Computer Support Blog

Online reviews are extremely important to small businesses that don’t have the massive advertising resources of large corporations.  In the days before the Internet, restaurants and local service providers would depend heavily on word of mouth and hope that customers would tell others of their positive experiences.  Now, with online review sites, it’s easier than ever for customers to relay their experiences with a company to as many people as possible all at once.   That means that each online review, positive or negative, can have a major impact on a small business trying to grow.  Cool product in technology Review Trackers is helping these businesses keep track of all the reviews they receive online and manage them accordingly.  Read more »

Content marketing is a huge part of growing and maintaining a strong web presence for a company’s brand.  To bring people to one’s website, companies need to present online visitors with content that is both informative and enjoyable.  The more people that associate a brand with positive and engaging content, the better it is for that brand’s public image.  However, producing engaging content that draws people in isn’t a simple process.  There is a significant amount of work in planning and delivering content to aim for the most reach and engagement on the web.  Cool person in technology and Triblio CEO Andre Yee wants to help companies with that process.  Yee’s product Triblio is a content marketing management and analytics platform that helps content providers learn from their audience and strategize.  Read more »

Traditional TV ratings are mostly indicative of a show’s potential as an advertisement space.  The more people that watch a show, the more eyeballs view the commercials attached to that show.  However, in the age of digital media, significant money can now come from direct digital sales to an online audience.  Ratings are not always helpful at measuring the overall potential of a show to make money through DVD, Blu-Ray and digital sales. A show with a smaller but very active and engaged audience can outsell a show with a very large audience who only watches casually.  Now, with social media becoming a major part of viewers’ everyday lives, networks and producers finally have a chance to gain insight into audience engagement.  Invested viewers constantly tweet and update their Facebook profiles with comments about their favorite shows as they air and directly afterwards.  Cool person in technology Laurent Maisonnave has created a system called SeeVibes to report the level of social media engagement for television shows.  With Maisonnave’s system, network and cable stations can get insight into how many people emotionally invest in their content and how they can encourage further investment.  Read more »

YouTube is no longer just an amateur video site.  Many people produce high quality content for the massive Internet video platform on a regular basis and even manage to earn a living purely from the advertisement money coming from their YouTube channels.  YouTube has gone from an interesting novelty to a major platform for many different types of media—from talk shows to independent dramatic web series.  However, for potential YouTube personalities, the task of building an audience large enough to sustain a regular show or popular channel can be daunting.  Cool product VidIQ wants to give users a better chance at getting enough regular viewers to make their YouTube videos profitable.  Building an audience takes far more work than just content creation and VidIQ is a platform that streamlines that work.  Read more »

Sports and athletic competition have been a pastime of choice for human beings for literally thousands of years. With all our technological advancements, people have never had more opportunity to improve their skills than they do today.  Competitors can track their health and fitness with countless mobile devices and smartphone apps.  They can also view HD video to study both their own performances and the performances of others on their phone, tablet, computer, or large screen TV almost any time they want.  Cool person in technology Chen Sachar has introduced yet another way that players can use technology to improve their game—real-time analytics and 3D visualizations.  Read more »

Trying to react to how customers interact with and perceive a website is one of the most difficult challenges of modern marketing.  Companies devote extensive time and resources to constantly updating their websites in reaction to how visitors spend time on and engage with their sites.  Usually, companies perform long-term tests, which help them decide on new designs and content for their pages.  However, a new startup has released a product that can help businesses react even more quickly and dynamically to how people use their sites.  Cool person in technology Karl Wirth founded Evergage to create a system where companies can react to visitors on their site in real-time and provide specially tailored content to users depending on their behavior.  Read more »

Analytics and data collection is hot area in the technology industry.  There are countless analytics startups trying to help both large corporations and small businesses grow.  However, cool person in technology Rob Mancabelli believes that analytics can help improve more than just business.  Mancabelli is a former teacher and educational technology director that wants to get schools on the analytics bandwagon in order to find better ways to help young students.  Mancabelli’s company BrightBytes has developed a product for schools that provides actionable data that can help institutions improve children’s experiences and increase their learning.  Mancabelli wants to measure how students interact with what’s available at school and seeing what policy changes affect positive change statistically.  If his product can provide these insights, Mancabelli’s analytics could have a major impact on education.  For example, if analytics prove students using the computer lab more often frequently receive better grades, then there is viable data school officials can use to acquire more funds for things like IT support.  Just knowing the most effective ways to spend a school’s limited funds could make serious change in many kids’ educations. Read more »

While universities are centers of education, they are also a business in many ways.  Reputation and student enrollment are major pieces of the puzzle when keeping a college successful.  However, both of those things drop when a college is unable to retain students from year to year.  Whether young people are dropping out of school completely or transferring to other colleges, it always hurts a school significantly.   Fewer students coming back means lower enrollment and therefore lower tuition.  Low retention rates also hurt a college’s reputation and make it more difficult to recruit new freshmen the following year.  Read more »

Hotels often live and die by their reputation.  The famous star rating system and referrals from previous travelers are what bring most people to the lobbies of hotels all around the world.  Reputation is key in the hospitality business and the opinion of a hotel’s guests dictates its reputation.  Now, there is a cool product in technology that helps hotels connect better with their customers.  GuestDriven gives hotels the tools to engage and provide for their guests to gain insight into what they need to improve their experience.  GuestDriven then also encourages guests to become brand ambassadors, spreading the good word about particular locations to other potential customers and improving overall business for the hotel.  GuestDriven accomplishes all of these goals through mobile technology.  Read more »

Social analytics aren’t always the most accurate way to find out what a company’s reputation is on the web.  Most of these analytics tools scan social networks and find relevant posts simply by the mention of a business’s name and potentially a few keywords.  However, this often means that these tools measure both positive and negative statements about a company in the same manner.  Someone complaining about a restaurant’s menu and someone complimenting it could look the same in many tools as long as the authors used one or two of the same words.  This situation demands a more accurate solution and the team at Local Measure believe that they have found one.  Read more »