MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Dealmaker Media’s Under the Radar conference is something akin to a debutantes’ ball. Young and/or startup companies put on their Sunday best, get their goals and priorities well-rehearsed, and compete for a few invitations to be formally introduced to venture-capital society.
Then comes the ball itself: the daylong showcase event at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, in which each of the companies selected gets six minutes on stage (with a PowerPoint, SlideRocket, video or other presentation) to try and impress a group of skeptical venture capitalists looking for companies with good ideas and at least the potential for good execution.
"This year, we had about 300 companies competing to get into the final 32," Dealmaker’s Jasmine Antonick told eWEEK. "The ones who made it—as they are every year—are very impressive."
The theme for this 17th such event was "Consumerization of the Enterprise." Most of the companies showed cloud-service related products.
Chances are quite good that if your company is a finalist to present at UTR, you will get funding of some kind—whether from a venture capital firm or firms, an angel investor or some other source. You’d really have to blow it on the presentation, and that rarely happens.
The format is similar to speed-dating: The startups were grouped in sets of three to five for each of seven sessions. Each CEO or president gets those precious few minutes to deliver a clear, compelling message about what problem his company’s product or service solves and why his or her company will have enduring value.
These are companies—carefully selected by Dealmaker Media founder Debbie Landa and her team—that are likely to be serious IT influencers in the months and years to come.
Following are UTR’s short descriptions of all of the 32 companies selected, in alphabetical order, including their headquarters locations and links to their Websites. eWEEK will examine many of these in closer detail in the weeks and months to come.
Abiquo, Redwood City, Calif., has an open-source management platform for private, public and hybrid clouds using a globally deployed computing infrastructure that can be accessed through a single control dashboard. Abiquo says its customers are able to decrease the cost/complexity of managing their virtual IT environments while maintaining control of the physical infrastructure and increasing agility to change hypervisors as needed.
For more, read the eWEEK article: Under the Radar Introduces New Set of Fresh-Idea Companies.