Computer Support Blog

Navigating large airports when you travel can be an excruciating process.  Often times, you don’t know where the nearest restroom is, you choose a poor place to get a meal just because it’s on the way to your gate, or you can’t find the currency exchange before your international flight.  Cool person in technology Mark Wagner knows that these issues plague travelers all the time and that’s why he’s created the AirportChatter app for the iPhone.  AirportChatter helps users manage their airport experience more effectively.  Wagner created the app to give travelers the resources they need to make their time spent in airports a much better experience.  Wagner’s app has a complete listing of shops, restaurants and ATMs in each of the U.S.’s thirty largest airports.  Each listing has spaces for customer reviews, so users can find out which restaurants and stores are their best bets as they wait for a flight.  The app can even tell you where the nearest restrooms are to your location within the airport.  If you have problems navigating the app, finding iPhone support should be your next step in getting it to work. Read more »

Bootlegging live recordings from concerts has been a tradition of many artists’ fan bases since long before the Internet came into existence.  However, due to a lack of professional recording equipment, most fan-recorded concerts have very poor sound quality.  Fan recordings also can be risky due to copyright issues if used outside of very specific settings and situations.  Lively is a cool product that lets people listen to live shows without any of the downsides of bootlegged recordings.  With Lively, you can listen to professionally recorded audio tracks of the concerts you attend as soon as the show is over.  If you want to relive an amazing performance you just attended, all you have to do is turn on your smartphone and download the concert right away.  Anyone who’s only experienced low-quality fan-recorded bootlegs will quickly realize the advantages of professional, high-quality recordings that they can conveniently access wherever they go.  For help downloading performances to your iPhone, find Apple support. Read more »

Thanks to the explosive popularity of digital readers and eBooks, more and more authors are choosing to self-publish through the web.  However, most of these authors don’t have all the necessary skills for getting a quality book out to the public.  Cover design, copyediting, eBook formatting, and marketing are all essential pieces of the publishing process that most writers aren’t going to be able to handle on their own.  That’s why cool person in technology Kelsye Nelson created Writer.ly, a website where authors can easily connect with freelance publishing professionals for the publishing tasks they can’t handle.

Nelson and her co-founder, Abigail Carter, met in writing group in their hometown of Seattle where they discussed the rise of self-publishing and formed the idea for Writer.ly in order to meet the needs of the many new self-publishing authors on the Internet.  Nelson is making sure that even those writers who have to call tech support for simple computer problems can still publish digitally with the help of freelance professionals that know the world of digital books. Read more »

Keeping track of your receipts and warranties can be a serious pain.  It’s all too easy to misplace a receipt or forget how long you’ve had a product.  John Jackovin, the CEO of Bawte, is a cool person in technology who wants to solve these problems with his mobile application.  In his company’s own words, Jackovin wants to “make owning things simple.”  His smartphone app, Bawte, allows you to “tag” products you buy on your smartphone.  Once you tag a product, Jackovin’s app gives you access to warranty information and instruction manuals for that product anytime you want.  This would save customers from worrying about the paper trail when they make purchases and potentially save them hassle later on if they need to find a manual or warranty information quickly.  Bawte makes information about your products accessible whenever you want on your smartphone.  It even keeps track of when a warranty expires for each product you purchase.  For example, you can check the status of the warranties on your computer products and know when you definitely need to go to a local computer repair company for help because your product’s warranty isn’t viable anymore.  Read more »

There are many options when you need a new design for a company logo, business card, or even an overhaul of your website.  However, unless you have a full-time designer on staff, getting simple updates to your designs can feel like more effort than it’s worth.  Swiftly is a cool product that helps you avoid the pain of trying to find a freelance designer for every small design task.  Swiftly is a web service that connects you to professional designers who can perform small design tasks for you quickly.  You simply upload your current design to the site, explain what you need done, and Swiftly finds a design professional who can do it right away.  The website currently claims that it only takes hours to complete whatever design task you upload to them, meaning you could get your company’s design problems fixed in less than a day.  Contact IT support if you ever have trouble uploading a design to Swiftly’s website. Read more »

Finding an internship or a first job out of college can be an aggravating experience.  Having to fill out endless applications for individual companies can be daunting.  While social networking sites like LinkedIn offer a place to keep a centralized profile and make job applications easier, most companies using those sites are often looking for seasoned professionals, not people to fill entry-level roles.  InternJump is a cool product that is trying to offer a something similar to LinkedIn, but specifically for college students and recent graduates.  Both students and companies can keep profiles on the site that make searching for the right internship or first job easier.  For students, this is helpful in that they know the companies on InternJump are definitely looking for young talent.  This means students and recent grads won’t waste time applying to many positions at companies who don’t want younger applicants.  InternJump’s focus on the internship and entry-level job market could provide major benefit to young job hunters as well as companies looking for fresh talent.  Those who have problems setting up profiles on InternJump should seek PC tech support for assistance. Read more »

There are many travel websites that allow you to compare prices for airfare and hotels when you’re making a trip across the country.  However, there aren’t many options when you want to avoid air travel for any reason—maybe because you’re afraid of flying or because you simply want to save money.  Polina Raygorodskaya is a cool person who is changing this predicament with her website and online service Wanderu.  Wanderu is an aggregator for bus and train companies who provide inter-city travel options.  Users simply log on to the site, search for a starting point and a destination and Wanderu gives them a list of the best options for travel by train, by bus, or even by a combination of the two.  Raygorodskaya wants to make finding the best deal for train and bus travel online as easy as it is for air travel.  She is working to make Wanderu the easiest way for people to book inter-city ground transportation between any two points in North America.  It’s a lofty ambition, but Wanderu appears to be on the right track for now.  Raygorodskaya has made her website fairly simple to use, though if you do have trouble IT support is always an option. Read more »

Campus safety is an important issue as crime rates continue to be a cause for concern for many universities.  Most people wouldn’t immediately think of mobile applications as a technological tool that could help students remain safe on campus.  However, Dr. Gary Margolis is a cool person in technology that has developed exactly that—a smartphone app that students can use to keep safe while they’re at school.  Margolis and his team have developed Campus Sentinel, which gives college students a number of resources and tools to help them remain safe on campus.  The app lists detailed crime statistics for over 4,400 schools to help students remain informed about what’s going on around them.  This will hopefully help them make safer decisions as they go about campus life.    Read more »

It’s hard to know exactly what’s in our food and what it might do to us.  Nutrition labels on most food products only give us pure statistics about things like fat, calories and sodium, which can be misleading without a full ingredient list.  Grocery shoppers who want to find the healthiest foods and avoid ingredients that may cause long-term harm to their health can’t depend solely on the information found in nutrition labels.  NxtNutrio is a cool product that gives shoppers the power to check a detailed ingredient list of every food they buy in a store.  It allows users to see exactly what’s in their food before they purchase and eat it.  NxtNutrio gives users the ability to make educated and healthy decisions about what they put in their body.  Read more »

Companies have given smartphones a myriad of functions as they’ve grown more powerful and versatile over the years.  Smartphones can now be your GPS and navigation device, mobile computer, weather tracker, and gaming device.  Max Perelman sees a lot of potential is smartphones as well, but not simply as personal consumer devices.  Perelman is a cool person in technology that’s working to make it possible to turn a smartphone into a portable DNA diagnostics lab.  He and his team envision a future where you can connect your smartphone to a small device wirelessly and immediately have a solution for genetic diagnostics and on-site disease tracking.  If Perelman’s vision comes true, it could be much easier and much cheaper to track developing diseases and treat them more efficiently. Perelman also wants to keep his device simple to use.  He doesn’t want lab assistants having to call tech support just to hook up their smartphones and run tests.  It’s an ambitious project, but if successful, Perelman and the team at Biomeme could make a huge difference in the future of public health.  Read more »