Computer Support Blog

There are many options for planning vacations via the web, such as travel sites like Orbitz and Expedia, but most of these options are limited in nature.  They only allow you to plan certain things ahead and generally offer no easy tools to plan anything beyond a place to stay and a flight to get there.  Many vacationers want to plan a complete and unique trip with a detailed schedule, but most travel websites don’t offer this option, forcing such travelers to speak to a travel agent.  Nezasa is an online travel service that attempts to make planning even the most complicated and unique trips as easy as booking a flight is on other websites.  This cool product wants customers to be able to easily customize their entire trip, schedule every detail down to the minute, and book everything at once for a single price, eliminating the need to speak to a travel agent at all.  Nezasa aims to make even the most adventurous trips simple and convenient to plan for travelers.  Read more »

It’s a problem everyone who uses e-mail faces: inbox clutter.  Even with a solid spam blocker installed on your PC as part of an Internet security solution, there are many legitimate e-mails we get every day but don’t always want to read.  Perhaps you’ve signed up for band newsletters, online magazine subscriptions, or promotional offers.  You don’t want to block these e-mails because they occasionally give you useful information, but most of the time they simply clog up your inbox and make it a pain to navigate your e-mail.  Unroll.me is a cool product that aims to solve the problem of inbox clutter.  The team at Unroll.me has developed a service that takes all of your promotional and newsletter e-mail subscriptions and combines them into one e-mail per day called “The Rollout”.  They organize and keep all of your promotional e-mails in one place, making it easy to scan for useful information.  This way, your e-mail subscriptions are not taking up inbox space or wasting your time. This could make e-mail a much more organized experience. Read more »

With the advent of MP3 players, music streaming sites and smartphones that contain entire music libraries in the palm of your hand, music has become an increasingly individual experience over the last decade.  Billy Chasen is a cool person in technology who wants to use his online service, Turntable.fm, to make music a social activity once more.  This may seem counterintuitive, as most online music services, such as personal Internet radio sites Pandora and Slacker Radio, focus on making music a personal experience.  Chasen wants to people to interact while listening to music.  That’s why Turntable.fm combines the concepts of chat rooms and Internet radio.  Users log into rooms designated by genre or mood and interact while through chat while music plays in the background.  Users, as oppose to algorithms, also choose the songs that play in each room.  People fill in specific “DJ spots” in each room that allow them to pick the upcoming songs for everyone to listen to and (hopefully) enjoy.  This allows groups of people to share their tastes and potentially discover new music through their friends.  If you have trouble connecting to the Turntable.fm service online, finding PC tech support is essential. Read more »

You want a clean house or apartment, but you just don’t have the time to keep it that way. Today’s cool product, Homejoy, wants to create happier homes by making professional housecleaning more affordable. Book someone to come clean your home through the Homejoy online platform and spend more time on your work or with your family. Use Homejoy for a one-time cleaning or to find a reliable person to continue cleaning your home on a regular basis.

Founded by brother and sister Aaron and Adora Cheung in July 2012, Homejoy is located in San Francisco, California. The service is now available in more than 20 cities. Phoenix, Arizona, recently joined the list in June 2013. Some of the other cities where Homejoy provides service are New York City, San Francisco, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle and Philadelphia. Read more »

One of the best gifts parents can give children is a lifelong love of reading. Today’s cool person is Julie Stubblefield. Along with her husband, James, she founded Reading Glue. It enables parents to help young children improve their reading skills and comprehension. For those going to school, the Reading Glue website wants to build on the skills learned in school. The name refers to reading strategies that stick. Reading Glue mainly applies to readers through elementary school age.

Parents can provide reading activities to stimulate and enrich a child’s reading experiences. Beginning readers, which Reading Glue defines as children in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, should know their letters and sounds and read some short words. Books for this group should have many pictures and few words on a page, Stubblefield suggests. Read more »

With the wide diversity of people in the United States, not everyone is fluent in English. When non-English speakers suffer emergencies or want to transact normal business, they may require interpretation assistance to explain the situation. Today’s cool product is the ELSA (Enabling Language Service Anywhere) device from RTT Mobile Interpretation in Minnesota, which provides on-demand interpretation services.

Charles Howerton invented ELSA and founded RTT Mobile Interpretation. ELSA has been interpreting since December 2012. Read more »

When you have multiple credit cards and bank accounts, keeping track of all your monthly purchases to ensure their legitimacy can be a time-consuming and harrowing feat.  This is especially true if you are already lacking for free time because of the many hours that your job and family require of you.  This can often cost you money thanks to grey charges—items and services charged to your credit card that you are unaware of but keep piling up because you fall behind on checking your bills.  Yaron Samid, the CEO of Billguard, is a cool person using technology to help consumers combat these grey charges and save money in the process.

Billguard is an iPhone app that keeps track of all your credit card bills at once.  This keeps all your billing data in one convenient place for review.  Arguably more important than that, Samid’s app flags transactions it believes to be grey charges for user review.  Samid is a cool person in technology who believes he can save people a lot of money and frustration by bringing their attention to unwanted charges and helping to make the management of monthly credit card bills easier.  If you have downloaded Billguard for your iPhone but need help getting it to work, iPhone support is the best option. Read more »

Every great mobile application starts with an idea.  The effort and resources it takes to turn that idea into a working prototype that you can show to others costs serious amounts of time and money.  POP (Prototyping on Paper) is a cool product that makes the process of demonstrating your idea for a mobile application quicker and easier.  All you need for POP to turn your idea into a working prototype is a pen, paper, and a smartphone.  POP turns your sketches and drawn concepts for an app into prototypes that you can show others on a mobile phone.  You simply take a picture of your concept’s sketch with your smartphone’s camera, and, in POP’s own app, you can edit it to create a functional design with buttons and links to show off your concept to others.  POP is available on iPhone with an Android version in development.  If POP gives you technical issues, smartphone tech support can help you get the app working properly. Read more »

It’s one of the most common problems people have: lack of time.  Many of us have so many things to do in our lives that we forget the smaller tasks, even when they’re important.  Only the most affluent among us can hire personal assistants to take care of those smaller tasks and ensure they are completed.  However, Ted Roden is a cool person in technology that envisions a future where his service, FancyHands, allows everyone the benefit of a personal assistant.  FancyHands is an online service that Roden created where members can immediately request the completion of any task that doesn’t require a physical presence.  You can assign any scheduling, research, calls or other Internet and phone-based tasks that you need done to the FancyHands team.  Roden and his team use tech to make this process even easier with a mobile app that simply lets users speak their request into their phone.  Roden has created a system where anyone can free up their time with the help of a virtual personal assistant. Read more »

Designers often need feedback for their work but want more than a limited pool of responses.  Dribbble CEO Rich Thornett is a cool person in technology that has created a social network made specifically for designers to showcase their work.  Dribbble allows designers to post the projects their working on and get feedback from other designers.  It also allows designers to put their portfolio online to increase their visibility in the design community.  Thornett works to keep Dribbble a space where designers can interact, give feedback and promote their own work within the community easily.  The Dribbble CEO doesn’t limit what types of designers can use the service, explicitly stating on the site that the social network is for “web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types”.  Being open to so many forms of design works towards Thornett’s vision of an open community where ideas can cross breed even across design disciplines.  Non-technical designers that would like to post their work on Dribbble may want to find online computer support for help getting started.  Read more »