1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2011: ifood.tv, Menlo Park, California

For some, like Tyler Florence and Rachael Ray, cooking is their livelihood. For others, it’s a hobby. But for most, cooking is a necessity, a means to an end. Still, they want to cook food that looks and tastes good.

Based in Menlo Park, California, with offshore offices in India, ifood.tv was launched in 2007. This 1M/1M premium company is a popular destination for food- and recipe-related video content. On ifood.tv, foodies are coming together to discover new and interesting content, while professional chefs are using the platform to gain exposure and build their brand. Over the past few years, the company has aggregated a large library of cooking videos (more than 40,000) and text recipes (about 200,000) online; all the videos are hosted, managed, and streamed through the content management platform. Content is created by an in-house team of editors and sourced from professional chefs, video producers, authors, and media companies. The technology platform can deliver a blend of multimedia, interactive, and social features, and it can be reused to launch new Web 3.0 sites in other verticals. >>>

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. >>>

Trend: SaaS-enabled BPO

Otherwise known as technology-enabled service, the practice of offering not only software as a service, but also the people who can execute on those services with specialized skills and training, is becoming increasingly prevalent.

This gives rise to a new breed of outsourcing: highly specialized, high value, and differentiated outsourcing with interesting technology nuances. The best-known examples of truly large companies built on this model are ADP and Paychex. Now, however, I see a new trend developing along these lines.
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Latin America Rising

I have been interested in Latin America for more than 15 years, although my involvement with business in the region started only in 2007, when I visited Buenos Aires for a client engagement. Since then, I have closely followed the ever-growing reach of MercadoLibre, Latin America’s e-commerce leader, in the form of an interview with founder Marcos Galperin and regular Tech Stocks coverage. >>>