1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Uloop, Chicago, Illinois

Anyone who’s ever gone to college knows that college students have a lot of needs. They need internships for real-world work experience in their chosen fields. They need scholarships to help pay for their education. If they want to live off campus, they need to find apartments in safe, nearby neighborhoods; and then they’ll need to find roommates. Uloop, Inc. was founded in 2007 to meet those needs and others through localized college classifieds. It does this with its two primary business units: Uloop.com and CampusAve.com.

Uloop.com is online college classifieds with student users at more than 1,500 colleges and universities throughout the United States. Through the Uloop.com classifieds platform, students can connect to buy and sell textbooks, find jobs and internships, search for housing, look for roommates, and so on.

CampusAve.com is Uloop’s white-label classifieds platform for college newspapers. It powers online and print classifieds for more than 175 college newspapers, including Arizona State University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Oregon and Rutgers University. >>>

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1Mby1M Deal Radar: Virsto, Sunnyvale, CA

As the world of storage virtualization continues to change, old problems need new solutions. Quite a few companies have tried to answer the old questions in new ways; some have succeeded.

Virsto Software provides innovative storage virtualization solutions to address the growing need for cost-effective and efficient storage for virtual servers and desktops. It delivers the only 100% software virtual-machine (VM) storage solution that companies worldwide use to achieve breakthrough increases in performance, reduce storage capital and operating costs, and streamline provisioning and data management for virtual computing.  >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: ReCourses, Nashville, Tennessee

David C. Baker’s chosen profession aligns perfectly with one of the many things entrepreneurs need to be successful: management skills. Baker founded ReCourses, a one-man management consulting firm, in 1994 to give exclusive help to small and mid-sized marketing services firms (advertising, design, interactive, public relations and in-house departments that also perform those functions). >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Tapjoy, San Francisco, California

Tapjoy is an engagement and monetization service for mobile applications. The company’s turnkey in-app advertising platform helps developers acquire new users, drive engagement within their applications, and create incremental income by providing ad-in-game currency free. The company’s network includes more than 9,000 apps and 200 million global consumers on iOS, Android, and emerging mobile platforms. Tapjoy has 1.5 million transactions a day across its network for app developers and advertisers. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: VigLink, San Francisco, CA

VigLink is a content monetization company that helps publishers of all kinds earn money from content on their sites. The company’s core product provides automated link affiliation that secures commissions from existing outbound links on the publishers’ sites. The site experiences no visible changes or interference with its monetization efforts; however, when someone clicks through to a commercial site and buys something, the content publisher receives a commission. The company is currently testing link insertion, which would add links to a site’s existing content. It would also be automatically affiliated. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Contify, Delhi, India

Contify is a content aggregation and distribution company based in New Delhi, India that markets content obtained through its partnerships with 250 of India’s leading and niche publications. That content, more than 3,000 business news stories, is then distributed daily to clients in the form of global information databases such as Dow Jones Factiva, Thomson Reuters, LexisNexis, and Bloomberg.

The idea for Contify came to Delhi native, Mohit Bhakuni, during his tenure as the head of the content syndication department at Hindustan Times Media Limited (HTML). He had experience working with information databases like Factiva not only while pursuing his MBA at INSEAD in France, but also while working as a consultant for Deloitte Consulting in the United States. He returned to India in 2005 and started working for the Indian Express Group (IE). From there, he went to HTML. Working with the content license managers of information databases showed Bhakuni that “there is much demand for good quality content from India.” >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: BonitaSoft, Grenoble, France

Deal Radar revisits open source with Grenoble-based BonitaSoft. The company creates a functional open source business process management (BPM) solution that designs, simulates, and automates processes. The aim is to allow businesses to turn their processes into business applications. Bonita Open Solution is designed to be comprehensive and scalable BPM solution that includes three main components: a process studio, an execution engine, and a Web user experience. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: DisputeSuite, Tampa Bay, Florida

DisputeSuite develops niche technology and education services to assist credit repair companies in the management and growth of their business. These companies help consumers who notice an error on their report or whom want assistance in rebuilding or repairing their credit. DisputeSuite provides an interactive platform for professionals to communicate with consumers in a secure environment while tracking and managing the consumer’s credit repair process. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: HootSuite, Vancouver, British Columbia

Mashable perhaps says it best: “So many statuses, so little time.” Social media can be an excellent tool for small businesses to collaborate and to build and maintain relationships with new and returning customers, but managing multiple profiles, commentary, and brand mentions – and keeping social media assets secure – can be a daunting task. HootSuite, which builds and markets a social media dashboard for Web and mobile platforms, aims to help individuals and organizations manage multiple social profiles including Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, among others. Users can also monitor brand mentions, schedule updates, and track results with modular reports that integrate with Google Analytics and Facebook Insights.  The product includes security features to prevent account hijacking and mistakes when posting to corporate profiles. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: CapLinked, Manhattan Beach, California

My regular readers may be surprised to the see the subject of today’s 1M/1M Deal Radar. For the past three years, Deal Radar has been covering companies that have at least $1 million in annual revenue. It’s an important milestone that we take seriously. So why CapLinked, a pre-revenue company? Well, primarily because it’s a company that has been misunderstood as financing exchange, and to give the 1M/1M entrepreneurs a clear view of what they really do. CapLinked is an online platform for private companies, investors, and their advisors to collaborate, manage a capital raising or asset sale, and exchange updates. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: mopay, Palo Alto, California

According to Mashable, the global combined market for all types of mobile payments is expected to double from its current value to reach more than $600 billion by 2013. The mobile payment market for goods and services, excluding contactless near field communication (NFC) transactions and money transfers, is expected to exceed $300 billion globally by 2013. This is good news for companies such as mopay, which develops payment solutions that allow consumers to buy goods online via their mobile or landline phones. Online retailers can also use mopay instead of relying exclusively on credit card merchants. The aim is to offer consumers a better way to pay for online goods and merchants a safe and reliable option. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Spigit, Pleasanton, California

Regular readers will be familiar with The 1M/1M Deal Radar’s coverage of crowdsourcing through companies such as crowdSPRING, UserVoice, and the 1M/1M partner CrowdEngineering. Today’s post looks at a different kind of idea management: innovation management. Pleasanton, California–based Spigit makes social business collaboration and innovation management software. This software is designed to tap into the collective intelligence of an organization and transform it into actionable, predictive information. By incorporating incentives, idea graduation, idea trading and real-time analytics, Spigit helps companies to harness the social capital within their organization. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: VirtuOz, Emeryville, California, And Paris, France

The February 2011 victory of IBM’s Watson, a “question-answer computer,” over two human competitors in the popular trivia game show “Jeopardy” was a milestone in artificial intelligence that caught the attention of scientists and the general public alike. Today’s Deal Radar company, VirtuOz, points to Watson’s humanlike reasoning capabilities as a testament to the viability of natural language processing (NLP) for commercial applications. VirtuOz provides intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) for customer service and sales to large and mid-market enterprises. The agents are designed to be an online channel for improved access to customer service and a high-quality user experience that avoid the high costs associated with traditional customer service channels such as search and human agents. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar: Digital Photo Academy, New York City

Typical studies of of the economic contribution of the arts tend to focus on the income jobs in the field produce. This approach is wrong, says Financial Times columnist John Kay, and reveals only a poor understanding of wealth creation. As funding for libraries, museums, and public school programs in art and music is cut, sometimes severely; as uninformed or weakly reasoned comments about the lack of value of a fine or liberal arts degree circle the blogosphere, it is more important than ever to try to truly understand the role of the arts and humanities in the economy, education, and public life. (For a more thoughtful debate than most, readers may want to see this week’s New York Times Room for Debate piece Career Counselor: Bill Gates or Steve Jobs?) To this end, the 1M/1M Deal Radar is seeking stories of entrepreneurs in these fields. But we want to do more than simply give examples of artists, writers, and others who have been successful in setting up a business; rather, we want to show, through their business’s story, what has made it work. The first such Deal Radar company is Digital Photo Academy, a workshop series that delivers 960 digital photo workshops and 80 photo retailer demonstrations a year in 25 cities and metropolitan areas in the United States. Workshops focus on both techniques in the field and the use of plug-ins and software for photographs. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar: Hatsize, Calgary, Canada

The 1M/1M Deal Radar heads north to feature Hatsize, a cloud automation software company based in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. From its place at the intersection of buyer and seller, Hatsize provides hands-on demos, proofs of concept (POC), and training to technology companies’ prospects, channel partners, and customers by using virtual private cloud technology to fully automate scheduling and provisioning over the Web from anywhere in the world. The goal is to make sales more efficient; that is, to help customers make decisions faster, accelerating revenue growth and expanding market penetration while reducing travel and equipment costs as well as the time a sales engineer spends per customer. >>>