1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Car Rental Bookers, Greece

Using the Internet to book services such as car rentals is now routine for many drivers and travelers. Internet booking capabilities, however, exist almost solely for global operators and franchises. Barriers to entry for SMBs include the high cost of development and the need to cover a minimum territory before entering into a global distribution system (GDS). In 2004, travel industry veteran Stathis Katinas teamed up with software architect Tristan Mcevan to support these small and mid-sized car rental operators, creating a tool to give them a greater online presence. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: SociaLasso, Tel Aviv, Israel

The meteoric rise of social media has in turn created a need for social media marketing for every business, large or small. A key issue for all these marketeers is to identify the players to market to: potential customers and influencers, in particular, and the ecosystem in general. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: InSync, Kolkata, India

In 2006, 1M/1M premium member InSync was established as an IT company to provide software solutions to Indian small and medium businesses (SMBs) from their location in Kolkata. Over the next three years, InSync would acquire more than 500 domestic customers, and make an important discovery. They noted that at a certain volume, it was impossible for customers to manage their e-commerce businesses without an integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Leveraging this knowledge, InSync shifted focus from services to product and released their flagship integration solution, SBOeConnect. Today, the company specializes in solutions that complement enterprise solution products, as well as business intelligence services, including reporting and data warehousing. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: PartingOut.com, Graham, Texas

After years of frustration trying to efficiently sell used car parts online, Kevin Fullerton realized there was a significant opportunity to build an online community designed around the deal flow of buying and selling used parts. The result was PartingOut.com, an online salvage marketplace for used auto parts that operates on a visual platform of parts exchange, combining a yard management system with an open web-based platform. Its intention is to work evenly through both buyers and sellers.

>>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Hooduku, Houston, Texas

In late 2011, 1M/1M premium member Hooduku, a cloud and mobile application services company, saw an unduly large bill from one of its cloud providers but couldn’t see how to track the spending. Citing lack of controls on cloud spending as a cause, Hooduku decided to develop an internal solution to the problem. Earlier this year the company released Xervmon, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) based cloud cost management and analytics product that primarily focuses on cloud spending analytics.

>>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2012: Sensible Softwares, Pune, India

Sensible Softwares is a 1M/1M premium company that launched in August 2009 with its flagship product BootStrapToday. BootStrapToday is an application life cycle management platform for software development teams. In just 60 seconds, software development teams can get started managing the life cycles of their projects.

In any software development undertaking, 30% to 40% of a developer’s effort goes into fixing bugs. That percentage is even larger for maintenance projects. The cost of fixing a bug increases exponentially with the time it takes to detect it, and writing bug-free code is impossible. But the cost of fixing a bug can be reduced by detecting bugs earlier. >>>

The Future of Software Development Is Here. Are You Ready Yet?

By guest author Mridula Velagapudi

As I wrote in a piece earlier, as a part of technology evolution, software development has evolved and matured a lot, and the present trends show that there is going to be a paradigm shift in the developers’ roles. The question is: are you ready yet?

With Web 3.0, the exponential increase of Internet-enabled mobile devices, and adoption of cloud computing technologies, an increasing number of applications are being pushed on the Web. In the future, the Web will be considered the most important medium for any kind of communication, commerce, and context-driven collaboration and for use of any kind of automated services (the consumption part of IT services). Web 3.0, mobile technologies, and cloud computing will together evolve as complementary trends that support each other’s growth. >>>

Romancing the Distributed Teams

By guest author Mridula Velagapudi

Distributed teams and demand for unbundled services will be the next big trend in business process management (BPM). Outsourcing is nothing new and has been around for many years now. In software development it has been the ‘art of the game’ for more than three decades. This trend will not slow down; it will only grow and become more sophisticated. If there ever is a debate on nurturing staff functions in-house vs. outsourcing them, it is highly probable that the companies will prefer outsourcing provided managing distributed teams does not seem a daunting task. This is because outsourcing and unbundled services for BPM makes organizations more agile, and business agility is an important factor that cannot be ignored in today’s fast-changing marketplace. >>>