Deal Radar 2009: SodaHead

California-based SodaHead is a place where opinionated users of the web are found. SodaHead aims to be a community where users can meet new people with similar thought processes, which the company says differentiates it from other social networking sites which let people connect with existing friends. The company’s goal is to provide the online world with a space where people can bounce ideas off one another, see different viewpoints and get a snapshot of what public sentiment is on issues in the news. >>>

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Deal Radar 2009: SpotMixer

There’s no question that shrinking ad budgets and the decline of print ads have shaken the foundations of traditional and often powerful media outlets, from ABC to the Boston Globe. Online video advertising, however, is growing in this poor economy, albeit at a slower place. One company taking advantage of this growth is One True Media’s SpotMixer. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Sonoa Systems

Last year, I wrote a piece called SaaS Impact on IT Infrastructure as part of the Trend Radar 2008 series. In the last 16 months, SaaS has really taken off, with over 500 companies in the space. Concurrently, the operational complexity of managing SaaS in the enterprise has also escalated. Today’s Deal Radar looks at a company that addresses some of this complexity. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Vindicia

Today’s Deal Radar showcases a very impressive SaaS company that solves an important problem in an already large and growing niche: intangible goods. Vindicia’s on-demand billing and fraud management solution, Vindicia CashBox, aims to transform billing into a strategic advantage for online merchants. The company provides a hosted solution that integrates with other core elements of a company’s e-commerce infrastructure, from payment processors to accounting systems to shopping carts, which aims to provide a seamless experience for customers. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: UserVoice

With today’s Deal Radar installment we bring our focus back to web startups. UserVoice offers customer support service for any website and allows users to give votes to their favorite suggestions. Founders Richard White, Marcus Nelson and Scott Rutherford—all serial entrepreneurs—modified Digg’s principles of crowdsourced news, or social news to come up with UserVoice. The idea was simple: take some of the crowdsourcing principles that worked for news and apply an added constraint (a voting limit) to help limit the vocal minority, a bane of customer feedback. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Infinia

Today’s Deal Radar brings cleantech and solar energy back into the limelight with Infinia. The Kennewick, Washington-based company is an energy technology company whose Stirling Solar products convert solar energy into electricity. As a company, Infinia has been around since 1985 and has successfully commercialized the Stirling engine for a number of applications, including combined heat and power and as a heart pump. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: concrete5

Long gone are the days of Web 1.0, when Internet content was generated by a relative few and website design was the exclusive domain of professionals. And as more people generate richer content, entrepreneurs are recognizing the need for better systems to manage it. Our latest Deal Radar company is concrete5, an open source content management system. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Outspark

Deal Radar returns to social gaming with Outspark, a casual games publisher that has developed a virtual playground where online gaming and portals merge to create a new market called 3P, in which a company must be a games Publisher, operate a Portal and own and operate a Platform. Outspark.com is a “freemium” games portal combining online gaming with personalized social networking experiences to enable player to connect with friends outside each game.  >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Tangle.com

Today’s Deal Radar company, Tangle.com, creates social networking tools for the faith-based and ‘family-friendly’ marketplace. Founded as GodTube.com, a video-sharing site for Christians, the company changed its name to Tangle.com in February 2009. The rebranding process came about when CEO Jason Illian decided to move from a video-sharing site to a full-fledged social networking site. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: xTuple

Cost-cutting is still at the top of many an executive’s mind as the recession continues. Today’s Deal Radar company, xTuple, uses open source enterprise resource planning (ERP) to help enterprises streamline their operations at a lower cost without a vendor lock-in. Its main products, xTuple ERP: PostBooks and Standard and Manufacturing Editions, include capabilities for accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), sales and purchasing, inventory control and warehousing. ERP is designed to help companies to gain better control over operations, increase productivity, and produce measurable growth across all areas of their businesses. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Jivox

Directories such as the Yellow Pages are still important marketing tools for small and medium sized businesses. But with the services of companies such as Jivox, which specializes in online video advertising, small business owners can use DIY online marketing and communications tools to develop the same kind of sophisticated advertising as larger players. Founded by Diaz Nesamoney in 2007, Jivox is headquartered in San Mateo, California with offices in Bangalore, New Delhi and Mumbai, India. Nesamoney, who had has had two prior successful ventures in Celequest and Informatica, was looking for his next challenge but wanted to do something outside of his enterprise software background. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Webtide

Deal Radar swings back towards open source with Webtide, a company that provides open source server and communications components of the Internet: Jetty, an open source Java web container, and Cometd, a scalable HTTP-based event routing bus from the Dojo Foundation. Webtide provides customized packages of these components for form factor, subscription deployment support, and subscription development advice on retainer for development teams. The technology is ideally suited for application sites with a large number of users who stay connected for long durations, for phones, and for embedded network devices. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Nokeena

TV still rules. According to Nielsen, in 4Q08 the average US household spent more than 151 hours per month watching television compared to slightly less than three hours watching video on the Internet and about 3.75 hours watching video on a mobile phone. But as watching online media becomes more common, it seems likely that consumers will increasingly demand solutions that deliver higher quality viewing experiences. Nokeena, founded in 2008, is one company that is trying to provide such a solution. Nokeena‘s new media infrastructure solutions deliver online media in way that provides a television-like viewing experience and dramatically lowers delivery costs. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: SpineMatrix

Deal Radar last discussed the use of medical technology to treat a specific problem with VeraLight, which has developed a test to detect diabetes early. Today we look at SpineMatrix, an innovative medical technology company specializing in advanced spinal diagnostics. The company has developed the Lumbar Matrix Scan, a diagnostic procedure which can produce an all-inclusive physiological image of the lower back. The system uses an array of non-invasive, deep-penetrating electrodes and generates an image to measure paraspinal neuromuscular activity. With the results of the scan, a physician can diagnose the reason behind low back pain and tell the patient if the source of the pain is a disc, a facet or a muscle. >>>

Deal Radar 2009: Spiceworks

Founded in January 2006, Spiceworks developed the industry’s first free ad-supported network/systems management tool for IT professionals in small- and medium-sized businesses. Based in Austin, Texas, the company was founded by Scott Abel, Jay Hallberg, Greg Kattawar and Francis Sullivan, who after working for enterprise software companies, wanted to do something new, different and above all, fun. After watching enterprise organizations dole out millions of dollars for IT management software, Abel came up with the idea for developing software that is powerful yet simple to use. But instead of attacking the enterprise IT management market, which was heavily serviced by IBM and several other companies, he decided to focus on the small businesses segment. >>>