Deal Radar 2008: Pandora

Pandora Media, based in Oakland, California, is an Internet radio web site. Founded by Tim Westergren in 2000, it was formerly known as Savage Beast Technologies. Pandora uses the Music Genome Project, a collection of songs that have been analyzed by trained musicians. >>>

Featured Videos

Deal Radar 2008: Metacafe

Metacafe is a popular video sharing site where users can upload and view video clips. The company was founded by Eyal Hertzog and Arik Czerniak, with early funding from Ofer Adler, in July 2003 in Tel Aviv. In September 2006, the company moved its headquarters to Palo Alto, California and currently has offices in Tel Aviv and New York. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Appirio

Appirio was founded in October 2006 by Narinder Singh and Glenn Weinsten to help companies integrate Software-as-a-Service (Saas) solutions. Headquartered in San Mateo, California, the company has a strong advantage because of its partnerships with Google and Salesforce.com. A cloud integrator with a focus on cloud applications working well together, Appirio ‘practices what it preaches’ and runs its own business without any servers on premise. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Care.com

Care.com is described as a “Family 2.0” company that helps users find caregivers for children, pets and the elderly. It was founded in 2006 as a result of owner and CEO Sheila Lirio Marcelo’s personal struggle to find quality care providers. Before starting Care.com, Marcelo was part of several Internet ventures like TheLadders.com and Upromise.com. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Revision3

Revision3 is a San Francisco-based Internet TV network. The company was formed in 2005 by Kevin Rose, Jay Adelson, Dan Huard, Ron Gorodetzky, and David Prager to address the lack of good content on traditional television. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Coremetrics

Coremetrics is an option for businesses looking to optimize online marketing efforts through analytics. Founded in May 1999, the company provides solutions to enhance marketing performance and yield high returns on online marketing investment. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Sabrix

On our radar today is Sabrix, a transaction tax management provider. Based in San Ramon, California, Sabrix provides applications for businesses to calculate and manage their taxes. I have discussed the company’s combining domain expertise with technology before. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Biz360

Biz360 transforms available information to help businesses make informed decisions in order to understand and reach their target audiences better. They provide companies with this market research by using technology, analytics and natural language processing (NLP) to sift through large amounts of electronic and traditional media and present the information in flexible, easy-to-use formats. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Mixpo

Mixpo—a Seattle-based company—offers a platform to simplify the process of handling multimedia on the Internet. Aimed at small and medium business owners, the company concentrates on providing tools to simplify the task of modifying and posting ads online. Unlike other companies in the segment that are still concentrating on video sharing, Mixpo is focused on capitalizing on the online advertising market. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: PaidContent

PaidContent—the flagship site of ContentNext Media Inc.— is a blog site that covers news on media related technology worldwide. It was founded by editor and publisher Rafat Ali in 2002 in a bid to raise his personal profile and find a new job. Four years later Ali made PaidContent a business and founded ContentNext Media, joining the bandwagon of monetized blogs like GigaOm and TechCrunch, which have been covered before. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: UpTake

UpTake is a travel site that offers users options to help them plan themed trips such as kid- or pet-friendly trips, girl getaways and romantic escapes. The site caters to the millions of people who have yet to decide what type of holiday they want – where to go, what to do, where to stay, what to see. (I must admit, I tend not to be that kind of a traveler … I decide on things and THEN start researching.) >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Powerset

Powerset concentrates on natural language processing (NLP) to search the web, meaning that the search engine uses whole phrases rather than just keywords, making it easier to get the results required. The site currently uses natural language queries to search Wikipedia. Powerset’s real strength is the way it indexes web pages: pages are analyzed according to semantics, or the meanings of words and of the relationships between them; similar words; and categories to find better results. >>>

Catching Up on Deal Radar 2008

Here’s some more catching up material for the holiday weekend:

In the last month, we have featured the following companies in the Deal Radar 2008 series:

* SaaS: PayCycle, Bill.com, Daptiv, PayScale.

* Online Video/IPTV: Joost, VideoEgg, YuMe, BitTorrent, Brightcove, Revver, MotionBox, Veoh.

* Others: Inform, Mercado, AKQA, Geni, Blurb, Mimosa, Metaweb, Cake Financial, and Mint.

Deal Radar 2008: Mint

Mint is a smart, easy-to-use online money management tool. The service is free, setting up an account is simple, and the site requires little user involvement while offering several advantages. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Cake Financial

Cake Financial is an online social investing network that enables individuals to improve their portfolio’s performance. >>>