Computer Support Blog

While ridesharing apps like Uber and Lyft have gained significant momentum, the most common way for most people to get a ride in a major city is still an old-fashioned yellow cab.   There is still a way to use technology to make it easier for people to find a ride even when they want to take a taxi.  Cool product Hailo is a mobile device that allows users to hail cabs with their smartphones or tablets.  Rather than calling a taxi company and potentially ending up on hold for a long time, people can just open up their phones and tap away to call a ride right away with Hailo.  This cool product wants to erase the uncertainty of trying to find a cab on the street.   The app lets people call cabs specifically for them, rather than hope to catch taxis that are simply passing by the area.  Hailo wants to revolutionize the urban transportation industry in order to get people service in an on demand capacity just as many other industries, such as remote computer support, have in recent years. Read more »

Gift giving is often a stressful experience for the giver and disappointing for the person receiving the gift.  No matter how well someone knows a friend or family member, there will always be times when that person chooses an awkward, inappropriate or just plain bad gift.  Jifiti is a cool product that uses mobile technology to try to get rid of this problem.  Jifiti makes a mobile application that facilitates gift giving for both givers and receivers.  Jifiti works with Facebook to help friends give each other items that they actually want.  Users can add gifts from any store or vendor to their wish list.   They can add potential gifts either through e-commerce websites or by taking a picture of the gift in a physical store.  The Jifiti app will recognize the gift from the image and label it appropriately in the wish list.  Other users can then browse friends’ wish lists in order to find gifts that their friends actually want.  Then, when people find gifts they want to give, they can simply click the gifting button on Jifiti app.  Jifiti charges the giver and sends a voucher to the giftee immediately.  Each voucher is instantly retrievable through any online or in-store vendor with whom Jifiti partners.  This process removes a lot of hassle from gift giving experience and ensures that users receive items they actually desire.  If the Jifiti app doesn’t work properly, users can always contact smartphone tech support. Read more »

Location-activated triggers are becoming a major part of the future of marketing in technology.  Technologies like GPS and NFC have made it so that specific locations and items can activate smartphones and tablets.  This technology can deliver text messages to mobile devices and even turn on certain apps.  Proxible is a cool product that inserts this technology into a company’s mobile application.  Proxible’s service turns everyday objects and locations into potential marketing tools.  As potential customers travel through the real world and interact with different locations and items, companies can engage them with their brand or product.  Proxible can’t have objects activate users’ phones without permission.  However, they can have objects trigger the sending of text messages or the activation of specific apps when the user has agreed to allow it.  Proxible enhances other businesses’ apps with these features and allows its clients to use the technology as they see fit.  By allowing this customization, Proxible ensures that each brand that can construct their customers’ experiences exactly how they want them.  If anyone has a Proxible enabled application but its features aren’t working correctly, mobile computer support may be helpful.  Read more »

According to cool person in technology Pascal Mathis, booking activities for your vacation should be easy to do from any computer whenever you want. The travel industry already uses websites to book hotels, flights, rental cars, and most everything else that has to do with tourism. Therefore, it’s no surprise that someone would want to give people a way to browse through and book different tours and location-specific activities online as well. Mathis calls his service GetYourGuide. On GetYourGuide, users can search for specific activities that they would like to book while on vacation. They can also browse by location to see what is available if they already have a destination picked out for their trip. Mathis wants to offer travelers a more convenient way to book activities and plan their trip ahead of time with GetYourGuide. That’s why he gives users the option to add things like hotel pick-up to their bookings. Mathis aims for his customers to be in complete control of their trip before they even leave their homes. Computer IT support is available for customers who have trouble with bookings on Mathis’s website. Read more »

Amos Elliston is, first and foremost, a software engineer.  However, his career has grown significantly over the years and turned him into a highly successful leader as well.  Currently, Elliston is the Chief Technology Officer of PocketChange, a company that rewards users of specific mobile apps with loyalty points.  Elliston’s current position offers him a serious challenge, as he has to work to make the PocketChange loyalty rewards system integrate with hundreds of different mobile applications.  He also has to coordinate teams that work with two different mobile operating systems: Android and iOS.  Fortunately, Elliston has a significant amount of experience handling large engineering and software projects.  This cool person in technology has held upper management positions at two other major software startups besides PocketChange over the last seven years.  This is not a man who would ever need onsite computer support to solve his computer problems like most people.  The evidence heavily suggests that Elliston is a man who knows what it takes to succeed in the tech industry. Read more »

Communication in any large organization or business can be a hassle when there are hundreds of employees.  In a hospital or other healthcare workplace, things are often even more chaotic due to the constant intake of patients and sudden emergencies that can occur.  Cool person in technology Sunny Tara founded docBeat in order to attack this problem by improving communication in hospitals.  Tara’s product, docBeat, is a mobile platform that facilitates quick and secure communication between workers in a healthcare institution.  Tara lets doctors and other healthcare professionals install docBeat on the smartphones they already own.  This makes integrating docBeat into a workplace easier, although hospitals should still have onsite tech support available to ensure the system works smoothly.  Read more »

The print journalism and publishing industry is shrinking yearly as digital magazines and newspapers become the new standard.  This shift has created a new barrier for those who want to get their publications out to the majority of the market online.  Getting a magazine or newspaper to the widest possible audience now requires technical skills that one did not need in the print era.  However, cool product Prss takes down that barrier of difficulty for professional writers and publishers who want to release their work as high quality digital publications.  Prss is a web platform where users create, design, and fill their digital publications with content. It also includes a distribution service to release those publications globally via the Internet.  Prss gives publishers the tools to design and create their own mobile app for their digital magazine even without excessive technical knowledge or skill.  Readers can access the apps you publish via digital distribution services such as Apple’s Newsstand in iOS.  If you don’t understand what Newsstand is or how it works, an Apple tech support service will be able to help you. Read more »

Cool person in technology Alex Austin used to send emails to his parents and attach his recent pictures to them every month so his family could keep up with his activities.  However, this proved awkward and cumbersome, especially since his parents had to take the effort and time to print out their favorite photos locally. Austin felt that there had to be a better way to handle this process.  As a solution, he created Kindred, a mobile application that collects all your digital photos and lets you quickly and simply design print photobooks to send to whomever you want directly from your phone.  His app lets you automatically send photos to those family members who might need hours of computer support to print one out normally. Read more »

Voice control is a growing trend in the smartphone arena.  Both of the two biggest smartphone operating systems—iOS and Android—have voice-activated virtual assistant features built in to their system (Siri and Google Now, respectively).  However, these virtual assistants often don’t work within many specific applications, limiting how many actions they can actually perform.  This is why cool person in technology Stuart Patterson is making virtual assistant style voice control available for individual mobile applications with his company Xtone.  Consumers have responded well to the ease-of-use presented by Siri and Google Now, so Patterson sees an opportunity for app creators to transplant that experience into their own mobile software.  Patterson targets Xtone’s services at small and medium-sized app developers who want to add a Siri-like experience to their product.  Xtone’s own website lists various potential applications of such a feature.  One could use Xtone’s technology for booking hotels and rental cars quickly with a travel app, transferring money or paying bills with a banking app, or even connecting to an online tech support service when you have trouble operating an app.  While virtual assistants like Siri and Google Now can only let you open certain programs or access specific OS commands by voice, Xtone’s technology lets people commit these essential tasks the same way.  Read more »

There is a plethora of options for mobile users who want to use their smartphone as a GPS navigation system.  However, most of these navigation apps are essentially the same.  The only differences you are likely to find are in their user interfaces and perhaps the accuracy of their specific mapping systems.  iOnRoad is a cool product that breaks this trend of homogeneity.  Instead of merely relying on the old conventions of GPS navigation and mapping software, iOnRoad uses your smartphone’s camera to create an experience based on augmented reality instead.  Users mount iOnRoad so it can take video through their cars’ windshields.  The app then overlays its interface on top of the video while it navigates drivers to their destinations. Read more »