Fitbit recently unveiled their new and improved super watch the Fitbit Charge, just in time for the Holiday season. Six months ago the company recalled their product the Fitbit Force to due the nickel content in the surgical steel affecting some consumers causing allergic reactions, thought limited in cases according to Mashable Fitbit offered a full refund, and worked hard to come back with a new and improved product. During this release, Fitbit introduced the three products it is releasing within the next year.  

Products include the Fitbit Charge, the Fitbit Charge HR, and the Fitbit Surge. Currently the only product available for purchase is the charge which offers special features that track steps, calories burn, and sleeping patterns, which can then be synched to your smart phone. The fit band also displays incoming calls and messages, so you can check your wrist before reaching for the phone. So far the Fitbit products come in black and slate, but new colors such as blue and burgundy will be released in 2015 according to Mashable.

The FitBit collections offer the combination of hardware and software unity to take health tracking to the next level. Relying on smartphone devices is less efficient, than synching the features of a smartphone and smart watch. The Fitbit HR offers heart rate monitoring during physical exertion and rest periods alike, offering extensive health insight for only a 20$ price increase. the Fitbit Charge HR offers heart rate monitoring, GPS, sleep analysis, and activity tracking. Unfortunately these two products are yet to be released to the market, but we will patiently await their release, and look forward to taking health tracking to a new level.

This morning at 10am PST, the whole world gathered for the unveiling of the highly anticipated iPhone 6 at the Apple Live event in Cupertino. However, Apple not only revealed the details of the next iPhone but also debuted their very first product in the world of wearable technology. The Apple Watch, described as “a smartwatch with inductive charging, a square face, sapphire glass, swappable bands, a heartbeat sensor and a rotating digital crown” by TechCrunch, is Apple’s sleekest new product proving their innovation in the advancement of technological development.

While Apple made it very clear that the watch is not simply an iPhone on your wrist (the watch is only compatible with iPhone 5 and 5s), the list of applications and functions available on the watch holds its own against its mobile counterpart. The design of the watch is classic Apple, with remarkably clean features and lines. All the watches use the innovative “digital crown”, aka the spinning thing on the side of the watch, to access the different interfaces and utilities.

A quick description of the aesthetic differences between the collections:
WATCH: The standard 38mm and 42mm watch faces with leather and stainless steel bands in a variety of loop designs and colors.
WATCH SPORT: Made to withstand sport-style use, these watch faces are made with a 60 percent stronger alloy case. This collection also includes a “sport band’ made of durable Fluoroelastomer in a variety of bright colors.
WATCH EDITION: This collection seems to be the high-end collection, with Rose and Yellow 18-karat Gold 38mm and 42mm watch faces and leather straps.

Brynn Elliott is a singer/songwriter from Atlanta, GA who just released her debut EP titled ‘Notions of Love.’ We designed her logo and complete web presence to fully match her personality and aesthetic. She’s headed on tour with Tyler Ward this summer, be sure to check her out!

Desktop View:

Mobile View:

After announcing at WWDC 2013 a month ago, Apple has already released two Beta versions of iOS 7. The latest version, Beta 3, was just released to developers and has a few tweaks to the design and functionality. Here are some pictures and screenshots of how iOS 7 will look like and some of the highlights of the new system (iOS Beta 2 on left, iOS Beta 3 on right):

We are happy to announce that we have launched THREE awesome sites for Las Vegas nightclubs, Haze, 1Oak, and The Bank.

With nightclubs in Las Vegas, Miami, and Dubai, The Light Group is one of the United States’ leading hospitality development and management companies. Our team developed these killer sites with both desktop and mobile views, and great api integrations.

Haze, 1Oak, and The Bank came to Oniracom with the need to update their web presence. Oniracom based our designs on client requests, while blending leading-edge technology with the website build. The result is a beautiful handcrafted website, boasting intuitive navigation features and stunning event-based social content.

Get a feel of each of the sites by exploring through the video walk-throughs below.

Oniracom Portfolio | Haze Nightclub at Aria (HazeLasVegas.com) from Oniracom on Vimeo.

Dwight Yoakam came to Oniracom through Topspin and Warner Music Nashville for an interactive album release splash page. The splash page featured staggered promotions and contests leading up to the release of Dwight Yoakam’s album “3 Pears.”

Oniracom Portfolio | Dwight Yoakam (3Pears.DwightYoakam.com) from Oniracom on Vimeo.

Last night, Oniracom and StartupSB came together for a night of creativity and inspiration! StartUp Creativity was a success, and Oniracom would like to thank everyone who made last night possible. Thanks to CreatorUp, an awesome organization that offers web series tutorials online for presenting, Rusty’s Pizza for providing us with delicious food, StartupSB for letting us host this event in honor of Startup Weekend, and of course to everyone else who made it out to our office!

Oniracom will play host to StartupSB and an event entitled Startup Creativity. The event, organized and moderated by StartupSB, a 600+ member meetup group of startup entrepreneurs, will focus on inspiring creativity by highlighting creative local startup endeavors, the local Santa Barbara startup community and the upcoming Startup Weekend Santa Barbara.  Startup Weekend Santa Barbara will be held November 2, 3 and 4 at Citrix Online.

Startup Creativity will take place on October 25th at 6pm at our office (720 East Haley Street Santa Barbara, CA). Food will be supplied by one of our awesome clients Rusty’s Pizza, as well as libations from Telegraph Brewery. All of Santa Barbara’s favorites!

On October 25, you’ll hear from Jacob Tell and Mike Wald about their current creative projects that will be sure to excite the development community. You’ll also hear from CreatorUp, a Startup Weekend Santa Barbara #1 team, who will discuss their online web series school.

Oniracom’s first project walkthrough video is finally here! We’ve been working the last few months to bring all of the pieces together for provocative marketing videos. Our goal is to showcase our creative projects in the best way possible.

Often times Oniracom will develop new technologies and integrate various web platforms in new ways. We are driven to create excellent and engaging marketing tools for our clients. This time around, we leveraged Instagram to create a user-generated content campaign that allowed users to unlock exclusive songs before their official release. We ran this campaign for Jana Kramer, an up and coming Country Music artist, in collaboration with Topspin Nashville and Warner Music Nashville.

Watch the video for more details

Jana Kramer Instagram Campaign Walkthrough from Oniracom on Vimeo.

Oniracom has completed work on the new website for The Gaslight Anthem just in time for the band’s July 24th album release.

Feel free to check out our latest project, Courtney O’Donnell’s new website: CourtneyODonnell.com

Courtney is at the beginning of her career, yet has already written more than 20 songs, taught herself to play the guitar and worked with major names in the music business. She released her first two original CD’s at the age of 11 and 14. Courtney has big things lined up for her, and there is no doubt that she will succeed. We are thrilled to be working with her.

Be sure to check out her website to learn more about Courtney and to see what cool features we included on her site!

CourtneyODonnell.com

Long gone are the days of records, tapes, and compact discs. But what is in store for music storage? Music streaming services are surfacing, making it possible to not only listen to music on computers, but also in cars, on TVs, throughout home sound systems, and on mobile devices. Countless services allow users to access thousands of albums and millions of songs instantly on the device of their choice. Users can create libraries of their favorite songs, listen to pre-made or personally created playlists, share songs with friends, purchase songs and so much more. While these services allow users to sync their created libraries and playlists, many music fanatics are looking for what’s next.

InsideFacebook.com published an article “How Top Musicians Are Utilizing Their Facebook Pages” showing how bands now leverage Facebook more heavily as they turn from artists into brands.  With many of Facebook’s tools (old and new), artists are able to form lasting relationships with their fans, rather than selling them the occasional album, EP or single.  Oniracom shares this philosophy—in fact all of our websites, microsites, widgets and social media destinations facilitate direct to fan marketing, fan-oriented growth tactics and lasting relationship building.

By collecting additional contact information from their fans through a sign-up form, musicians can augment their Facebook campaigns with mass e-mails and mobile promotions. Mozes, a leading service providing mobile engagement tools such as mass promotional text messaging, powers the mobile sign-up of many leading musician pages such as Rihanna and Kings of Leon. Email sign-ups are predominantly handled through an integration of a widget, often developed by an artist’s record label. Jack Johnson, in a tab powered by Oniracom, baits users with a free mp3 but then requires an email address to which to send the file.

Tabs which offer downloads, especially of rare b-sides or live recordings, in exchange for contact information are a great choice for musicians because they entice both hardcore and new listeners with something exclusive, and help establish the artist on the fan’s hard drive, not just their web browser.

Read the Article Here

What makes a good website? How do you start building a website? Learn all this and more this week on Jeremy’s Desktop.

Join Jeremy and the guys from Oniracom to find out what you need to make your website a smashing success. Oniracom is the company responsible for the websites of Jack Johnson, John Legend, Matt Costa and countless other music sensations. We’ll get the scoop from them on how they go about creating these works of art – from the story board to content dissemination. See what these experts say are the 3 things every website must have.

About Oniracom

What makes a good website? How do you start building a website? Join Jeremy and the guys from Oniracom to learn what you need to make your website a smashing success. Oniracom is the company responsible for the websites of Jack Johnson, John Legend, Matt Costa and countless other music sensations. We’ll get the scoop from them on how they go about creating these works of art – from the story board to content dissemination. See what these experts say are the 3 things every website must have.

Fast-Forward 17 minutes…

Oniracom built this free MP3 widget for Matt Costa.  We got a bit of press in the OC Weekly too!

​Visit MattCosta.com right now for your chance to download new song, “Permanent Vacation,”  from the Huntington Beach Brushfire artist. But don’t think you don’t have to put (a little) work into it—by either posting on Facebook, tweeting or joining the Costa mailing list, you can get the track for totally free.

While it’s definitely a deviation from the usual ultra pleasant Costa M.O. we’re all used to—sunshine, Astairs, roses, et al—the track may just be a pleasant surprise for you fans out there waiting for fresh material. Hope you like the Doors. And reverb.

If you haven’t had a chance to come visit Oniracom, you should know that we can get pretty nerdy here. Even during our daily lunchtime gatherings where we tend to talk about other topics, we still end up talking about content management systems and the value of open source. This just happened the other day. The White House has just transferred whitehouse.gov to the drupal content management system. Sean mentioned that it is highly customized version of it, created with a lot of internal development. Hopefully they release a lot of their changes to help the community. We are a smaller shop though, and are better suited to outsourcing that work to a third party. We chose Expression Engine as our main content management platform. It is not a matter of which CMS is better, but what fits the needs of the project….

We recently launched the new Jack Johnson Music for his upcoming “En Concert” release.  The launch includes a brand new website layout, updated online store complete with digital downloads (integrated with physical merchandise shipments) and a social media campaign to promote the products.  Billboard.biz covered our Twitter widget:

Jack Johnson is harnessing the power of his Twitter followers to promote his new live album. Users send a form letter (form tweet?) to their followers and in return will get a free MP3. Nice. It’s simple, probably cost next to nothing, and will most likely be very effective. Oniracom, the company that runs Johnson’s website, offers a case study on its efforts to increase Matisyahu’s Twitter following and improve his Twittering. (For example, Matisyahu generated buzz by inviting five Twitter followers to his band rehearsal). (Mashable)

Read the Billboard Article

We recently launched the new www.jackjohnsonmusic.com for his upcoming “En Concert” release.  The launch includes a brand new website layout, updated online store complete with digital downloads (integrated with physical merchandise shipments) and a social media campaign to promote the products.  Mashable.com covered our Twitter widget:

It’s really simple: just head on to twitter.jackjohnsonmusic.com. There’s a premade Twitter message there (you can add 24 more characters if you like) that promotes the new album, titled En Concert, and all you need to do is login into your Twitter account and send it. The download of the promised tune (it’s a 192 kbps MP3) will start automatically.

Read the Mashable Article

Over 8 million users become fans of Facebook Pages every day to connect with their favorite public figures and organizations and get updates directly in their streams. Now, users can connect with brands, musicians, celebrities, businesses, and more, whether they’re on or off Facebook.

Today, we’re excited to launch the Fan Box, a Facebook Connect-enabled social widget that Page owners can add to their websites to allow users to fan and view the accompanying Facebook Page stream. With the Fan Box, brands can bring content from their Facebook Page into their website and help convert website visitors into Facebook fans. Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site. Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn’t logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.

How does this relate to Oniracom?

Others implementing the Fan Box on their websites today include ABC News, NPR, World Wildlife Fund, (RED), BlackBerry, Lance Armstrong/Livestrong, Roger Federer, Lenny Kravitz, Kings of Leon, Tide, and Herbal Essences.

Yes, we implemented this on Lenny Kravitz website and social network destinations.  Thank you to the Facebook development team who are incredibly easy to work with.

Read More Here…