LocalOn: Simple Web Marketing for Small Businesses

These days, running a business requires having an online presence as well. Maintaining a website and social media accounts can be overwhelming and expensive, but San Francisco Bay Area startup LocalOn offers a simple and painless solution to web marketing. The only website and online marketing platform built especially for small businesses, LocalOn lets entrepreneurs manage their business' web presence from one place. Through LocalOn's dashboard, business owners can edit their website, post events and deals, manage their Twitter and Facebook pages, and publish to local newspapers and associations, among others.

Believing that web marketing should be easy and manageable, LocalOn develops tools that not only produce results, but also enrich communities. LocalOn's WYSIWYG site editor enables anyone to build and modify a custom website sans a web programmer, with changes going live right away. In addition, social marketing tools are built in, allowing users to post events, news, and deals directly to their website and social media accounts. Users can advertise through local newspapers and merchants associations, send invoices, and collect payments from the LocalOn dashboard. There's also an ecommerce tool for those who would like to market and sell their products online. Customers get access to unlimited phone and email support as well.

Co-founded by Shahbano Imran and David Tolioupov, LocalOn is part of Y Combinator's current class of startups. To reach businesses that could use its web marketing suite, LocalOn has partnered with 2 newspapers and 40 merchants associations in the Bay Area. Prior to this, the company went door-to-door to sell its product, which Imran describes as “a complete failure,” as small businesses were receiving pitches from 20 startups per day and nobody was interested in hearing another one. Now that some local businesses have signed on, LocalOn plans to target those outside of the Bay Area.

CDNify: Easy and Affordable CDN Implementation

Based in Manchester, United Kingdom, CDNify is a content delivery network (CDN) that specifically caters to startups, developers, and digital agencies. Implementing a CDN is usually a frustrating and potentially expensive process; the company's goal is to change all of that by making CDN as flexible, accessible, affordable, and easy-to-use to as many businesses and people as possible.

CDNify takes a website's static files and distributes them across its global network of cloud servers. Every time a user visits a website, CDNify delivers the content via the POP location closest to them to provide a lightning fast experience. A faster loading site leads to increased user engagement, more repeat visits, higher conversion rates, and better search engine rankings.

Compatible with various content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento, CDNify offers a “pay as you grow” model. There are no monthly payments or subscription fees; users only pay for what they consume. Bandwidth blocks range from 500GB ($14.50) to 10TB ($222.50).

BioBeats: Adaptive Media for Better Health

Founded by Nadeem Kassam, BioBeats is a healthtech startup that merges entertainment and healthcare. Believing that our devices and media should interact with us, BioBeats develops adaptive media technologies, which reacts to the human body's environment and vital signs in real time. The startup hopes to help people live healthier, more engaging lives by monitoring themselves with biometrics.

BioBeats' first product, Pulse, launched at SXSW 2012. Holding your finger over your iPhone's camera prompts the app to play music according to your heartbeat. Recently, Biobeats partnered with hip hop group the Far East Movement to create an event powered by more than 1.5 million heartbeats from around the world. Pulse went on to win the Spotify Hackathon Echonest Prize at SXSW.



BioBeats will soon be releasing BioMuse, which builds playlists based on your heart rate, breathing, and other physiological factors. In other words, BioMuse automatically searches for music to fit your mood. BioBeats plans to eventually create a suite of products that “use entertainment to facilitate the wellness process,” including an app that generates custom music from a group of samples. The company is working on a clinical app for hospitals as well.

BioBeats recently raised $650,000 in seed funding from actor Will Smith, music manager Scooter Braun, entertainment lawyer Ken Hertz, actor Damon Wayans, artist management exec Mark Beaven, musician Justin Boreta, record label Cantora Records, Zhen Fund, ENIAC Ventures, and angel investors Kevin Colleran and Gotham Chopra. According to Kassam, he secured more than his target amount due to “the deep interest from all these partners.”

BioBeats was founded in 2012 after David Plans (VP product) and Davide Morelli (VP engineering) pitched to Kassam their program to visualize and sonify brain waves using just an iPhone and a custom-built headset. Kassam immediately saw the opportunity to use heart data to create experiential music, as well as fulfill his dream of uniting healthcare and entertainment.

Snaptee: A Custom T-Shirt Design App

Snaptee is a Hong Kong-based startup that believes a T-shirt is not only an article of clothing, but also a blank canvas for expression. Its iOS app (Android version coming soon) lets anyone design and order their own custom T-shirt with just a few taps on their smartphone. Simply link your photo or Instagram albums to Snaptee and create a cool design by applying a filter and adding some text. You can also use the Remix function to modify other users' designs, if you're feeling lazy. Snaptee uses 100 percent organic cotton garments and ships to anywhere in the world for as little as $5.

Snaptee launched earlier this year and has since amassed 130,000 users in 45 countries. So far, the app has been used to create over 160,000 unique designs. With key markets in Japan, Germany, and the US, the startup plans to target Australia, South Korea, the UK, and Southeast Asia next.

Jifiti Makes You a Better Gifter

Nobody wants to be a bad gifter, but who has time to learn and remember the shirt size, favorite color, or personal style of every single person in their life? Besides, those things change. To take the guessing and awkwardness out of the gifting process, a team of entrepreneurs and developers has created Jifiti, a free app that makes gift-giving easy and worry-free.

Next time you're shopping in-store or online, you can use Jifiti to “teleport” a gift to a friend or family member. Just scan an item, buy it, and send it off to the recipient's mobile phone. They'll then get a notification that they have a gift, which they can redeem online or in-store. With Jifiti, you don't have to worry about shipping or picking out the right size, color, or style. And if your recipient doesn't like what you got them, they can always select a different product from the store.



As a giftee, you can use Jifiti to create wish lists of items you want, so your loved ones will know not to get you another pair of socks or more gift cards. Scan products to add them to your list and share them with your friends and family. You'll get notifications if someone chipped in for your gift or purchased something for you.

To deliver a one-stop gifting experience, Jifiti has partnered with dozens of well-known retailers, including Old Navy, Barnes & Noble, Toys “R” Us, Williams-Sonoma, Sur La Table, Build-a-Bear Workshop, The Body Shop, GameStop, and more. The startup has just raised $2.5 million in seed funding from Simon Property Group, Schottenstein Stores Corp., and the Jesselson Group. Simon Property Group, which operates more than 300 malls in the US and Asia, will be promoting Jifiti in over 100 more of its malls by this holiday season.

Postcards App Helps Seniors Join the Digital Age

These days, we share everything via the web and mobile, be it photos, videos, stories, or memories. In our modern, tech-driven world, it's easy for elders to feel intimidated by new technology. Rich Lowenberg and Danielle Narveson believe that our parents and grandparents don't have to be left behind, and that we can bring them with us into the digital age with ease. Along with a few friends, the duo built Postcards, a free iPad app that allows seniors to receive photos and videos from loved ones effortlessly.

Made with seniors in mind, Postcards requires no computer experience or user interaction on the part of the receiver. If grandpa doesn't want to interact with the app, he can simply leave the iPad on the mantle and still receive photos, videos, and messages from loved ones. Using their computer or smartphone, family members can send content from any site and control the app's settings from the dashboard. Basically, all grandpa has to do is sit back, relax, and enjoy the photos and videos of his kids and grandkids.

Swell News Radio Learns What You Like and Don't Like

Swell is to news radio as Pandora is to music radio. Designed with the belief that your time is valuable and should be maximized, Swell only brings you content that you want to listen to. And you don't even have to set up or manage any playlists, as the app will do that for you. The more you use Swell, the more it learns about your preferences. For instance, if you listen to TED Talks, it delivers more TED Talks. If you skip the Sports Update, you get less of that.

Swell's advanced algorithm evaluates content based on a variety of factors, including the amount of time you and other similar users spend listening to episodes of a program, the rating and metadata assigned by a human curator, how closely the content and topic matches your interests, and the rating provided by the Swell user community.

Swell promises to offer “a continuous stream of good stuff,” presented in a user interface that's minimalist, beautiful, and easy to use.