Computer Support Blog

Anyone who works with digital photographs knows that having great photographic equipment is only half of what one needs to create amazing digital images.  In many ways, the quality of your digital camera is not as important as the quality of your photo manipulation software.  Adobe has long been the leader in digital photograph manipulation software, with its Photoshop software becoming synonymous with photo manipulation.  Once again, Adobe is raising the bar with its Lightroom 4 software.

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For those who might not have heard of it yet, there is a social network challenging Facebook for supremacy on the Internet.  It’s not Google+, either!  The social network is called Diaspora and it is an open-source alternative to Facebook that was founded on the belief that users ought to control their information and social network experience.  Diaspora is a good idea that has been plagued by problems, not the least of which are a lack of name recognition (outside the hacker community) and the suicide last November of one of the company’s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy.  Despite the setbacks, Diaspora is poised to break out into popular culture.  If it does, it will no doubt be in part because of Rosanna Yau.

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It is hard to imagine a cooler connector than the USB port.  Seriously, USB connectors truly live up to their name as being a Universal port.  USB flash drives can be cool and stylish and the ability to connect them to virtually any computer device has made the exchange of data and media exceptionally easy.  In fact, with so many different devices that use a USB port and contain a male USB jack, you are much more likely to run out of USB ports than ever before!  With the USB hub from iBuffalo, fear of not having enough USB ports may be safely set aside.

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There are a number of ways to try to make money off the Internet.  However, the study of analytics is becoming a big business for those who want to generate revenue from their websites.  Analytics is a study of both website content and visitor traffic patterns.  The big analytic programs, like Google analytics and Gnip, rely upon vast amounts of data and trends to provide the content providers of websites with the tools they need to monetize their site most effectively.  One of the emerging analytics sites on the Internet is Yieldbot.  The daunting task of creating their analytical tools falls to Soren Macbeth.

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As mobile computing devices like smartphones and tablet computers begin to dominate the electronics market, an entire generation of media enthusiasts is being marginalized.  The consumers who popularize listening to music on mp3 players and watching movies on tiny screens streamed from The Cloud are eroding the high standards producers of movies, music and quality television have when they pour their hearts into their work.  Fortunately, there are still those who are interested in immersing themselves in great music or the full movie experience.  For those consumers, there are giant-screen high definition televisions and Blu-Ray players.  For their sound system, there is the Bowers & Wilkins MT-60D Mini Theatre System.

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Any number of good ideas will fail when you do not have the right people in place to execute them.  As online advertising becomes increasingly competitive, Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman knew that in order to compete with giants like Amazon and Google’s Adsense, he needed a staff that was both creative and could execute complex ideas.  For the computer proficiency Spongecell needed to compete in a very tight market, Kartzman turned to Blythe Dunham!

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There are a number of emerging online and mobile phone payment companies. No longer is the whole of the Internet beholden to PayPal for fast, secure, on-line payments. In addition to emerging mobile phone payment companies Square and Dwolla, there is Boku. If you haven’t heard of Boku, yet, that is not a surprise; it is still fairly new. But David Yoo is determined to make Boku a household name!

David Yoo is the Senior Vice President of Strategy, Product and Marketing for Boku. In that role, David Yoo is raising brand recognition and spending a great deal of time informing potential customers about the services that Boku offers. As Boku breaks into the rapidly expanding online and mobile payment market, it is David Yoo’s job to help Boku rise above the pack. So far, Yoo’s efforts have helped to net more investment from Silicon Valley investors and the launch of a multimedia advertising campaign.

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It is absolutely astonishing to see how fast a social network can rise on the Internet.  It seems like Internet social networks fall much, much slower than they rise – one need only look at the slow fading of MySpace to recall how they might linger – but when a new social network is a hit, it can come out of nowhere.  That is the story of Pinterest.  Pinterest may not be a household name yet, but the little social network had about one third the traffic of Twitter in January 2012, making it a sudden force in the social network market.  With such a sudden demand for its service, Pinterest has a great reliance on Aubrey Obata Kendall.

Aubrey Obata Kendall is the chief recruiter for Pinterest.  Since November of 2011, Kendall has been staffing up Pinterest in order to help the small company grow to meet the current and forthcoming demand for their services.  Because Pinterest is currently so small, the recruiting position is especially important to the company.  Aubrey Obata Kendall’s judgment on staff may well affect the course of the entire company, so the reliance Pinterest has on her is actually quite high.

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No matter how convenient mobile computers and streaming technology are, there is nothing that enhances a movie viewing experience like seeing it on a big screen. In fact, watching pretty much anything is improved by seeing it on a color-rich, high definition, high-resolution, giant screen. Directors and producers produce their works to make them look good when they are big, so why do so many people obsess on crowding around tiny mobile devices to watch things? With the Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable, you no longer have to!

The Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable is a beautiful and durable basic connector. What can make a connector beautiful? For true high-definition transfers, your connectors need to be gold and the Amzer Micro HDMI To HDMI Cable has stylish and functional gold plating for the connectors and the leads. The gold offsets the standard black cable very nicely, so the word “beautiful” certainly applies to this cable.

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In the quest to make digital music a viable business endeavor instead of just a cool idea, there have been many businesses and websites that have already come and gone.  While digital music pirating has been a huge issue for most of the services that have failed, rapidly changing hardware has been a serious issue as well.  One quarter, the dominant digital music device is an MP3 player, the next it is a smartphone!  Failure to adapt the digital music service to the new technologies has sunk some of the digital music services distributing digital music files over the Internet.  Spotify is deeply invested in making sure that does not happen.  For that, they have Oskar Stal!

Oskar Stal is the Chief Technology Officer of digital music distributor Spotify.  As Spotify developed as a website, but prepared to take its service international, the company sought a CTO who had extensive experience with mobile operating systems.  Without a CTO who knew the ins and outs of various mobile platforms, Spotify could not take their business to the next level.  Having been employed at mBlox, a company deeply invested in mobile transactions and the technical interactions between mobile platforms, Oskar Stal rose to the top of Spotify’s list of desirable candidates for the position.

Oskar Stal’s resume is more extensive than simply working for mBlox, though spending eight years as the Director of Development in the technical department at that company was the weightiest factor in Spotify hiring him.  Fortunately for Spotify, Stal was exceptionally interested in the position; he was already impressed by how much Spotify had accomplished without someone as experienced at the top of their development branch!

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