Keeping track of all the press your company gets can be a difficult and time-consuming task. When you’re building a startup, you barely have time to sleep, much less analyze your company’s press and social media coverage in serious depth. However, Matt Allison is a cool person in technology who wants to solve this problem. Read more »
Poor user engagement can kill an enterprise’s website performance. Even if your company’s website gets high traffic, you’re not getting the most out of your site if users aren’t staying and digging deeper into it. Cool person in technology Murray Galbraith knows how much of a problem this is for many businesses. That’s why he built Youneeq. Youneeq tracks the behavior of users on your website and keeps them engaged by only showing them the content they want to see. Galbraith’s company uses its data to filter your site’s content on an individual level so that when someone visits the site, they only see what interests them specifically. In theory, this increases engagement on the site and prevents users from leaving due to having to filter through too many things that they have no interest in viewing. Read more »
Keeping track of your receipts and warranties can be a serious pain. It’s all too easy to misplace a receipt or forget how long you’ve had a product. John Jackovin, the CEO of Bawte, is a cool person in technology who wants to solve these problems with his mobile application. In his company’s own words, Jackovin wants to “make owning things simple.” His smartphone app, Bawte, allows you to “tag” products you buy on your smartphone. Once you tag a product, Jackovin’s app gives you access to warranty information and instruction manuals for that product anytime you want. This would save customers from worrying about the paper trail when they make purchases and potentially save them hassle later on if they need to find a manual or warranty information quickly. Bawte makes information about your products accessible whenever you want on your smartphone. It even keeps track of when a warranty expires for each product you purchase. For example, you can check the status of the warranties on your computer products and know when you definitely need to go to a local computer repair company for help because your product’s warranty isn’t viable anymore. Read more »
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 »
With the advent of MP3 players, music streaming sites and smartphones that contain entire music libraries in the palm of your hand, music has become an increasingly individual experience over the last decade. Billy Chasen is a cool person in technology who wants to use his online service, Turntable.fm, to make music a social activity once more. This may seem counterintuitive, as most online music services, such as personal Internet radio sites Pandora and Slacker Radio, focus on making music a personal experience. Chasen wants to people to interact while listening to music. That’s why Turntable.fm combines the concepts of chat rooms and Internet radio. Users log into rooms designated by genre or mood and interact while through chat while music plays in the background. Users, as oppose to algorithms, also choose the songs that play in each room. People fill in specific “DJ spots” in each room that allow them to pick the upcoming songs for everyone to listen to and (hopefully) enjoy. This allows groups of people to share their tastes and potentially discover new music through their friends. If you have trouble connecting to the Turntable.fm service online, finding PC tech support is essential. Read more »
With the wide diversity of people in the United States, not everyone is fluent in English. When non-English speakers suffer emergencies or want to transact normal business, they may require interpretation assistance to explain the situation. Today’s cool product is the ELSA (Enabling Language Service Anywhere) device from RTT Mobile Interpretation in Minnesota, which provides on-demand interpretation services.
Charles Howerton invented ELSA and founded RTT Mobile Interpretation. ELSA has been interpreting since December 2012. Read more »
Designers often need feedback for their work but want more than a limited pool of responses. Dribbble CEO Rich Thornett is a cool person in technology that has created a social network made specifically for designers to showcase their work. Dribbble allows designers to post the projects their working on and get feedback from other designers. It also allows designers to put their portfolio online to increase their visibility in the design community. Thornett works to keep Dribbble a space where designers can interact, give feedback and promote their own work within the community easily. The Dribbble CEO doesn’t limit what types of designers can use the service, explicitly stating on the site that the social network is for “web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types”. Being open to so many forms of design works towards Thornett’s vision of an open community where ideas can cross breed even across design disciplines. Non-technical designers that would like to post their work on Dribbble may want to find online computer support for help getting started. Read more »
Video editing is a tasking process for many computers. For a reasonably smooth experience editing videos, you must have a somewhat powerful PC. Furthermore, if you want to do serious editing, professional software can cost hundreds of dollars. Vidmaker attempts to solve these problems by giving you a video editing option performed in the cloud. This cool product provides web tools that you can access from any Internet-connected device, allowing you to upload your videos and edit them right in your browser. When finished editing a project, users can post videos on social networks, e-mail them, or save them on cloud storage services like Dropbox. Vidmaker gives you powerful video editing tools that you can access through the web, so you can edit your videos even on an underpowered device. Those who have trouble accessing or using Vidmaker should contact computer support when they need help. Read more »