Computer Support Blog

RESCUECOM’s 2014 Q3 Computer Reliability Report results are in, just in time to allow you to compare tech devices before buying on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. With all of the deals on technology this time of year, you want to make sure to get the best device you can for your money. Whether you are looking for a computer or a tablet, RESCUECOM’s Computer Reliability Report will give you all the information you need to make the right purchase. Even if you are looking to buy a device for someone else this holiday season, RESCUECOM’s convenient reliability grades will help you choose the perfect fit. Read more »

Reading can be an expensive hobby.  Hardcover books often cost between fifteen and twenty dollars and many paperback books hover around the ten-dollar area at bookstores across the United States.  However, avid eBook readers know that going digital can save people a significant amount of money.  While eBooks aren’t often cheaper than their physical counterparts upon initial release, digital bookstores provide readers with free and heavily discounted books far more than physical retailers do.  However, readers have to dig through the depths of different eBook stores like Amazon’s Kindle Store, Google Play, Apple iBooks, and Nook’s digital store to find these deals.  Most companies do not heavily advertise these discounts, especially in niche genres that have many digital readers.  Cool person in technology and entrepreneur Josh Schanker wants to make it much easier for eBook readers to find these deals.  In fact, with his company BookBub, he wants to make it completely effortless.  Schanker’s company provides a service that both curates specific eBook deals for its customers and automatically delivers the deals via email.  Anyone who has trouble receiving email will obviously need to contact a remote tech support company for help before using BookBub. Read more »

Augmented reality has many applications in the real world.  People can use it with wearable technology such as Google Glass to create head-up displays for when they perform physical work in an outdoor environment.  However, augmented reality isn’t only limited to wearable tech devices.  Cool product Augment puts the power of augmented reality in the hands of anyone with a smartphone or tablet.  Augment allows people to impose 3D models or prototypes that they create onto the physical world.  Users can view how their models would appear as real-world objects and get a better idea of how they would look before investing money to create a physical item.  Read more »

One of the key aspects of marketing a book has always been holding book-signing events.  These events help to create hype a writer’s work and allow authors to connect directly with their biggest supporters, which increases the chances that those supporters will spread the word about their favorite author’s books.  Book signings have always been an effective way for authors to communicate and promote their books to their readership.  However, with eBooks on the rise over the last several years, traditional books are taking up the less of the market.  This introduces a serious problem for authors: how do you continue to promote your work through book signings when more and more content is digital in nature?  Cool product Autography provides a solution to this conundrum.  Autography has created a system for the digital signing of eBooks.  With new advances in technology, Autography allows authors to personalize eBooks for their readers and attach digital signatures and individualized messages so readers can receive personalized copies of books just as they would at a physical book signing.  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 »

Flipboard is a tablet application for iPad and Android that aims to improve the user experience for consuming social media and news.  Mike McCue, the CEO of the company, founded Flipboard in 2010 alongside iPhone engineer Evan Doll.  He branded the app as a “social magazine”, which collects information from a person’s many different social media accounts and specific news sources and places it into a magazine aesthetic for the user.  Users can then quickly flip through the digital pages of their personalized magazine to take in all the information from their media and news feeds in a single place.  This is opposed to the traditional web format of news and social media, which usually involves vertical scrolling and does not consolidate and organize your data the way Flipboard attempts to do. Those who have interest in Flipboard but are struggling with the app should find iPad support for help. McCue has lead Flipboard to great success since founding it.  He has helped to make the application one of the most featured and prominent on both Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS operating systems. Read more »

There has been a major shift in consumer purchasing behavior in the personal computer market over the last two years.  Traditional desktop and laptop PCs, have seen significant decline in year-over-year sales.  In the first quarter of 2013, there was an 11.7% year-over-year drop in shipments for the traditional PC market in the United States.  Meanwhile, US tablet shipments grew 49.6% year-over-year in the same quarter.  These statistics show an important shift for consumers towards mobile computing.  These numbers also made Rescuecom’s decision to include tablets as part of the RESCUECOM Computer Reliability Report for Q1 2013 that much easier.  It’s clear that many users are choosing to take their computing mobile with tablet purchases.  It would be foolish to ignore this trend. Read more »

There are two significant barriers for most people to traveling the world and seeing all that it has to offer: money and not knowing the languages native to the places you wish to visit.  Once you have enough money to travel, you have to determine whether you want to learn a new language or hire a guide.  Either choice may require an investment of time or money you may not wish to spend in that manner or, in the case of adding an additional person, it may fundamentally change the experience you were hoping to have.  Thanks to ECTACO there is now a third option!  If you want to visit Korea, you need not learn the language.  Instead, you just need to take the Partner EK900 Deluxe English-Korean Talking Electronic Dictionary with you! 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 »

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 »