I’ve heard good things about the Under the Radar Conference for a couple of years, but haven’t been able to attend the event because of scheduling conflicts.

After serving as a corporate partner last year but still being unable to attend, I finally experienced my first Under the Radar conference yesterday not only as an attendee but as the moderator of two of the event’s afternoon sessions.

It was a terrific experience!

The Under the Radar conference showcased startups focused on or taking advantage of cloud computing solutions, in a series of tightly choreographed presentations and panel Q&A sessions akin to an American Idol talent show.

The conference founders and staff leverages their expansive rolodexes of relationships to pull together a wide range of entrepreneurs, CIOs, investors, business development professionals and folks like myself to serve as judges and moderators.

While some of the solutions presented during the sessions involved byzantine technologies which far exceeded my technical knowledge, the purpose of the event was to test them against the realities of today’s enterprise requirements and marketplace realities.

It was also to encourage people to establish new relationships, or even initiate a sale, investment or acquisition.

I had the pleasure of moderating two of the sessions focused on,

• Communications including AwayFind, CubeTree, Fonolo, SendGrid.
• Application Development & Management including AppDynamics, AppFirst, Makara, and ‘Grad Circle’ companies beyond the start-up stage – Heroku, New Relic, WaveMaker.

Click here to see the video archives of their presentations and the Q&A sessions, as well as to see the winning companies.

I want to congratulate and complement the Under the Radar staff for a superb event, and thank my friend Joe Weinman for turning me on to it and encouraging me to participate.

Under the Radar