Onswipe

Onswipe is a New York-based tablet publishing company that CREATES customized mobile sites for web publishers. In 2011, Time Inc. named Onswipe one of "10 NYC Startups to Watch”. The company has raised over $6 million in venture-capital funding.

History

CEO Jason L. Baptiste and President Andrés Barreto founded Onswipe as PadPressed on June 1, 2010. The company’s first prototype launched in July 2010. The company was rebranded as Onswipe in 2011.

In 2011, Onswipe was chosen to be part of the Techstars, a startup incubator that offers seed funding and three months of mentorship for selected firms.

The Onswipe platform officially launched in June 2011. Also in 2011, Time Inc. named Onswipe one of "10 NYC Startups to Watch”.

In January 2010, Onswipe added comment support and more layouts. In March 2012, the company added real-time touch analytics.

In May 2012, the company released Onswipe for iPhone and Onswipe Draft. Onswipe for iPhone enables the delivery of iPhone-optimized touch content. Onswipe Draft is a web-based editor designed for personalizing Onswipe layouts.

Television and media

Onswipe was featured in the Bloomberg TV documentary series called TechStars. Running from September to October of 2011, the six-episode series featured the companies from TechStars' New York City program. Onswipe and ten other companies including Nestio, Shelby.tv, and CrowdTwist were filmed in a reality-show style.

Product impact

Onswipe uses HTML5 to allow publishers to develop mobile content without having to develop native applications.

Onswipe says that its users see an increase in page views of 300 to 400 percent, an increase in time-on-site of 50 percent, and benefits from interactive media tools like geo-location, video, and social sharing. Onswipe advertisements also perform 50 to 100 times better than traditional ads in banner form, and every ad engagement is measurable because Onswipe is web-based.

Onswipe is able to take content from any content management system (CMS) and convert it to a clean interface for the mobile experience. Companies or individuals can customize their publications to include feeds from Flickr, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and other media. The interface is fully customizable through layout options, branding, and color schemes, and has been designed for use by anyone from companies with millions of viewers to personal publishers who want to go mobile with their blogs. Onswipe also facilitates a new level of full-page advertising that functions better on tablets.

Onswipe is available for the iPad and other tablets as well as the iPhone. It is an SaaS solution that adds only one line of code to the publisher's existing website, but allows publishers to make changes through its "Draft" functionality. It is 100% ad-driven and costs nothing for publishers to use.

Onswipe has played a role in addressing touch-friendly web-traffic trends. In September 2012, the company released data derived from mobile sites that are powered by Onswipe. The data showed that 98 percent of tablet web-traffic came from iPads. Further statistics from Onswipe have confirmed the prevalence of Apple’s iOS 6 platform.

Leadership

Jason L. Baptiste and Andrés Barreto, the co-founders of Onswipe, have a history of starting successful companies. Before starting Onswipe, the pair co-founded Cloudomatic, a SaaS app store for businesses acquired by Ambassador (formerly Zferral). They have both stayed on as advisors since the acquisition.

In August 2012, Onswipe hired Jared Hand as its first chief revenue officer and Rich Bloom as its first chief operating officer. Hand and Bloom have announced plans to further develop their publisher relations and revenue sharing methods.