Computer Support Blog

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 »

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 »

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 »