Computer Support Blog

Any number of good ideas will fail when you do not have the right people in place to execute them.  As online advertising becomes increasingly competitive, Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman knew that in order to compete with giants like Amazon and Google’s Adsense, he needed a staff that was both creative and could execute complex ideas.  For the computer proficiency Spongecell needed to compete in a very tight market, Kartzman turned to Blythe Dunham!

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In the wake of the Justice Department’s closure of the file-sharing and data backup website MegaUpload, most similar sites began reducing or shutting down their downloading features. The owners of these sites are concerned that they will face the same criminal charges as MegaUpload’s founders are, so they are playing it safe.

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It was not too long ago that webcams were a novelty.  Well before they were made standard equipment on virtually every laptop computer, webcams were a separate peripheral that allowed computer users to stream record and transmit small movies.  Even now webcams are a fun accessory for PCs and having an external webcam may offer you more versatility than the one embedded in your monitor or laptop computer.  For those who want more webcam options, it is hard to do better than the new Hercules HD Twist!

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There are a number of emerging online and mobile phone payment companies. No longer is the whole of the Internet beholden to PayPal for fast, secure, on-line payments. In addition to emerging mobile phone payment companies Square and Dwolla, there is Boku. If you haven’t heard of Boku, yet, that is not a surprise; it is still fairly new. But David Yoo is determined to make Boku a household name!

David Yoo is the Senior Vice President of Strategy, Product and Marketing for Boku. In that role, David Yoo is raising brand recognition and spending a great deal of time informing potential customers about the services that Boku offers. As Boku breaks into the rapidly expanding online and mobile payment market, it is David Yoo’s job to help Boku rise above the pack. So far, Yoo’s efforts have helped to net more investment from Silicon Valley investors and the launch of a multimedia advertising campaign.

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As if the public needed another reminder to be careful what they publicly share on social networking sites, the FBI is currently working on a new project that will monitor Twitter, Facebook, and other popular sites for keywords related to terrorism and other criminal activity. The FBI is asking companies to create a means of sifting through all the tweets, posts, and pictures in order to identify present and future threats.

The main purpose of the software, once developed and put into place, will be to allow the FBI to identify terrorists and criminals by highlighting social networking posts that include certain keywords. Some of these keywords will include “small pox”, “leak”, “gangs”, and “2600” (the name of a popular hacking magazine).

In order to sort through the data, the FBI wants to have the flagged posts appear on a map. Ideally, the data would be color-coded according to threat level to make it easier to identify possible incidents of criminal activity.

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Social networks rise and fall lately with a frequency that is troubling for those who become invested in the new social networks appearing on the Internet.  Each Internet social network tries to appeal to a different niche audience and it is intriguing to see which ones take off and which ones fail to find their market fast enough.  Arguably the hottest new Internet social network is Pinterest and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it begs the question “where have you been?!”  Pinterest has been making quite a lot of news on its own and as a reference – in articles about other up-and-coming Internet social networks – lately.

Pinterest is a budding social network that is most analogous to Twitter combined with StumbleUpon . . . for online photographs.  Let’s untangle that, shall we?  Twitter only allows 140 characters; the whole point of the social network or messaging service is to provide quick blurbs to your followers to give them instantaneous status updates.  They are short, focused and not often all that useful.  In a similar fashion, your Pinterest page – which is imagined as a bulletin board upon which you and your friends “pin” digital images – is likely to become a cluttered, messy space as you and your friends find more images to pin.  The sense of activity and networking is represented by your friends being able to comment on every image you post.

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It is absolutely astonishing to see how fast a social network can rise on the Internet.  It seems like Internet social networks fall much, much slower than they rise – one need only look at the slow fading of MySpace to recall how they might linger – but when a new social network is a hit, it can come out of nowhere.  That is the story of Pinterest.  Pinterest may not be a household name yet, but the little social network had about one third the traffic of Twitter in January 2012, making it a sudden force in the social network market.  With such a sudden demand for its service, Pinterest has a great reliance on Aubrey Obata Kendall.

Aubrey Obata Kendall is the chief recruiter for Pinterest.  Since November of 2011, Kendall has been staffing up Pinterest in order to help the small company grow to meet the current and forthcoming demand for their services.  Because Pinterest is currently so small, the recruiting position is especially important to the company.  Aubrey Obata Kendall’s judgment on staff may well affect the course of the entire company, so the reliance Pinterest has on her is actually quite high.

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Google Plus has finally opened its virtual doors to the teenagers. Anyone ages 13 and up can now create a Google+ account, although for teenagers, Google has added more safety precautions. It was not that Google did not want teenagers to be able to use the site previously – there was no “mature content” – but simply that Google wanted to get things ironed out and ready before letting in the teens.

Since teenagers and young adults are the more avid social networking users, and the most avid Internet users, it makes sense for Google to allow teenagers to join its social networking site. According to Bradley Horowitz, the Vice President of Google, “We want to help teens build meaningful connections online. We also want to provide features that foster safety alongside self-expression.”

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No matter how convenient mobile computers and streaming technology are, there is nothing that enhances a movie viewing experience like seeing it on a big screen. In fact, watching pretty much anything is improved by seeing it on a color-rich, high definition, high-resolution, giant screen. Directors and producers produce their works to make them look good when they are big, so why do so many people obsess on crowding around tiny mobile devices to watch things? With the Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable, you no longer have to!

The Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable is a beautiful and durable basic connector. What can make a connector beautiful? For true high-definition transfers, your connectors need to be gold and the Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable has stylish and functional gold plating for the connectors and the leads. The gold offsets the standard black cable very nicely, so the word “beautiful” certainly applies to this cable.

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In the quest to make digital music a viable business endeavor instead of just a cool idea, there have been many businesses and websites that have already come and gone.  While digital music pirating has been a huge issue for most of the services that have failed, rapidly changing hardware has been a serious issue as well.  One quarter, the dominant digital music device is an MP3 player, the next it is a smartphone!  Failure to adapt the digital music service to the new technologies has sunk some of the digital music services distributing digital music files over the Internet.  Spotify is deeply invested in making sure that does not happen.  For that, they have Oskar Stal!

Oskar Stal is the Chief Technology Officer of digital music distributor Spotify.  As Spotify developed as a website, but prepared to take its service international, the company sought a CTO who had extensive experience with mobile operating systems.  Without a CTO who knew the ins and outs of various mobile platforms, Spotify could not take their business to the next level.  Having been employed at mBlox, a company deeply invested in mobile transactions and the technical interactions between mobile platforms, Oskar Stal rose to the top of Spotify’s list of desirable candidates for the position.

Oskar Stal’s resume is more extensive than simply working for mBlox, though spending eight years as the Director of Development in the technical department at that company was the weightiest factor in Spotify hiring him.  Fortunately for Spotify, Stal was exceptionally interested in the position; he was already impressed by how much Spotify had accomplished without someone as experienced at the top of their development branch!

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