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Deal Radar
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. >>>
1Mby1M Deal Radar: JouleX, Atlanta, Georgia/Munich And Kassel, Germany
JouleX develops sustainable energy management systems for the enterprise. Its flagship solution, the JouleX Energy Manager (JEM), provides Global 2000 companies and government agencies with the ability to monitor, analyze, and manage energy usage for all network-connected devices and systems, including in distributed offices, data centers, and facilities. JouleX says that JEM decreases energy costs by up to 60% while ensuring availability and providing reporting that helps companies to comply with emerging carbon monitoring requirements. >>>
1Mby1M Deal Radar: The Betty Mills Company, San Mateo, California
The Betty Mills Company is an Internet top 500 e-retailer that has taken a traditional low-tech business online by selling cleaning and facility products directly to business customers. >>>
1Mby1M Deal Radar: Act-On Software, Beaverton, Oregon
Last week we did a spotlight on entrepreneurs in the Northwest, and today we are featuring Act-On Software, based in Oregon, on Deal Radar. Act-On is a SaaS online marketing company focused on the “Fortune 5,000,000” – one of its goals is the commoditization of marketing automation so that it is available to businesses of all sizes. Last week, the company launched its online platform for SMBs and small marketing groups within larger organizations. >>>