Computer Support Blog

Campus safety is an important issue as crime rates continue to be a cause for concern for many universities.  Most people wouldn’t immediately think of mobile applications as a technological tool that could help students remain safe on campus.  However, Dr. Gary Margolis is a cool person in technology that has developed exactly that—a smartphone app that students can use to keep safe while they’re at school.  Margolis and his team have developed Campus Sentinel, which gives college students a number of resources and tools to help them remain safe on campus.  The app lists detailed crime statistics for over 4,400 schools to help students remain informed about what’s going on around them.  This will hopefully help them make safer decisions as they go about campus life.    Read more »

It’s hard to know exactly what’s in our food and what it might do to us.  Nutrition labels on most food products only give us pure statistics about things like fat, calories and sodium, which can be misleading without a full ingredient list.  Grocery shoppers who want to find the healthiest foods and avoid ingredients that may cause long-term harm to their health can’t depend solely on the information found in nutrition labels.  NxtNutrio is a cool product that gives shoppers the power to check a detailed ingredient list of every food they buy in a store.  It allows users to see exactly what’s in their food before they purchase and eat it.  NxtNutrio gives users the ability to make educated and healthy decisions about what they put in their body.  Read more »

Companies have given smartphones a myriad of functions as they’ve grown more powerful and versatile over the years.  Smartphones can now be your GPS and navigation device, mobile computer, weather tracker, and gaming device.  Max Perelman sees a lot of potential is smartphones as well, but not simply as personal consumer devices.  Perelman is a cool person in technology that’s working to make it possible to turn a smartphone into a portable DNA diagnostics lab.  He and his team envision a future where you can connect your smartphone to a small device wirelessly and immediately have a solution for genetic diagnostics and on-site disease tracking.  If Perelman’s vision comes true, it could be much easier and much cheaper to track developing diseases and treat them more efficiently. Perelman also wants to keep his device simple to use.  He doesn’t want lab assistants having to call tech support just to hook up their smartphones and run tests.  It’s an ambitious project, but if successful, Perelman and the team at Biomeme could make a huge difference in the future of public health.  Read more »

When you have multiple credit cards and bank accounts, keeping track of all your monthly purchases to ensure their legitimacy can be a time-consuming and harrowing feat.  This is especially true if you are already lacking for free time because of the many hours that your job and family require of you.  This can often cost you money thanks to grey charges—items and services charged to your credit card that you are unaware of but keep piling up because you fall behind on checking your bills.  Yaron Samid, the CEO of Billguard, is a cool person using technology to help consumers combat these grey charges and save money in the process.

Billguard is an iPhone app that keeps track of all your credit card bills at once.  This keeps all your billing data in one convenient place for review.  Arguably more important than that, Samid’s app flags transactions it believes to be grey charges for user review.  Samid is a cool person in technology who believes he can save people a lot of money and frustration by bringing their attention to unwanted charges and helping to make the management of monthly credit card bills easier.  If you have downloaded Billguard for your iPhone but need help getting it to work, iPhone support is the best option. Read more »

Every great mobile application starts with an idea.  The effort and resources it takes to turn that idea into a working prototype that you can show to others costs serious amounts of time and money.  POP (Prototyping on Paper) is a cool product that makes the process of demonstrating your idea for a mobile application quicker and easier.  All you need for POP to turn your idea into a working prototype is a pen, paper, and a smartphone.  POP turns your sketches and drawn concepts for an app into prototypes that you can show others on a mobile phone.  You simply take a picture of your concept’s sketch with your smartphone’s camera, and, in POP’s own app, you can edit it to create a functional design with buttons and links to show off your concept to others.  POP is available on iPhone with an Android version in development.  If POP gives you technical issues, smartphone tech support can help you get the app working properly. Read more »

It’s one of the most common problems people have: lack of time.  Many of us have so many things to do in our lives that we forget the smaller tasks, even when they’re important.  Only the most affluent among us can hire personal assistants to take care of those smaller tasks and ensure they are completed.  However, Ted Roden is a cool person in technology that envisions a future where his service, FancyHands, allows everyone the benefit of a personal assistant.  FancyHands is an online service that Roden created where members can immediately request the completion of any task that doesn’t require a physical presence.  You can assign any scheduling, research, calls or other Internet and phone-based tasks that you need done to the FancyHands team.  Roden and his team use tech to make this process even easier with a mobile app that simply lets users speak their request into their phone.  Roden has created a system where anyone can free up their time with the help of a virtual personal assistant. Read more »

Social networking has made online communication easy, but privacy is a key issue with platforms like Twitter and Facebook.  While those services have their own private messaging applications, all it takes is a small mistake like clicking on the wrong button to broadcast a private message to all your friends, business partners, and family accidentally. Then you find yourself calling tech support for help deleting the message as you try to limit the damage. Social networking companies like Facebook design their services for mass communication, but there is a cool product that is available for social network-style private communication between only two people.  Avocado is a service available on Android devices, iOS devices, and the web that facilitates private communication between you and one other person.   This ensures the privacy of your messages and makes sure you’ll only ever send private messages and media to the intended recipient. Read more »

EBook publishing grows significantly as an industry every year.  More and more companies have begun to offer direct publishing options and eBook conversion tools for authors and publishers.  However, these services, such as the popular Smashwords, focus almost entirely on standard prose eBooks.  With tablets and smartphones getting better displays all the time, the industry needs similar publishing services and conversion tools for graphical publications.  Cool Person in technology Micah Baldwin is filling that role with his company Graphicly.

Baldwin has built a service that handles the conversion and digital distribution for comic books, graphic novels, children’s books and even photography publications.  Artists and authors simply upload their book once and Graphicly converts it into multiple distribution formats for both the web and mobile.  Baldwin’s company then distributes the graphical eBook to several different online marketplaces as well, including Amazon’s Kindle bookstore, Apple’s iBooks store, and the Google Play Store. Readers who have trouble downloading books for their mobile devices on any of these marketplaces should speak to someone for mobile tech support. Read more »

Keller Rinaudo, the CEO of Romotive, is a cool person in technology that wants to put robots that improve people’s lives in every home.  While you’re probably wondering if this is science fiction, it’s true that Rinaudo has already taken the first steps towards his goal with his company’s first product: Romo.  Romo is a robot that has a tank-like base that contains an iPhone dock and wheels.  The iPhone itself displays the robot’s face when connected. Users can control Romo through an iOS app that allows you to program its behavior.  You can program Romo for basic things such as being happy to see you when it recognizes your face through the iPhone camera. However, you can also have it do more complex tasks, such as rolling away from you to prevent you from pressing snooze when the iPhone alarm goes off.  If you have trouble programming Romo on your iPhone, smartphone computer support is probably a good option for you. Read more »

Mobile solutions for banking purposes have grown incredibly popular.  Nearly every major banking institution has a mobile app these days for users to manage their finances on the go.  The founders of GoBank have noticed these trends as well and have launched a bank with a new model focused entirely on mobile.  GoBank has no physical branches, but has instead designed a system to allow its customers to handle their banking entirely via mobile apps.  GoBank is hoping to save users time and money by preventing the need for them ever to drive to physical banks to make transactions.  In theory, if everything you need to bank is in a mobile app, you never have to leave home or work to manage your finances at all.  This cool product wants to take the partial mobile solutions offered by other banks and advance them towards a completely new model for banking. Users who need help using the GoBank app should seek mobile tech support when in trouble.  Read more »