1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Knowlagent, Alpharetta, Georgia

Anyone who’s ever worked in a call center knows that there’s a certain ebb and flow of incoming calls. Often, during the ebb, call center agents have little or no other work to do. Alpharetta, Georgia–based Knowlagent seeks to minimize the amount of down time call center agents have. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Cellit, Chicago, Illinois

With the advent of smart phones, the mobile marketplace has grown by leaps and bounds. People send emails, make purchases, or update their Facebook statuses with their cell phones as much as if not more than they use them to make phone calls. Today’s consumers are  more mobile than ever before, and reaching them is an ongoing challenge for marketers.

Cellit is a $5 million, profitable mobile marketing platform provider based in  Chicago, Illinois, that allows companies to send text and multimedia messaging  service (MMS) messages to their customers. These mobile campaigns act as a  mobile customer relationship management (CRM) tool for retailers, restaurants  and other companies that want to leverage mobile technology to increase customer engagement.  Cellit’s Studio campaign management platform helps clients to create interactive mobile CRM programs including coupons, contests, games,  surveys, and alerts that inform, delight and motivate customers and increase  knowledge, loyalty, and spending. The company integrates with client enterprise and point-of-sale (POS) technology and provides an easy to implement, measurable way to maximize the potential of the mobile channel. Cellit’s client list includes IKEA, SUBWAY, Pizza Hut, and Zumiez. The company appeared on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in 2010.

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1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Healthcare Interactive, Glenwood, Maryland

A report issued by the U.S. Census Bureau in September 2010 stated that in 2009, more than 50 million people living in the United States did not have health insurance. According to Wikipedia, more money per person is spent on health care in the United States than in any other country in the world. It makes sense that anything that helps to reduce the overall cost of health care while improving the quality of care that people receive is a good thing. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: Monarch Media, Santa Cruz, California

Online education and training continue to grow in popularity. It costs less for students to get bachelor’s and master’s degrees online. Employers, too, save money by arranging for employees to take training courses online and on their own time.

Monarch Media has provided e-learning solutions, including online and mobile courses, educational software development, learning management systems, and instructional design for more than 13 years. The Santa Cruz–based company serves a client base across both the private and public sectors. The top target segments are educational publishers, universities, government agencies, nonprofits and corporate training departments, and the company follows a traditional business-to-business approach. Within the educational publishing market, Monarch Media focuses on serving large and mid-sized companies ranging from the largest in the industry, such as Cengage Learning, Elsevier and the National Institutes of Health to specialty publishers like ETR Associates, a provider of specialized public health training materials. Monarch Media also plans to launch new product lines of skills training courses for mobile delivery.

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1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: ONOSYS, Cleveland, Ohio

At the beginning of the 1995 movie “The Net,” Sandra Bullock is seen ordering a pizza online. What seemed like a novel concept back then is almost commonplace today. According to the twentysomething founders of ONOSYS (Online Ordering Systems), Stan Garber, Alex Yakubovich and Oleg Fridman, online ordering sales are growing at 30% to 50% annually. Small wonder the founders created a software product that would make it easy and affordable for restaurants to offer their customers an alternative take-out ordering method.

ONOSYS is a Cleveland, Ohio–based company that develops mobile and online ordering systems for restaurant chains. The company services over 75 brands including Papa John’s International, Panera, Applebee’s, Jersey Mike’s Subs, Panda Restaurant Group and numerous others. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2011: PhoCusWright, New York And Connecticut

As long as the world has people who can afford to support it, the travel and tourism industry will continue to exist. The industry experienced a decline, understandably, after September 11, 2001. Travel declined again when the recession started in 2007, and an increasing number of people found themselves either unemployed or underemployed, practices like “staycations” grew in popularity. Businesses, too, spent less on business trips, choosing instead to hold video conferences or teleconferences whenever possible. Since, according to USTravel.org, 14 million jobs are either directly or indirectly supported by travel and tourism, companies like PhoCusWright, provide an invaluable service. >>>

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. >>>

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.  >>>