Computer Support Blog

Many of us remember sharing story time with our parents as kids or even to our own kids as parents.  The tradition of storybooks remains strong because it is a strong bonding experience between parent and child.  Mobile technology has made it even easier to share this experience with your children wherever you are, as mobile apps for narrated and interactive storybooks have become more and more commonplace.  However, cool person in technology Woody Sears believes he can make it even easier and more convenient with his new service iStorytime.  iStorytime is a subscription-based service that offers a large, growing collection of digital storybooks to its customers for a monthly charge.  Parents can also buy these digital storybooks a la carte within the iStorytime app.  Sears wants to consolidate the digital storybook experience into one app, so parents have an instant collection of books for their kids whenever they need it.  In theory, this takes away some of the headache of finding new material to read to your kids.  It also ensures that children have access to more varied content to help them learn. Read more »

Lost it again?  A new app for your phone will make it easier to find than ever before.  The Tile App, a product developed by Reveal Labs, is a thin device with a double-sided adhesive to stick to virtually any surface.  Place the tile on your laptop, wallet, keys, guitar, bike, or whatever else you have the tendency to misplace.  In fact, Reveal Labs states that the app can handle up to 10 tiles on one account. Great for the individual on the go who just can’t seem to keep their stuff all together! Read more »

It’s always the right time to throw a steak on the backyard grill.  An app from iDevices takes some of the pressure off the grill chef by monitoring your food via your Apple or Android device.  The app developed by iDevices may be the perfect solution for your next party or just right for the non-stop schedule you keep.  Read more »

Have you ever imagined being able to manage your postal mail as quickly or conveniently as e-mail?  Jason Seriff certainly has imagined it.  In fact, he probably imagined quite a few different ways to accomplish the feat while he was developing snail mail management software as Outbox CTO and cofounder.  Seriff is a cool person in technology who founded Outbox with the hopes of creating a system that made handling postal mail digitally simple for people everywhere.  Along with cofounders Will Davis and Evan Baehr, Seriff set out to make people’s lives easier by erasing the need to handle physical mail that you don’t want to manage.

Outbox is a service that allows you to handle your postal mail via the web, iPhone, or iPad.  Once you sign up for the service, you give the company access to your mail.  Outbox then collects your mail, scans it and stores the files.  Users can then use Seriff’s software to view and manage their snail mail digitally on their computer devices.  Read more »

With so many professionals using mobile and touch technology nowadays, it was inevitable that someone would make software to optimize presentations on such devices.  That cool person in technology is Brent Brookler, the CEO of Treemo Labs.  Brookler and his company have created an iPad app called Flowboard.  Flowboard allows users to create dynamic presentations right on their tablet.  Brookler and his company designed the app to have an easy-to-use interface.  In theory, Flowboard allows people to create presentations more easily by avoiding complicated menu systems.  Brookler wants to make it so laptops aren’t necessary for professionals making presentations for meetings on the go.  In some ways, Flowboard is his attempt to let people replace their work laptops with iPads in certain situations.  Those who want to do so should make sure they have iPad support to help with the transition. Read more »

While there are a lot of funny pictures or moments that we like to share with our friends on social media, we don’t always want those pictures permanently archived on the Internet.  Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, has created a mobile application that tries to resolve this conflict between the desire for long-term privacy and the need for social connection.  Snapchat is an app that lets users send pictures they take back and forth in real-time in a conversational manner, but also deletes those pictures forever after specified period of time.  Spiegel’s vision has resonated with consumers all over the world.  This is clear from the fact that Snapchat is consistently a top ten app in Apple’s App Store for the iPhone.  Spiegel has worked to create a space where people can share their day-to-day moments without the fear of long-term embarrassment.  Many users concerned with online privacy and Internet security have clearly been waiting for a service to provide that opportunity.  Spiegel is definitely a cool person in the tech industry who has capitalized on a simple but effective idea. Read more »

Smartphones, tablets, and computers have made the digital distribution of entertainment media a major industry in the last decade.  While the first major changes came in the music and film industries, recently the publishing industry has seen major shifts towards digital markets as well.  However, it’s not only prose that people read on their computers and mobile devices these days.  With his company Comixology, David Steinberger has helped to make comics a part of the digital publishing industry as well.  Comixology sells digital comics for reading on the web, on tablets, and on mobile devices.  Readers can buy comics in both the shorter, more traditional issue format or as larger collections of issues in many cases.  Comixology has allowed comics to storm on to the digital market thanks to the vision of its CEO, David Steinberger. Read more »

Flipboard is a tablet application for iPad and Android that aims to improve the user experience for consuming social media and news.  Mike McCue, the CEO of the company, founded Flipboard in 2010 alongside iPhone engineer Evan Doll.  He branded the app as a “social magazine”, which collects information from a person’s many different social media accounts and specific news sources and places it into a magazine aesthetic for the user.  Users can then quickly flip through the digital pages of their personalized magazine to take in all the information from their media and news feeds in a single place.  This is opposed to the traditional web format of news and social media, which usually involves vertical scrolling and does not consolidate and organize your data the way Flipboard attempts to do. Those who have interest in Flipboard but are struggling with the app should find iPad support for help. McCue has lead Flipboard to great success since founding it.  He has helped to make the application one of the most featured and prominent on both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems. Read more »

We all have stories to tell and many of us fear losing them to history, where at best they’ll become lists of facts stored in dusty file cabinets.  Personal histories, especially those passed on orally, are often lost this way.  Michael Davis believes StoryPress can help solve this problem.  StoryPress lets users document and record their personal stories orally using an iPad.  Each story is stored virtually on StoryPress’s cloud drive, where one can access it anytime.  StoryPress also organizes your stories and allows you to make them available for public viewing if you desire.

This is an elegant application of technology for recording and organizing family and personal histories.  Michael Davis, the CEO of StoryPress, had family histories in mind when he created the app, but other interesting uses have appeared. Read more »

 The world truly is interconnected by telecommunications technology now.  Even so, there are gaps in the worldwide network and the people who explore those gaps are often the individuals who would benefit most from having reliable technology.  Where smartphones may fail or one might find themselves out of network – on the open sea, in the wilderness, hiking and/or climbing – there are technologies that may allow you to communicate with the rest of the world and the mainstream communications networks.  One of the premiere companies providing such communication channels is DeLorme.  DeLorme has an impressive satellite network that allows its devices, like the Inreach For Smartphones, to operate wherever you are on Earth. Read more »