Deal Radar 2010: Webyog

By guest author Shailesh Otari

Today’s Deal Radar goes back to India, to a Bangalore-based product company called Webyog. Webyog is a leader in GUI and monitoring tools for MySQL databases. Its flagship product, SQLyog, is a graphical environment for MySQL. The company also provides MySQL monitoring and advisory tools called MONyog for MySQL DBAs. SQLyog is available in two editions – an open source community edition and an enterprise edition. According to the company, the community edition has been downloaded 2 million times. Webyog is also venturing into other markets. For example, it has recently released a Gmail plug-in, Mailbrowser. >>>

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Deal Radar 2010: Urban Green Energy

Urban Green Energy (UGE) is a manufacturer of wind turbines and related products such as wind- and solar-powered street lamps. The company is a player in the “small wind” market, which includes turbines with rated capacity of up to 100 kilowatts. Such turbines are used from northern Canada to Antarctica for a variety of on-grid and off-grid purposes, from supplementing traditional electricity to powering boats, vacation homes, special radar equipment, and so forth. Small wind remains a niche market, but it is growing. Global small wind turbine sales were $203 million in 2009 and could double by 2013, according to Pike Research. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: PressOK Entertainment

In 2008, as readers will recall, the field of mobile games publishing underwent a dramatic change following the launch of the iPhone and its App Store, which disrupted the relationships between large, entrenched publishers and mobile operators and OEMs. Since that time, operators have launched their own versions app store, opening up their platforms to more developers. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: MaxiScale

MaxiScale, a cloud-scale file serving and storage platform provider, was founded in 2007 by Gianluca Rattazzi and Francesco Lacapra. At that time, major cloud computing and Web companies were transitioning away from standard enterprise storage platforms to commodity hardware and smart software. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Firm58, Chicago, Illinois

Firm58 provides financial management software to capital markets firms. The company’s SaaS-based platform is designed to help clients better manage post-trade processes such as billing, profitability reporting, client commission agreements, and soft dollar programs, thus increasing revenue and operational efficiency and lowering costs. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: 99designs, Australia

99designs is a marketplace for crowdsourced graphic design. The company runs contests through which clients submit design briefs to the site along with how much they want to pay. Designers registered with 99designs submit their entries, and the client chooses which design they want and pays the winning designer. This approach has proved popular among entrepreneurs, given the proliferation and profitability of sites like 99designs, but it has often passionate critics. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Globant

I seldom cover outsourcing on Deal Radar, but here is one that showcases some interesting trends. And of course, I do have a special soft corner for Argentina!

Inspired by the success the Indian IT outsourcing industry and the growth of that country’s outsourcing stocks, Martín Migoya, Martín Umaran, Guibert Englebienne, and Néstor Nocetti, founded their own outsourcing business in Argentina. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: I Love Rewards

I Love Rewards provides results-driven rewards and recognition solutions that clients can use to motivate employees and increase sales. The company focuses on recruiting, retaining, and inspiring employees so that they are in tune with their employers’ goals. Through the company’s points-based system, which includes packages targeted at younger workers and at keeping people motivated during a recession, employees can chose their own rewards. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Should Facebook Acquire Into Vertical Search?

On ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick asks, “Who(m) Should Facebook Acquire Next?” Here’s my response. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Slooh

Deal Radar heads into outer space with Slooh, which is both a Web-based platform that turns a computer into a telescope and an online astronomy community. Through Slooh’s SpaceCamera, members can access and even control telescopes that the company has positioned in both hemispheres to observe objects in space, including the moon, planets, and other galaxies. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Office Ally

Office Ally is an electronic clearinghouse that acts as a go-between in processing insurance claims for doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals. Founder Brian O’Neill saw that although the United States often has the latest technology for clinical testing and patient care, it often lags when it comes to business operations in the health-care industry. O’Neill entered the market in 1999 with a physician as his partner—whom he bought out after about one year—at a time when the market was beginning to explode with opportunity and interest in health-care management technology and services for providers was increasing. The number of oppportunities should only increase as the United States reforms its health-care system. The Department of Health and Human Services’ Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) and the and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently issued two regulations to help implement the electronic health records (EHR) incentive programs enacted under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Knewton

Founded in the spring of 2008 by Jose Ferreira, Knewton is an online educational platform provider and test preparation service. Ferreira, who previously worked as an executive with Kaplan, was frustrated by what he saw as traditional, outmoded approaches to test preparation. He saw what he believed to be an opportunity in the market for a customized approach that would improve the quality of instruction to a wider audience and ultimately prove to be more effective for students than other methods. He saw many unproven instructors teaching at local test centers and wanted to be able to target students’ weaknesses at a more granular level. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: OmniGuide

OmniGuide, Inc. develops and commercializes high-precision, flexible, minimally invasive surgical instruments. OmniGuide’s family of indication-targeted fiber-optic scalpels enable flexible delivery of clinically beneficial CO2 laser energy, thereby broadening the field of minimally invasive surgery. >>>

Deal Radar 2010: Chegg

This year’s Deal Radar series begins with a company that is direct competition for your campus bookstore, Chegg. Chegg is an online textbook rental company whose name is a play on the well-known conundrum of which came first, the chicken or the egg. Founded in 2003 by Aayush Phumbhra, Josh Carlson, and Osman Rashid, Chegg started as a “Craigslist-like” classifieds site at Iowa State University. The three realized that the high cost of textbooks was a huge problem for students and started to rent textbooks. Though Carlson left Chegg in 2006 to pursue other interests, Phumbhra and Rashid tweaked the original version and launched Chegg.com nationwide in 2007. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Clearpath

By Guest Author Shailesh Otari

In this post we discuss Clearpath Technology, an Indian company in the field of Internet marketing and search engine optimization (SEO). What started as a hobby in engineering college became a profession for the company’s founder, Deepak Bansal. Surfing on his home computer and learning methods of search engine optimization led Bansal to develop expertise in this area, and he even wrote a book on the subject. Convinced that Internet marketing is his greatest passion, Bansal took the road less traveled and founded Clearpath right after his graduation in 2005. >>>