Congratulations to Under the Radar Alumni SlideShare on being acquired by LinkedIn! The deal is reportedly valued at over $118 Million. The deal will include about 45% cash and about 55% stock, and is expected to be completed in the second quarter.

SlideShare, founded in 2006, provides a way to share presentations on the Web. According to LinkedIn, Slide Share in March had nearly 29 million unique visitors. The site has nearly 7.4 million presentations embedded on more than 1.4 million Web domains. (Source).

We look forward to seeing the results of this acquisition in the end of this year.  Stay tuned…

Congratulations to Abheek and the entire TagTile team on being acquired by Facebook! In November 2011 they won the Under the Radar Best in Show Award and this is further proof they’re on to something huge!

See their 2011 Presentation HERE

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Love is in the air, and it isn’t just for Valentine’s Day couples.  Corporations have been canoodling one another in attempts to form a union. The recent turmoil in the capital markets and the heavy accumulation of corporate cash have created grand opportunities. According to The Street, we could be in a merger and acquisition boom. Not only are banks willing to start lending more, but acquirers will pay premiums for companies they truly adore-ones that can help them expand their distribution channels.  However, other thought leaders think differently.  Ernst and Young feels that the technology markets won’t be able to keep up the pace of 2011 M&A activity.  What is the future for tech in 2012? Is their cash left to burn? How will the top recent acquisitions settle once the honeymoon phase is over? And are ones their size repeatable?

Is M&A Love Repeatable? 3 Big 2011 Acquisitions Just Settling:

$12.5B: Just this week the US department of Justice approved Google’s acquisition of Motorola. Google’s interest in Motorola was largely around its patents, all of which help protect the Android in legal battles.

$11B: HP acquisition of Autonomy (UK). This deal was the largest in the European tech sector giving HP new customer accounts as well as new ways to “manage and extract data.”

$3.4B: SAP bought cloud computing software Success Factors, mainly to keep up with Oracle. In this case, buying was far faster than building.

These price tags may not buy love, but they certainly increase its bargaining power. Curious about “selling out” yourself? To learn about the future of start-up M&A activity come to our Strategy Session in Los Angeles March 6^th.  We’ll discuss acquisition strategies from both sides of the deal.

Last year companies like Google, Twitter, Facebook and Salesforce gobbled up a multitude of startups to strengthen their talent and technology strategies.  However, just because they’ve got money to burn doesn’t mean you should consider selling.  75% of acquisitions fail due to timing, out clauses, and cultural fit.  Google’s failed acquisition of Groupon is a classic example. However, some startups hit timing perfectly such as Bebo’s sale to AOL for $850M.

Entrepreneurs must ask themselves if exiting is the right strategy versus building up their company for a potential (yet sometimes reachable) IPO.

To know if selling is the right thing to do successful entrepreneurs must ask themselves these questions:

-  What type of company are you?  A full-fledged offering or a feature looking for a product?

- What type of acquisition are you? Talent, Business, or Technology?  Each will have different valuation.

-  Will your market grow and what are your chances of thriving amid competition if you go it alone?  Who else could your buyer acquire?

-  Is it the right time given your traction?  Will you have a significantly higher valuation in the near term?

-  What is your long term vision for the company?  Is it aligned with the buyer’s goals?

- Is the buyer the right cultural fit for your company?  Could you hang out with them?

- What service level agreements and out clauses do you have with your customers?

- Are your internal finances in order?  What things do you need to clean out from under the rug?

We will be tackling some of these questions with established corporate acquirers and acquired entrepreneurs in Los Angeles in March.  Come join us for an Acquisition Strategy Session in Los Angeles on March 6, 2012.

Congratulations to Andy and the entire team over at CardStar on being acquired by Constant Contact!  CardStar is a great friend of Under the Radar as a two time presenter, and we couldn’t be prouder of them today.   Read more about the acquisition here.

See CardStar’s 2009 Under the Radar Presentation HERE.

See CardStar’s 2010 Under the Radar Presentation HERE.

Company Description:
CardStar enables consumers to easily store and retrieve digital loyalty, rewards and club cards on their mobile device while providing retailers and CPG companies a channel to stay connected to their most loyal customers. CardStar is a Boston-based, privately held software company developing mobile applications that perpetuate the use of loyalty cards and mobile coupons. The CardStar application consolidates membership and rewards cards on smartphones — letting consumers access scannable cards from within a single app and enabling merchants to tailor mobile deals and information to their customers. The company was founded in 2008 with offices in Boston, MA and Washington, DC.

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2011 was a great year for acquisitions.  At least 23 of our past presenting companies were acquired this year by top players like Facebook, AMEX, Salesforce, and more. Congratulations to all the companies who got swooped up this year!  We look forward to seeing what all of you serial entrepreneurs will come up with in 2012!

2011 Under the Radar Alumni Acquisitions

• BigStage acquired by Image Metrics
• CloudSwitch acquired by Verizon
• DimDim acquired by Salesforce
• EchoSign acquired by Adobe
• Fanvibe acquired by BeRecruited
• FlightCaster acquired by Next Jump
• Kosmix acquired by Walmart
• Magento acquired by eBay
• Nirvanix acquired by IBM
• PhoneGap acquired by Adobe
• Rypple acquired by Salesforce
• SimpleGeo acquired by Urban Airship
• SlideRocket acquired by VMware
• SocialLight acquired by Group Commerce
• SocialMedia.com acquired by Living Social
• Sometrics acquired by AMEX
• Strobe acquired by Facebook
• Transpera acquired by Tremor Media
• TripIt acquired by Concur
• Tungle acquired by RIM
• Versly acquired by Cisco
• Wavemaker acquired by VMware
• Wufoo acquired by SurveyMonkey

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Congratulations to Daniel and the entire Rypple team on being acquired by Salesforce! Daniel presented Rypple just last month at our Under the Radar conference and they are officially the first company to be acquired from their cohort.  Nice work!

Rypple is a social performance platform that helps managers and their teams recognize one another for great work, share key priorities, give and receive feedback, and coach people to achieve their goals—all in real time. Rypple captures everything in one place, so it’s easy for managers to get a snapshot of employee performance at the end of a goal, project, or quarter.

To find out more about Rypple and find out more about their company culture, read this interview with Daniel HERE.

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Wave Accounting is presenting this Thursday and Under the Radar, and today, they announced announced their acquisition of Small Payroll, an online payroll application. The application will be rebranded and relaunched as Wave Payroll, with a beta release in Canada this quarter, and in the U.S. in early 2012.

Congratulations to Kirk and the entire Wave Accounting team! Look out for their presentation and more announcements this week at Under the Radar!

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Two of our favorite past presenting Under the Radar companies are teaming up and are going to blow this market out of the water!  Urban Airship has acquired SimpleGeo and we’re sure big things are ahead.

See SimpleGeo’s Presentation HERE. See Urban Airship’s Presentation HERE.

Congratulations to Scott and Rob and all the rest of both teams!

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Congratulations to Charles and the entire Strobe team on being acquired by Facebook!  Strobe presented at Under the Radar just seven months ago and won our BEST IN SHOW for the entire day.  Looks like the judges made a good call that day!

See their presentation and slide deck HERE.

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We always like to share the success stories of Under the Radar Alumni, and today, we’ve got a great one!

Back in 2008, Sometrics presented on the Under the Radar stage.  Just last month, they were acquired by American Express after raising over $5 Million in funding.

Congratulations to the entire team!

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We’re happy to announce that Nitobi, (creator of PhoneGap) is set to be acquired by Adobe! PhoneGap presented at last year’s Under the Radar, and also attended the GROW Conference as one of the 70 invited startups in the invite-only idea exchange day.

Andre is a great guy and we couldn’t be more thrilled for him and his team!  Way to go guys!!

Company Description:
Nitobi Inc. is the creator of PhoneGap, an open source developmenttool for building cross-platform mobile apps with HTML5 and JavaScriptthat take advantage of core native features in the Apple iOS, GoogleAndroid, HP/Palm WebOS, Symbian and BlackBerry SDKs. Nitobi providescommercial support and training on the framework for businesses aroundthe world. In 2010, Nitobi launched the PhoneGap Build PaaS beta. Thisservice built on top the PhoneGap framework solves key pain points ofcompiling, testing and deploying mobile apps for various devicesautomatically in the cloud, eliminating the need for SDKs, compilersand hardware

To see Andre’s presentation from UTR, click HERE.

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In April of 2011, Versly presented on stage and Under the Radar and impressed the crowd at the Microsoft Campus with their offering.  Versly integrates with Word, Excel, PowerPoint, the Web and your mobile devices to make it easy for groups to stay organized and on track – Anytime, Anywhere.

Today the San Francisco based startup announced they have been acquired for an undisclosed amount by Cisco.

Congratulations to Erik and the entire team!  See Versly’s presentation HERE and read more about the acquisition in their press release below.

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In November of 2009, Tungle presented on our stage at Under the Radar.  You can still see their slide deck, and video presentation HERE.  We would like to congratulate the entire team on being acquired by RIM last week!!  Way to go Team Tungle!

Read more about the acquisition HERE.

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Congratulations to past Under the Radar presenter SlideRocket on their acquisition by VMware!

Here what SlideRocket had to say about it:
Today, we are thrilled to announce that SlideRocket has been acquired by VMware, marking a dramatic acceleration in SlideRocket’s mission to power great stories and presentations. VMware and SlideRocket share an affinity for seizing big opportunities to reinvent how people work, and we are aligned in our vision for the future of cloud applications – it’s a future where work becomes collaborative, social, mobile, and even fun!

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With Under the Radar just three days away, it’s exciting to hear about past presenters successes as we gear up for this up and coming batch of startups.  It’s been four years since Wufoo presented on our stage, and today, it was announced they have been acquired by SurveyMonkey for $35-Million.

Congratulations to the entire team!  Grab a ticket to Thursday’s Under the Radar for a chance to see the new hot startups or 2011.

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Congratulations to Chris and the entire team over at WaveMaker on being acquired by VMWare! It was less than a year ago they were impressing our audience at Under the Radar, and they’ve obviously continued to impress the right people!  Way to go guys!

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

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Here’s the deal:

1. NorthScale presented at Under the Radar in April of 2010 showcasing their elastic data infrastructure and won our BEST IN SHOW for their fantastic presentation and offering.

2. NorthScale changed it’s name in October of 2010 to Membase “in order to establish a tighter connection between the company’s moniker and its flagship product, the open source key-value store Membase Server.“

3. In 2010, startup Couchio announced it was changing it’s name to CouchOne.

4. Today, Membase and CouchOne have merged to form CouchBase.

5. You still with me?

All name changes aside, this “new company” CouchBase will “provide a comprehensive family of NoSQL database products for enterprise companies.”

Congratulations all around on this merger. Databases just got a lot more awesome.

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Congratulations to past Under the Radar presenter Transpera on being acquired by Tremor Media!!!

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.  Before this acquisition however, Transpera had already raised over $17-Million dollars from investors First Round Capital, Flybridge Capital Partners, Intel Capital, and more.  Congratulations guys!

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Way back in March of 2008, a little startup called Tripit presented on stage at the Under the Radar Conference.

In that group of Under the Radar startups alone, seven have been acquired including 3Tera, Flitrbox, HiveLive, NuConomy, Q-Layer, Ribbit.  What a power group!

Tripit has been acquired for a reported $120 Million by travel and expense management company Concur.

Congratulations Tripit!

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On FlightCaster’s Blog this morning, the company announced they have been acquired by Next Jump, stating:

We’re pleased to announce that FlightCaster has been acquired by Next Jump Inc. It’s a good day here at FlightCaster HQ (freakin’ phenomenal day!), and we’re stoked about the new possibilities.

FlightCaster presented at our 2009 Under the Radar event and you can watch their presentation and see their slide deck HERE.

Congratulations FlightCaster!!

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Whoohoo!  We are happy to report that one of our favorite Under the Radar companies, cloudkick, has been acquired by Rackspace!!  These are the guys that brought is T-Shirts for Christmas last year and stole our hearts.  We couldn’t be happier for the team!

Here is what Cloudkick is Sayin’ on their Website:

We are excited to join the Rackspace family, and are confident this will allow us to offer the absolute best cloud management experience possible, for everyone. We will continue to support multiple clouds, and our users can expect to receive the same, high level of service.

Watch Cloudkick Present at Under the Radar from 2009, and 2010!

Under the Radar 2009 Presentation

Under the Radar 2010 Presentation

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Congratulations to Under the Radar Presenter Heroku on being acquired by Salesforce!

Heroku presented originally in 2009 and again as Alumni in 2010.  Watch their presentations and read about the company here:

2009 Under the Radar Heroku Presentation

2010 Under the Radar Heroku Presentation

Read more about the Acquisition here.

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Congratulations to 2010 Under the Radar Company Makara on being acquired by Red Hat.  We are so proud of Issac Roth and his team for this amazing accomplishment!  Way to go guys!

News from Business Wire about the Acquisition Below:

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has acquired Makara, a developer of deployment and management solutions for applications in the cloud. Makara‘s technologies will accelerate the development of Red Hat’s comprehensive Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution as part of its Cloud Foundations portfolio.

“We welcome the Makara team and look forward to accelerating our delivery of PaaS solutions to the market.”

Based in Redwood City, Calif., Makara provides solutions to enable organizations to deploy, manage, monitor and scale their applications on both private or public clouds. Customers facing issues in moving applications to the cloud and managing them efficiently can benefit from Makara‘s solutions for scaling, rightsizing, rollback and monitoring. By integrating the JBoss Enterprise Middleware infrastructure with Makara‘s Cloud Application Platform, Red Hat can offer a more comprehensive PaaS solution that allows organizations to quickly transition their applications to both public and private clouds with minimal modifications.

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.

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Today’s most prominent story in tech news? Google’s *nearly* confirmed Groupon acquisition.

It is likely that the story floating around is indeed true, and the deal is said to be valued at 2.5 Billion dollars. Big congrats to the Groupon team on an epic climb into stardom, and huge disruption of social shopping as we know it.

While there may be hundreds of group buying sites out there, (Check our list of over 60-from earlier this year), Groupon has perhaps made the biggest impression on consumers. With its GAP deal going down in August, Groupon showed everyone just how much potential the company held.

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