Future Stars Gallery

Introducing the “selected” LEADING IN LOCAL Future Stars - early stage start-ups that are busy developing what they hope will be the next big thing in interactive local media. Please meet them at the show and vote for your favorite “star.” (If you are an early stage startup developing the next big thing in SMB digital marketing, there’s still time to submit an entry.)

Maverick by Appforma is the world’s best local marketing agency, and it’s virtual. The combination of Maverick's Artificial Marketing Intelligence with creative ideas and amazing content helps local businesses achieve amazing results with limited budgets and minimal time. We made it so easy, that business owners can approve and manage their entire marketing program from their smartphones.
Founders: Itamar Shfir, Eyal Kedem; Eyal Abramovitch, Halel Porat

ContactUs.com is a web solution offering a proactive contact form experience and cloud-based contact manager for websites to capture and manage inbound website inquiries. At the front-end, ContactUs.com adds beautiful, conversion-optimized contact and signup forms designed to generate more web users, leads and phone calls. On the back-end, we track each form submission, providing valuable web analytics such as referrer URL, geo-ip, pages visited before submitting, and whether new/existing visitor. Additionally, we provide seamless integration with popular 3rd party software you may already use.
Founders: Howard Yeh, Brad Seiler

SMBs recognize the benefit of reaching customers closer to their purchasing decisions The Local Brain automatically detects their customer’s presence in store and triggers a promotional message using microgeolocation. The message could be a link to download a special offer, reserve a table, enter a sweepstakes, play a game, or earn loyalty points. The goal is to influence customer purchases or return visits, promote inventory or to create a better experience. The Local Brain platform includes a range of modules that help SMBs manage, execute and measure their marketing success.
Founders: Mary Beth Brendza, Brian Gambs

Customer feedback re-imagined for a mobile, always-connected real-time world. Local Viewpoints collects, analyzes and publishes customer feedback from brick and mortar businesses. Our technology lets merchants produce actionable customer insights and attract new customers. Local Viewpoints is Software as a Service company. We sell a mobile-first, location specific customer feedback & review platform to businesses with 1 to 1000 locations. We target businesses who believe in the value of word of mouth marketing and want to measure and monitor the customer satisfaction of their existing customer base.
Founders: Gib Olander, Chris Lubkert

Mocentric is the world’s first scalable self-serve local mobile advertising platform to empower local ad agencies and affiliates that manage local advertisers, to run highly targeted mobile ad campaigns. Mocentric’s simple web-based dashboard and industry-leading mobile technology allow agencies and affiliates to target mobile users with geographic precision, quickly, at affordable budget and competitive CPM price points, within highly engaging mobile editorial environments.
Founders: Bill Ganon, Mike O'Hara, John Hartsell

Nifty Window is an integrated local marketing platform for national and regional brands that helps acquire new customers for their local outlets by enabling them:
   - to accurately showcase their business via inviting, visual, contextual & near real-time virtual display windows
   - using a single platform
   - in front of millions of people who perform local searches via mobile applications and on the web every day.
Founders: Sujit Zachariah, Rakesh Raghuvanshi

Business owner Gurpreet Singh received calls from exasperated consumers requesting service from beyond his service area. That inspired him to design Seva Call, an algorithm based virtual concierge platform. The service automatically ranks companies by location, availability, reviews and more. It then contacts the top-rated business, connecting consumers to first-responders in about 90 seconds. It’s free to consumers, and member businesses only pay for their chosen live conversations.
Founders: Manpreet Singh, Gurpreet Singh, Aman Bakshi

Shout About Us is a service that helps local businesses acquire reviews from their everyday satisfied customers.
Founder: Griff Emery

UpRing's proprietary technology provides newspapers with a call-based performance advertising product to sell locally. Beyond the mobile/desktop and in-app pay per calland call tracking/analytics is a paperless coupon/offer/deal voucher delivery and redemption system that uses unique phone numbers on coupons/vouchers to capture “leakage” in the consumer savings environment. UpRing also powers call-based contests for building mobile marketing lists for local merchants and leverages unique phone numbers for VIP loyalty programs for local merchants. All white-labeled for newspapers.
Founders: Chris MacDonald, Tom DeLuca

Zipinion is a technology company allowing businesses large and small to collect and analyze external consumer insight in real-time. Zipinion’s simple-to-use polling application is the fastest most affordable way to get independent unbiased feedback on marketing creative and textual content.
Founders: Nathaniel Gates, Brant Darby, Michael Gualano