Aydogon Ozcan

Aydogon Ozcan has developed an attachment to a cellphone that could save people's lives.

Nearly 6 billion people in the world use cellphones -- and about 70 percent of those users live in developing countries.

Those statistics gave UCLA electrical engineering professor Aydogon Ozcan an idea. "The cellphone is the ultimate Swiss Army knife tool -- rarely used to talk but doing many other functions," he says. As cellphones become more cost-effective, he explains, they will be used for more tasks, even functions that for a century have been relegated to laboratories with bulky and expensive equipment.

Courtesy of RingADoc

It's Sunday afternoon, and you've got chest pain. It could be the four Pink's chili dogs you hoovered at 3 a.m. after a night of mezcal and Tecate, or it might be something worse. Your primary-care physician is off on Catalina for the weekend, and you're leery of astronomical emergency-room costs. You've checked every medical website -- even Wikipedia -- to no avail. You need a doctor, but what kind? Where?

Cue RingADoc, the startup telemedicine service that bridges the gap between your paranoia and your primary-care physician. RingADoc soothes your burning question (or burning organ -- eww!) by providing on-call doctors 24 hours a day via phone, smartphone or tablet. Through a phone call or digital face time, you can renew a prescription, double-check your symptoms and get some peace of mind.

Courtesy Harold Lee

Harold Lee

Harold Lee was a guitar player who dropped out of music school and found himself handling the marketing for a guitar store chain while he worked toward a business degree. One night, he watched his wife play Guitar Hero and have a great time.

"I just started thinking, why not use a real guitar instead of a piece of plastic?" Lee recalls. An idea was born: to make a mobile instructor that would work with any guitar -- and make learning an instrument more like learning a game.

Lee and his team faced a huge hurdle, though, and it had to do with pitch detection.

"Pitch detection for one note at a time is not that difficult -- guitar tuners can do it, and so can your ear," says Lee. "But the tricky part comes when more than one pitch at one time comes from the same instrument, like a guitar." That's called polyphonic pitch detection, and after scouring the research world for an expert in it, Lee and the company's co-founder, Tyson Butler, found Roger Dannenberg, head of the computer music department at Carnegie Mellon University.

Screenshots courtesy of Starcast

The "best performances" screen on Starcast

OK, fine, maybe you've got the chops and you've got the looks, but you've missed the fame boat five times over. Your clean-cut mug and obvious talent got you out of Skokie, but you're still slinging pizza shooters six nights a week at TGI Mulligans in Studio City. Why won't anyone let you become the new flash in the Hollywood frying pan? Why doesn't anyone notice your raw talent and chiseled visage? You're destined to be the modern reincarnation of Cary Grant, clearly, if only someone would notice.

Cue StarcastAuditions.com, the Internet-based casting startup that will get you noticed -- if, of course, you deserve to be. Starcast is not a bunch of guys on a couch mocking videos of your craft for their own entertainment. It is serious business.

Founded by Gary Beer, the man behind cable TV's Smithsonian Channel and Sundance Channel, Starcast takes your craft as seriously as possible. The setup is pretty simple -- you log on and pay a nominal fee (right now it's about $10 and supposedly won't go much higher [Update: it's now free]). Then you pick a professionally crafted script, videotape yourself performing it, and voilà! Your video will be seen by legitimate high-level casting agents, reviewing Starcast footage in hopes of finding the next Tom Cruise. If you're truly gifted, they may rate you as one of their "Best Performances," marking you for further attention.

Institute for Creative Technologies

Researcher Belinda Lange demonstrates Jewel Mine, the video game her team made to help improve mobility in rehab.

Belinda Lange knows how to have some serious fun. A physiotherapist by training, Lange leads a group at the University of Southern California's Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT), which develops games to help people recovering from a stroke or other injuries.

At first, the researchers wanted to adapt existing games built around physical movement -- the Nintendo Wii and the Microsoft Kinect. But they quickly discovered those games weren't quite right for the rehab set. First, they didn't give enough data, explains Lange, a senior research associate at the institute.

They also weren't sufficiently accommodating to people who couldn't dance, jump or bend far. "Often, the fun parts of the game would only be unlocked after a series of other levels, which our patients often couldn't achieve," she says.

Courtesy of DooD

Andrea Carrano of DooD, and his dog George

Andrea Carrano was raised in Italy, which means he grew up with table-fed canines. That also was true of his brother-in-law, Ali Niroomand, who grew up in France.

"Very few people were buying store-bought dog food there," Carrano says. "My parents would give the dogs basically table scraps, chicken leftovers and brown rice."

Fast-forward a few decades, when, weary of industrial-size bags of puppy chow and lethargic pets, the Carrano and Niroomand families again began feeding their pups homemade food. They noticed a world of difference: Their pets' tails were waggier and their breath was almost pleasant (which, for a dog, is saying something).

>Postcard on the Run

The idea was simple: Take all those moments captured on smartphones and make something tangible out of them, fusing the online and the offline world. That's what Josh Brooks set out to do when he created Postcard on the Run last year.

The application converts any picture on an Android or IOS device to a real-world postcard. Users can write notes on the back and sign their names with a finger. They can choose to add a GPS-tagged location or even a small scratch-and-sniff sticker. "Basically, I cold-called the company that was making scratch-and-sniff back in the '80s and said, 'Please tell me you've innovated, because this is what I want,' " Brooks explains.

The company now offers 11 smells ranging from popcorn to ocean breeze to teen spirit --which, according to Brooks,"smells like a combination of band sweat and rotten stale drinks, with hints of skunk. It stinks, but it's funny."

The postcards are printed at a West Coast printer and mailed -- no need to deal with stamps. The cards cost $1.49, or $1.99 with the scratch-and-sniff. Cards sent overseas cost $1.69.