering
Rackspace | Lew Moorman | President, Cloud Division and CSO
Company Description: CloudSwitch delivers the enterprise gateway to the cloud. CloudSwitch’s innovative software appliance enables enterprises to move their existing applications to the right cloud computing environment—securely, simply and without changes. With CloudSwitch, applications remain tightly integrated with enterprise data center tools and policies, and can be moved easily between different cloud environments and back into the data center based on the requirements of the business.
Presenter: VMTurbo Category: Virtualization (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
BJ Fesq, Bank of America
Chris Weitz, Deloitte Consulting
Joe Weinman, AT&T
Mitchell Kertzman, Hummer Winblad
Company Description: VMTurbo’s virtual appliances use patented analytics to automate key virtualization management operational procedures. These include complex workload balancing, real time & continuous rightsizing, and virtual infrastructure performance & capacity management. VMTurbo’s solution increases virtual infrastructure utilization by more than 50%, while eliminating the risk of virtual machine performance degradation and downtime. VMTurbo provides the only virtualization management solution that combines monitoring (Observe), analytics (Advise) and actions (Automate), for proactive, rather than reactive management.
Presenter: Fonolo Category: Communication (SaaS) Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010
Judges:
Charles Babcock, Information Week
Ravi Simhambhatla, Virgin America
Sunil Dhaliwal, Battery Ventures
Company Description: Fonolo enables large companies to rapidly improve the experience of customers contacting their call centers. By adding Fonolo\’s intelligent caller interface to their website or mobile application, companies remove the annoyances of phone menu navigation, waiting on hold and data entry. Callers simply click or tap the option they want, and Fonolo’s deep dialing technology connects them directly to the right agent. The company\’s award-winning visual navigation service has successfully demonstrated end-user demand and scalability by connecting many thousands of callers since its launch. Fonolo requires no changes to existing infrastructure, enabling companies to quickly leverage the web and the smart phone to optimize customer satisfaction and call center investments.
Presenter: Layerboom Systems Category: Virtualization (Under the Radar Cloud conference 2010)
Judges:
BJ Fesq, Bank of America
Chris Weitz, Deloitte Consulting
Joe Weinman, AT&T
Mitchell Kertzman, Hummer Winblad
Company Description: Layerboom is in the business of cloud creation and management. We are the Barracuda Networks of Virtualization, offering the industry’s first virtualization appliance. Enterprises can now implement their cloud strategy in a day, not months. Our appliance, called the “BoomBox” enables you to transform your existing servers into a cloud environment. Combine that with our web based management interface and API means businesses can now choose a complete, easy and affordable cloud strategy.
