Deal Radar 2009: BOKU

BOKU is a global online payment company with a new mobile payment service which enables mobile phones to pay for digital goods and social experiences across the web. The company gets mobile users access to bank-grade technology, creating a viable and accessible market for consumers, publishers and carriers. Since most people today don’t have a preference for how they pay for things but just care about how fast it gets done, the company’s Pay By Mobile feature is gaining popularity worldwide, with the aim of making it a standard way to pay for digital goods. >>>

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Deal Radar 2009: GlobalSubmit

Today’s Deal Radar is another great bootstrapping case study! GlobalSubmit (formerly known as Intuitive Technologies), provides validation and review software for electronic control technical document (eCTD) submissions for the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and life sciences companies. As Intuitive Technologies, the company created publishing products for the financial industry. However, the economic downturn in 2001 combined with the emergence of eCTDs forced GlobalSubmit to redefine themselves. While submissions are historically done on paper, the eCTD provides an electronic format to submit the documents that make up marketing applications such as the New Drug Application (NDA), which pharmaceuticals and biotechs submit to the FDA when they want to take a drug to market. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: checkMD

We kick-start this week’s Deal Radar with a social networking site focused on healthcare and healthcare reform, checkMD. Based in Lehi, Utah, the company was founded by Jon Black, who had previously founded GetProof, a physician credentialing software and services company. Since GetProof did extensive research on physicians for hospitals and group practices, Black felt it was natural to start a venture, which would provide that knowledge to consumers. He realized the potential for this space when he was able to find the best healthcare providers for several family members who had debilitating illnesses. He realized that people around the US were struggling to find quality healthcare and decided to start checkMD. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Tabula Digita

Today’s Deal Radar is an educational gaming company, Tabula Digita. Based in New York city, the company was founded by NT Etuk. Part Nigerian and part Bahamian, he came to United States to study Computer Science. Between undergraduate and business school, he did Big Brothers Big Sisters, where he had a little brother. Etuk had to teach him Algebra but found that the challenge with the young man lay with his interest in the subject and not with his learning ability. He saw that a lot of young people lost out only because learning was not fun and engaging. He started Tabula Digita, to try and rectify that. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Hippo

You’ve often heard me use the expression Built To Enjoy. Today’s Deal Radar showcases a quintessential Built To Enjoy company. Hippo is an open source information centered Content Management System (CMS) which targets medium to large enterprises to manage their content for multi-channel distribution like websites and intranets.  The company has been around for ten years and has a deep commitment to open source.  >>>

Deal Radar 2009: HealthEdge

As the call for radical changes to the US healthcare system grows louder, tech companies continue to offer new solutions, such as value-based plans, and software that improves basic administrative tasks such as claims processing. Our latest company in the category, HealthEdge, provides an enterprise-class software suite that allows healthcare payors to take on new business, streamline their current business and give real-time responses to market changes and new regulations. Their main product, HealthRules, includes next-generation claims and benefit administration, business intelligence and portal solutions. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: InQuickER

More Healthcare IT on today’s Deal Radar. InQuickER is an online check-in service that cuts the waiting time on visits to the emergency room (ER). Though Tyler Kiley, the founder and CEO, has never been directly involved in the treatment process at an emergency department, he was always aware of the problems facing hospital emergency departments. The experiences of his parents, who were involved in hospital administration, combined with his own when he had to wait for four hours to get treatment, drove him to solve this problem. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Marin Software

Marin Software offers a paid search management application for advertisers and agencies to enable them to manage large-scale paid search campaigns across search engines such as Google and MSN in an easy and effective manner. Through its main product, a SaaS application called the Marin Search Marketer™, Marin offers advertisers campaign set-up and management, bid optimization, keyword expansion and complete business-level analytics. Advertisers are able to manage all of their search programs under one roof, thereby reducing the time spent as well as eliminating replication and complexity. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: CAST

Today’s Deal Radar focuses on a company that has used an alternative financing path than what we normally see. CAST makes an application intelligence platform that acts as a software assessment engine, going far beneath the business process layers of an application to analyze its architecture. The company claims that its product, CAST, has the ability to analyze entire mission-critical applications from the inside out and feels that their unique proposition is that they “fill in a real pain for IT managers” in helping them track quality and measure developer output. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: SoloHealth

Launched in 2007, SoloHealth offers self-service health screening. Their inaugural product, EyeSite™ is an interactive kiosk that provides vision health information and customized vision reports, and also directs consumers to an eye care professional nearby.  >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Zannel

Today’s Deal Radar company, Zannel, is another example of the move towards mobile convergence and the elimination of walls between the platforms people use to buy goods and services, communicate with friends, and find information. A mobile video and microblogging community, Zannel was the first mobile media company that allowed users to instantly share their videos and photos across mobile, web, and social networks. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Hydro Green Energy

Hydro Green Energy (HGE) is a Texas-based renewable energy systems developer and integrator in the hydropower industry. Its proprietary hydrokinetic power systems, Hydro+, Current+, Tidal+ and Ocean+, generate power without the construction of any dams, impoundments or conduits. HGE owns two patents in the US and others internationally, and it is the only US company with a commercial, federally-licensed hydrokinetic power project.  >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Coverity

One of the reviewers of EJ2: Bootstrapping, Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction on Amazon wrote: “I don’t think it was appropriate to even mention venture capital or angel investors in this book.” My response was, “One of the nuggets that I have picked up from my experience navigating the entrepreneurial waters is that it is wise to bootstrap early on, and develop negotiating power, but there is nothing wrong in using that negotiating power to then go and raise venture money at a good valuation, and with relatively little dilution. That is a theme that I have illustrated repeatedly in the book, through the stories of Greg Gianforte, Cree Lawson, even Manoj Saxena and Murli Thirumale.” In Coverity’s story, we have yet another example of a successfully bootstrapped company that raised its first financing only after thoroughly validating their business model. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Enquisite

Enquisite is a newly launched search engine marketing company which offers marketers a unique solution to address their customer acquisition needs. For businesses that rely heavily on online traffic, Enquisite’s organic search marketing innovation promises to address an important gap in search marketing: driving more of the right organic search traffic. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: EnterpriseDB

Deal Radar kicks the week off with yet another open source company, but one with rather large aspirations. EnterpriseDB was formed in an attempt to disrupt the three-company (Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft) oligopoly that controls the enterprise database market, of which Oracle owns more than half. The company says that as a result of this oligopoly, the market was exhibiting characteristics such as artificially high prices, strong-arm sales practices and vendor lock-in. EnterpriseDB was formed to provide enterprises with an alternative solution. >>>