Computer Support Blog

There are many travel websites that allow you to compare prices for airfare and hotels when you’re making a trip across the country.  However, there aren’t many options when you want to avoid air travel for any reason—maybe because you’re afraid of flying or because you simply want to save money.  Polina Raygorodskaya is a cool person who is changing this predicament with her website and online service Wanderu.  Wanderu is an aggregator for bus and train companies who provide inter-city travel options.  Users simply log on to the site, search for a starting point and a destination and Wanderu gives them a list of the best options for travel by train, by bus, or even by a combination of the two.  Raygorodskaya wants to make finding the best deal for train and bus travel online as easy as it is for air travel.  She is working to make Wanderu the easiest way for people to book inter-city ground transportation between any two points in North America.  It’s a lofty ambition, but Wanderu appears to be on the right track for now.  Raygorodskaya has made her website fairly simple to use, though if you do have trouble IT support is always an option. 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 »

There are many options for planning vacations via the web, such as travel sites like Orbitz and Expedia, but most of these options are limited in nature.  They only allow you to plan certain things ahead and generally offer no easy tools to plan anything beyond a place to stay and a flight to get there.  Many vacationers want to plan a complete and unique trip with a detailed schedule, but most travel websites don’t offer this option, forcing such travelers to speak to a travel agent.  Nezasa is an online travel service that attempts to make planning even the most complicated and unique trips as easy as booking a flight is on other websites.  This cool product wants customers to be able to easily customize their entire trip, schedule every detail down to the minute, and book everything at once for a single price, eliminating the need to speak to a travel agent at all.  Nezasa aims to make even the most adventurous trips simple and convenient to plan for travelers.  Read more »

It’s a problem everyone who uses e-mail faces: inbox clutter.  Even with a solid spam blocker installed on your PC as part of an Internet security solution, there are many legitimate e-mails we get every day but don’t always want to read.  Perhaps you’ve signed up for band newsletters, online magazine subscriptions, or promotional offers.  You don’t want to block these e-mails because they occasionally give you useful information, but most of the time they simply clog up your inbox and make it a pain to navigate your e-mail.  Unroll.me is a cool product that aims to solve the problem of inbox clutter.  The team at Unroll.me has developed a service that takes all of your promotional and newsletter e-mail subscriptions and combines them into one e-mail per day called “The Rollout”.  They organize and keep all of your promotional e-mails in one place, making it easy to scan for useful information.  This way, your e-mail subscriptions are not taking up inbox space or wasting your time. This could make e-mail a much more organized experience. 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 »

You want a clean house or apartment, but you just don’t have the time to keep it that way. Today’s cool product, Homejoy, wants to create happier homes by making professional housecleaning more affordable. Book someone to come clean your home through the Homejoy online platform and spend more time on your work or with your family. Use Homejoy for a one-time cleaning or to find a reliable person to continue cleaning your home on a regular basis.

Founded by brother and sister Aaron and Adora Cheung in July 2012, Homejoy is located in San Francisco, California. The service is now available in more than 20 cities. Phoenix, Arizona, recently joined the list in June 2013. Some of the other cities where Homejoy provides service are New York City, San Francisco, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle and Philadelphia. Read more »

One of the best gifts parents can give children is a lifelong love of reading. Today’s cool person is Julie Stubblefield. Along with her husband, James, she founded Reading Glue. It enables parents to help young children improve their reading skills and comprehension. For those going to school, the Reading Glue website wants to build on the skills learned in school. The name refers to reading strategies that stick. Reading Glue mainly applies to readers through elementary school age.

Parents can provide reading activities to stimulate and enrich a child’s reading experiences. Beginning readers, which Reading Glue defines as children in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, should know their letters and sounds and read some short words. Books for this group should have many pictures and few words on a page, Stubblefield suggests. 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 »