Computer Support Blog

In the wake of virtually every tragedy involving gun violence, the media and politicians talk quite a bit about responsibility.  While responsibility is easy to determine in incidents where a shooter or group of shooters does violence against others, in situations like accidents involving unsecured firearms (or firearms that were secured, but some element of that security failed), upon whose shoulders the responsibility rests may be harder to judge.  Regardless, technology now exists to make it far easier to secure your firearms and other valuables so that accidents are less likely to occur and so you might avoid losing your valuables to burglars.  Some worthwhile personal security technology is present in Barska’s Standard Biometric Keypad Safe. Read more »

It does not take long, when shopping for new technological gadgets, to realize that every major manufacturer of tech has a different way of connecting, recharging, powering or operating their devices to make them distinctive.  For those who do not want to ally themselves to a single corporate standard and would like to buy gadgets from a wide range of manufacturers, they either end up spending a lot of time figuring out how to maintain each of their devices or they end up spending a lot of money to be able to recharge and synch all of their devices simultaneously.  Callpod, the makers of the ChargePod, FuelTank, and other connectivity devices, saw that problem and has been steadily working to make the lives of consumers much easier.  A lot of the credit for Callpod’s success comes from Craig Lurey. Read more »

For a long time, there was a serious demographic of photographers who were being neglected with the digital camera revolution.  Those photographers were those who had an aptitude for taking photographs of subjects underwater.  While many cameras boasted of being water resistant, finding a truly waterproof digital camera was a difficult thing.  Fortunately, that trend is changing and now there are several entirely waterproof digital cameras on the market.  One of them is the Intova IC14 Digital Camera with Waterproof Housing. Read more »

Online and mobile payments are a growing industry.  One of the most recognizable names in the virtual payment industry is PayPal.  PayPal rose to prominence as a spin-off of eBay and as eBay grew, PayPal synergized with it in such a way that it rapidly gained the dominant market share for online payments.  However, with the rise of the smartphone, new mobile services like Dwolla, are steadily eating into that market share.  While the Technical Officers at PayPal work to increase PayPal’s mobile influence, it is Ranjana Clark who is retaining and winning over new customers for the company. Read more »

The concept of a social network is actually a very simple one: you log into a network, provide information about yourself and develop a channel to share interests and information with other people in your life.  As well, you may use a social network to expand your circle of friends by starting conversations with likeminded people who share some of the same interests as you.  One of the coolest products on the Internet, is expanding the perception of what a social network can be by offering options that make for a very real photo network!  The service is the Ceiva PicturePlan Photo Delivery Service and it is innovative, fresh, and very cool. Read more »

The tech sector seems to embrace different roles played by different people based upon their interests and experiences.  Just as cops do not make for the best marriage counselors and poets are not traditionally called upon to rewire your house, many brilliant technical minds simply are not good at, or interested in, business.  Many of the biggest tech sector companies, like Facebook, only reached their business potential when the tech-focused creator hired a brilliant business-oriented individual (like Mark Zuckerberg did when he hired Sheryl Sandberg).  No other major industry seems to respect just how well specialized people may work when they are allowed to focus on their specialization (instead of treating all employees and executives as interchangeable) than the tech sector.  Ryan Rouland has long recognized the benefits of letting tech leaders focus on the ideas and products, while he has built many successful tech companies for those innovators! Read more »

With the rise of digital photography, people have a vastly easier ability to take pictures and store them than ever before.  Taking photographs is no longer a costly or time-consuming process and with today’s digital storage methods, you can create a virtually limitless repository of images from your life and experiences.  What has not kept pace with the ability to take digital photographs is a normalization of technology used to display digital photographs.  In many offices and even at home, people have prints of pictures or they will furtively look through the images stored on their smartphone when they need to feel connected, but while digital picture frames have existed for years, the market has not grown nearly as fast as the technology by which you take digital photographs has improved.  Aiptek aims to change that and with their P8i26 Portable 3D Display, they make it easy to display and enjoy digital photographs! Read more »

As Cloud-based streaming services become more prevalent and popular, the major producers of movies, music, and television programming have become more anxious about the new services.  After early Internet sites like Napster gave away their content, major studios got wise (and litigious) and have been more vigorously fighting piracy.  The new strategy that both streaming services and the major studios have begun taking is creating alliances and agreements as Internet companies develop their platform.  That requires the streaming start-ups, or established sites that are looking to diversify into media distribution, to have great lawyers.  For Roku, the manufacturer of streaming media players, the legal team is headed by Kim Funk. Read more »

Manufacturers of many new devices aim to make them sleek, digital, and surprisingly uniform.  While many consumers, youth especially, eagerly buy up the latest tech, there is a growing consumer movement that makes such purchases less because they love the design and more because it is simply what they are forced to accept.  For many people, the purchase of a new smartphone or tablet computer is made simultaneous to or followed soon after by the purchase of a case or protector.  While the purchase of a protector is obviously about keeping one’s smartphone safe, many people choose their case or protector as a way to differentiate their smartphone from other people’s smartphone.  Accessorizing allows you to express your own personal sense of style.  One of the most eclectic and cool accessories flies very much in the face of manufacturer’s obsession with making technology smaller and button free and that is the POP Phone by Native Union. Read more »

With so many digital photography services online, it can be very hard for a new, emerging, or revamped service to effectively sell itself to its target demographic.  Digital photographers have a lot of choices these days, but with the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, recently several online photo editors and storage sites have been shut down, while new ones have sprouted up.  Making your online digital photo service seem fresh, new, and vital can be as much a marketing challenge as it is an issue of programming your service the right way.  For Shutterfly, the challenge of marketing the website and its many services falls to Katelyn Watson. Read more »