Computer Support Blog

For decades, watching and studying game film has been a constant source of help for high school and college athletic teams.  Taping performances to learn from mistakes and discover where certain strategies work and don’t work is something that varsity coaches in dozens of sports do for their players.  However, athletes do not always have an easy time learning from the tape presented to them.  Not every player knows exactly what to look for or what the most important elements of their performances to inspect are when studying tape.  This lack of understanding can frustrate coaches and prevent time studying film from being productive for athletes.  Cool person in technology Vasu Kulkarni founded his company Krossover to prevent this from happening to high school, college and even professional sports teams. Read more »

Most people do not perceive dairy farming to be a highly computerized or technology-heavy industry.  However, that doesn’t mean that the Internet, cloud technology and data tracking don’t have anything to offer the dairy farming world.  Cool product Farmeron is a digital platform that helps farmers eliminate paperwork and crunch numbers more efficiently.  With Farmeron, dairy farmers can keep track of all their business’s data in one place rather than in several complicated spreadsheets.  This cool product makes all of a farm’s data accessible and viewable in several different formats depending on what a user needs at a particular time.  Farmers create their accounts online and upload their data to Farmeron’s cloud-based platform.  Customers can then access their business’s data securely from anywhere, even on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.  Farmeron’s system saves farmers time by avoiding cluttered spreadsheets and makes it easier for them to make sense out of the data they collect about their herds. Any clients of Farmeron who find themselves unable to access their data over the web will need to contact a cloud tech support professional about the matter. Read more »

Traditional TV ratings are mostly indicative of a show’s potential as an advertisement space.  The more people that watch a show, the more eyeballs view the commercials attached to that show.  However, in the age of digital media, significant money can now come from direct digital sales to an online audience.  Ratings are not always helpful at measuring the overall potential of a show to make money through DVD, Blu-Ray and digital sales. A show with a smaller but very active and engaged audience can outsell a show with a very large audience who only watches casually.  Now, with social media becoming a major part of viewers’ everyday lives, networks and producers finally have a chance to gain insight into audience engagement.  Invested viewers constantly tweet and update their Facebook profiles with comments about their favorite shows as they air and directly afterwards.  Cool person in technology Laurent Maisonnave has created a system called SeeVibes to report the level of social media engagement for television shows.  With Maisonnave’s system, network and cable stations can get insight into how many people emotionally invest in their content and how they can encourage further investment.  Read more »

Television shows have always been a major piece of American pop culture and in recent years, there has even been increased media attention for popular shows on network and cable television.  Shows such as Game of Thrones, The Big Bang Theory and Mad Men have all garnered tremendous fan bases and mainstream media attention. Many online communities centered on different television shows sprout up consistently as well.  Die-hard television viewers who watch and follow several shows religiously now have a cool product that helps them stay up to date with each show they watch.  TeeVee is an iPhone app that contains a large database of many active and inactive television shows that still air regularly either in their main runs or through syndication.  The app gives users data about the next time a show is going to air, episode details and even connects people to preview trailers for new seasons and episodes of popular shows.  TeeVee is currently available as an app both for iPhone and iPad users. Apple support is available for those who experience issues trying to download TeeVee from the App Store. Read more »

Fitness apps and devices have become a major category of tech product in the consumer world in recent years.  Everything from iPhone apps that provide special workouts to wristbands that measure your daily fitness statistics have flooded the market.  However, most of these devices specifically aim to help users with weight loss and cardio-based exercise.  Statistics regarding calories and conditioning are easier to track numerically, so this focus is not really a surprise for most.  However, cool person in technology and Skulpt CEO Jose Bohorquez is releasing a product that will help men and women not just interested in losing weight, but also gaining muscle.  Measuring muscle quality and body fat percentage is key for those who are trying to add muscle to an athletic frame rather than just keep excess weight off their bodies.  That’s why Skulpt Aim, Bohorquez’s product, provides users with statistics about their muscle quality specifically rather than focus on calories burned.  Read more »

YouTube is no longer just an amateur video site.  Many people produce high quality content for the massive Internet video platform on a regular basis and even manage to earn a living purely from the advertisement money coming from their YouTube channels.  YouTube has gone from an interesting novelty to a major platform for many different types of media—from talk shows to independent dramatic web series.  However, for potential YouTube personalities, the task of building an audience large enough to sustain a regular show or popular channel can be daunting.  Cool product VidIQ wants to give users a better chance at getting enough regular viewers to make their YouTube videos profitable.  Building an audience takes far more work than just content creation and VidIQ is a platform that streamlines that work.  Read more »

People often look at social networking sites and public blogs as a way of journaling or recording one’s life online.  However, there is one inconsistency with the “journal” metaphor.  Most people have never posted the content of their physical journals or diaries in a public place for anyone to see and add comments whenever they want.  Meanwhile, social networks and blogging sites such as Facebook and Tumblr set everyone’s status updates and photos to public by default so that anyone can see or comment on them.  Cool person in technology Siqi Chen has created an app that seeks to address this inconsistency by giving users a truly private multimedia journaling experience.  Chen calls this new app “Heyday”.  While users can update their Heyday profiles the same way they would update their social network accounts and even set automatic updates, none of the information on Heyday appears to a public audience.  Chen wants Heyday to be a private experience, unlike so much of what social media is on the rest of the web.  Read more »

While many people consider reading books to be a solitary activity, that doesn’t always hold true in reality.  For lots of readers, books are as social of a hobby as anything else.  People create book clubs, use social media and engage in events such as author signings and Q&A sessions just to meet other avid readers and discuss the nature of their favorite texts.  Conversations range from speculation about character motivations to complex academic discussions about story themes.  Now, a cool product in technology wants to harness this social aspect of book reading for profit.  Bookmate lets readers take notes, leave questions, and copy quotes in every book that they read with the app and then share all their notations with all of their friends on social media.  Users can read their friends’ notations within a certain book as they read it on Bookmate and then engage those friends on social media to discuss how they felt about those notes.  Bookmate integrates with popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter so people can even share their notes with friends who don’t use Bookmate.  Anyone who cannot connect his or her Bookmate account to Twitter or Facebook should get help from a remote computer support provider. Read more »

Sports and athletic competition have been a pastime of choice for human beings for literally thousands of years. With all our technological advancements, people have never had more opportunity to improve their skills than they do today.  Competitors can track their health and fitness with countless mobile devices and smartphone apps.  They can also view HD video to study both their own performances and the performances of others on their phone, tablet, computer, or large screen TV almost any time they want.  Cool person in technology Chen Sachar has introduced yet another way that players can use technology to improve their game—real-time analytics and 3D visualizations.  Read more »

Mobile technology has changed the way musicians record their art in many ways.  It is now viable to use a smartphone or tablet to record multi-track performances as well as mix and edit the results.  Recording decent audio tracks used to be something limited to only a select few artists who could afford time in a professional studio.  New affordable music recording apps have revolutionized the state of professional music and made it possible for many amateur musicians to record high quality tracks without excessive resources.  Now, cool product in technology WholeWorldBand wants to take things another step forward by letting musicians not only record tracks on their mobile devices, but also collaborate with others on their works in progress.  Read more »