If you find yourself constantly checking your favorite retailer’s website for new arrivals, Wantr wants to be your middle man. The company raised $600,000 in seed money today to give you alerts as soon as new products appear at your favorite brands.

The funding was led by Seed Capital with participation from the founders of Trendsales and other angel investors.

Customers can save their favorite stores to Wantr and sign up for emails when a new product is available for purchase. The service really captures that “first world problems” vibe but could be good for artisans who have a favorite supply shop and want to see what new materials they can use.

Alongside the alerts system, Wantr also has a Pinterest-like feature that allows customers to share, or “want,” their favorite products that come in. Really, this sounds like a great deal for retailers. They get a really targeted market (people who have signed up to get product announcements from them) and also the opportunity for those products to go “viral” if the Pinterest-like feature ever gains enough users.

What would really be useful is if Wantr let you pick specific items to follow and then alerted you when those items went on sale. That’s one of the main reasons I go back to my favorite stores’ websites, and having this automated actually fills a consumer need.

The company was founded in 2012 and officially launched to the public in 2013. It is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Child shopping image via Shutterstock

PagerDuty provides IT alerting and incident tracking software. In this era of cloud computing, sites need to be fully functional at all times. Issues can arise at any time of the day or night, leaving IT teams scrambling to respond to the problem.

A number of companies provide monitoring tools, such as Nagios, Zenoss, Pingdom, monit, Munin, Splunk, and BasicState, which send out notifications when something is going wrong. Many of these services focus on just one part of IT infrastructure.  As a result, companies have to cobble together monitoring systems that can be disorganized and generate too much noise.

PagerDuty integrates with these systems and aggregates the alerts. When an incident is triggered, notifications are sent via email, SMS, and phone. PagerDuty has developed a unique set of tools to ensure that the right person receives the right notifications (database administrators don’t get pinged about application problems), and 4 am alerts are only sent when absolutely urgent. IT teams can use the software to set up escalation systems, meaning that if one person doesn’t respond, someone else is notified until there is a response. This prevents problems from slipping through the cracks. Scheduling features make it easier to divvy up on-call responsibilities, which also prevents lapses.

“Today, we are the “9-1-1 dispatch” system for IT,” said CEO Alex Solomon in a blog post about the funding. “The next major step in the vision is to expand beyond just the critical incidents. We ultimately will become the central nervous system of IT: we’ll provide the interconnecting fabric between your systems and the people responsible for managing them. Our big audacious goal is to reduce the noise. In other words, only the critical issues should wake you up at 4am, false alerts should be automatically filtered out, and low priority incidents should be surfaced in aggregate in summary reports.”

Clients include high-profile customers like Microsoft, Adobe, EA, Square, Github, Pinterest, Braintree, Heroku, Intuit, 37signals, and Etsy. This first round of investment will go towards hiring more “crazy-smart engineers” for product development and fuel global expansion. In addition to Andreessen Horowitz, the Webb Investment Network, Opscore founder Jesse Robbins, and existing seed investors Harrison Metal, Baseline Ventures, and Ignition Partners contributed.

PagerDuty was founded in 2009 and is based in San Francisco. Read the press release

The companies are creating ShopAlerts, which are location-triggered text messages sent from brands to consumers who opt into the service. The companies claim they can use the service to reach as many as 60 percent of U.S. consumers. The two companies are working on ShopAlert brand campaigns for retailers such as The North Face. More brands are signing up on a monthly basis, the companies say.

Placecast’s ShopAlerts service is a white-label mobile marketing tool. Retailers and other direct marketers deploy the technology to create their own version of the service. Consumers who agree to receive the messages can opt into them while they’re at a store, online, browsing text messages, or visiting mobile web sites or social networks. Once ShopAlerts are activated, the service automatically alerts the consumer about a brand’s local sales, special events, or other relevant information based on their location.

Combining location information and target marketing is called geo-fencing.

Location Labs allows Placecast to locate phones using its Location-As-a-Service Platform. The platform lets developers incorporate real-time location of smartphones and feature phones based on data from carrier partners. It does not require end users to download an app to their phone. Placecast CEO Alistair Goodman said the partnership with Location Labs gives the company a much greater reach than it would otherwise have.

Placecast was founded in 2005. It raised $8 million in a second round of funding in March. Investors include Quatrex Capital, Onset Ventures and Voyager Capital.

Some rival services such as ShopKick are based on apps, which only a small percentage of people are likely to have downloaded. Another rival is Xtify, which also does geo-relevant mobile messaging.