Postmates Revolutionizes Online Delivery
The Internet makes shopping online faster and easier along with the added convenience of being able to do so anywhere at any time. It also provides an opportunity, particularly with the advent of smartphones and apps, to improve and combine services of all kinds. Postmates is a startup that works to do just that with the delivery of the goods you purchase online. While there are plenty of online retailers that offer various shipping services, bike courier apps and services, and personal delivery options, as well as massive companies like Amazon offering quick on-demand delivery, Postmates distinguishes itself as a unique app in two ways. Firstly, it allows users to receive delivery of anything from anywhere. It is not merely for retail or any one segment of the market, but offers delivery of anything from fast food to clothing to groceries and anything else from any retailer. Secondly, it now offers an unlimited monthly subscription allowing users to get anything and everything they want delivered quickly from anywhere whenever they want. Read more »
The online marketplace has been growing as the ideal means for individuals as well as companies to buy and sell for years. More recently, it has also become a great way to rent, particularly through services such as Trulia and Zillow, and Airbnb. While these companies prove how fruitful online rental can be, they service the particular need for home and apartment rentals, but car rental has been a trickier thing to manage. Now, however, a startup called Getaround has emerged to help make online vehicle rental easy, practical, and convenient. While people have been able to use apps like Uber and Lyft for some time now in order to make money from their cars or, conversely, easily and quickly get a ride when they need one, only the typical rental agency options have been available for vehicles until now. 
Retailers will do just about anything they can to be able to most effectively engage customers, and these customers are constantly seeking a better shopping experience. Point Inside is a startup that seeks to help shoppers with their retail experience while utilizing that experience to aid retailers as well. As its creators describe it, it is an app helps mobile shoppers search, plan, and complete their in-store shopping trips with digital in-store product location solutions. In doing so, it helps businesses better engage shoppers and encourages them to continue shopping in the future as recurring customers. 
Teaching is not an easy job, and while a teacher is ultimately responsible for the educational growth and development of his or her own students, at least in a specific subject, everyone could use a little help and support. This is where a startup called BetterLesson aims to help. In its creators’ words, it empowers teachers to drive their own personal learning by utilizing personalized coaching to help them discover what works best in their particular curriculum and develop instructional strategies they can tailor to their particular students. It does this by offering an online community of professional educators with years of experience based on the premise that many professionals receive coaching of some kind or another and this should not exclude the field of education. BetterLesson also offers a database of lessons and resources organized by education professionals. 
We can measure almost everything in business and personal life in numbers, from fitness goals to percentages to finances and almost anything imaginable. These can be hard to keep track of, particularly when segregated into so many different areas for so many different needs. It is precisely this problem that the creators of an app called Numerous seek to solve.
Marketing agencies have long been a driving force behind brand recognition and the growth of a company through public exposure. In the Internet age, methods have changed somewhat, making it much easier for people to recognize a brand; the problem is that it is also easy to get lost among so many other brands that people can find online. AgencySpotter is a startup that seeks to pair companies with the best marketing agencies to meet their particular advertising needs.
Any medium to large business and many smaller ones have a travel manager, someone who needs to know where employees traveling for business purposes are and what they are spending there. While there are many apps and websites dedicated to many different aspects of travel management, Traxo is a startup looking to do more and specifically dedicated to business rather than personal travel. Many business travelers book their own flights or hotels or use services outside of company policy, and it is next to impossible to keep track of traveling employees in real-time. Traxo serves to understand what travelers want before they book and help managers or business owners keep better track of business expenses outside the office. 
Many tech startups have addressed the major issues of city living such as efficient transportation, finding living space, food pickup and/or delivery, and finding local events or even rides. Unfortunately, many people also have a lot of personal effects to store. This can be a significant difficulty in the small but pricey apartments common to city living, and solutions are limited. Fortunately, now there is Boxbee, a tech startup that ensures that big city dwellers do not sacrifice city living to keep the stuff they want or waste time moving it back and forth between their home and out-of-the-way storage units. 
As technology improves, so too does everything we use it for, whether for work, communication, play, or any other purpose. This is also true of the way children play and learn, and a startup called Pi’ikea Street looks to use the tech devices you utilize every day to help your child learn and grow. It is a company with apps dedicated specifically to young children, even babies, that they can safely access without getting into anything else that you have stored on your tablet or smartphone or opening any other programs on it. These apps have uses for both education and simple fun, and there are a variety of them to choose from. Pi’ikea Street also has plenty to offer parents including a blog about their apps and future release plans, coloring pages, and crafts that parents can access on a mobile device or download and print to use with their children. 
GPS has made many advances since it became available for everyday use, and it now comes as a standard feature on almost every smartphone and many tablets as well. While many higher-end models can be somewhat adaptable, showing recent shifts in traffic, road closures, and similar issues, there are still many factors for which even the best GPS cannot account. This is where an app called Mapkin can help. While there is a great deal of information that a GPS can provide about the route you choose to take or its alternatives, there are many things that only a local can tell you about any particular place. Mapkin provides users with access to information that can sometimes drastically affect your drive, information that no GPS can provide otherwise.