Cool Person of the Day

Parents often face a dilemma when it comes to their children’s arts and crafts.  As parents, many want to treasure their child’s work and the memories associated with it.  However, as the artwork piles up, it gets unorganized, lost, or simply starts taking up too much room.  This usually leads to parents boxing all of their kids’ art up and storing it away where no one ever sees it or even throwing it away altogether.  Offir Gutelzon is a cool person in technology who wants to offer parents an alternative solution to this issue.  Gutelzon is the CEO of Keepy, a company that produces an iOS app and cloud solution for parents to store children’s arts and crafts.  With Gutelzon’s app, parents can take pictures of all their kids’ artwork and upload them to his company’s cloud database.  Parents can then access the photos in a digital scrapbook on any iOS device whenever they want.  This allows parents to box up their children’s crafts without worrying about not having easy access to them.   If your smartphone camera doesn’t seem to work when using Keepy, find an iPhone repair company that can provide the proper assistance. Read more »

Most online marketing tools offer businesses an analytics feature to measure the successes and failures of their online strategy.  Many businesses have found that these analytical tools help them visualize their business model and customer base in new ways.  Analytics can also help them gain new insights into their model that they didn’t originally consider.  What if you could apply the same analytics to an enterprise’s offline marketing and get similar insights?  That’s exactly what cool person in technology Cory Capasso is trying to do with his company Nomi.  Nomi claims to offer businesses a vertically integrated solution that provides analytics about their offline marketing in the same way a business receives analytics from online marketing services.  Offline marketing includes sales, promotions, events, in-store signs, end caps, displays and any other form of advertising that doesn’t involve an Internet connection.  Capasso’s company leverages an enterprise’s POS, CRM, and BI systems to gather the appropriate data.  It then uses that data to try to provide you with insightful analytics.  If you’re interested in utilizing an analytics service like Nomi, but you need technical help implementing one, make sure you contact a business IT service before going forward.  Read more »

One of the most touted features of Google’s mobile operating system Android is the level of customization that it offers to users.  With the help of many different settings available as well as specialized Android applications, Android users can redesign their phone or tablet’s entire interface.  Cool person in technology Ashvin Dhingra knew that many Android users like himself were passionate about their own customized Android designs.  Dhingra acted on this passion by creating MyColorScreen.com, an online community that lets hobbyist Android customizers share their own design with others.  Users post images of their different Android interface designs and tutorials on how others can create and install them on their own phones.  Dhingra’s website features the most viewed and talked about designs on its main page and runs a blog with tips, guides, and opinions as well.  Dhingra even placed a special section on the site for those who have hacked their iOS devices to customize their home screen as well.  The website claims that its community has uploaded over 49,000 designs so far.  If you want to learn more about Android customization, find an Android tech support provider to help you. Read more »

It is hard to gauge just how hyped the public is for certain products.  Whether it’s in tech or entertainment, advertising and press coverage can often be misleading indicators of how much people anticipate an upcoming product.  Cool person in technology Grant Yim founded HypeJar to garner more accurate ideas about how much the public is looking forward to different product releases.  HypeJar does this by aggregating the opinions of everyday consumers itself for insight.  Yim’s website invites users to vote, comment, and tag upcoming products to share their opinions on them.  HypeJar then takes this data and uses it to measure how much “hype” a product actually has.  In theory, one can gain a more accurate idea of the buzz surrounding a product by seeing what users think on HypeJar, rather than what journalists, critics, or advertisers think in their respective bubbles.  For example, while a tech blog may be hyping an upcoming phone release, users may actually be unexcited by it because it seems confusing and would require smartphone tech support just to complete simple tasks. Read more »

Being a successful young entrepreneur is never an easy thing to accomplish.  Founding a company, directing it in its early stages and turning it into a successful business are things that many people struggle to do even after years of experience in an industry.  That’s why cool person Katherine Fleischman, the twenty-eight year old founder and CEO of Blink PR, is so impressive.  Fleishman has built Blink PR from the ground up and has garnered a long list of clients.  Fleischman founded her PR agency in 2008, less than two years after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in art history and psychology.  After only a year of working as a media coordinator at agency212, Fleischman made the bold move of stepping out on her own and trying to build something from nothing.  Five years later, Blink PR is the result of her efforts.  While working on Blink PR in New York City, Fleishman also managed to get a Master’s degree in public relations from NYU. Read more »

Finding the right company to enjoy a game of football, baseball or basketball and talk about your favorite teams usually isn’t much of an issue for local sports fans.  Sports bars and restaurants are littered throughout every major city with a professional sports team and even many that aren’t, but what happens when you move away from your local team for a new job or another opportunity?  You suddenly find yourself separated from everyone you can talk to about your favorite team.  That’s why cool person in tech Leigh Goldstein has founded Exiles, a social networking site designed specifically to cater to communities of displaced sports fans.  Exiles hosts several micro-sized social networks on its site, and each one is specifically dedicated to a particular sports franchise and its displaced fans in other areas of the country.  Goldstein and his team are aiming for these microsites to replace the community feeling of a local sports bar or club.  Fans can share team-specific stories, ask questions of the community, share related news articles, and even form local meetups if you find other displaced fans in your area.  By transferring teams’ fan community online, Goldstein believes he can recreate the communal experience that local sports fans have for fans that live away from their team. Read more »

Cool person in technology Alex Austin used to send emails to his parents and attach his recent pictures to them every month so his family could keep up with his activities.  However, this proved awkward and cumbersome, especially since his parents had to take the effort and time to print out their favorite photos locally. Austin felt that there had to be a better way to handle this process.  As a solution, he created Kindred, a mobile application that collects all your digital photos and lets you quickly and simply design print photobooks to send to whomever you want directly from your phone.  His app lets you automatically send photos to those family members who might need hours of computer support to print one out normally. Read more »

Voice control is a growing trend in the smartphone arena.  Both of the two biggest smartphone operating systems—iOS and Android—have voice-activated virtual assistant features built in to their system (Siri and Google Now, respectively).  However, these virtual assistants often don’t work within many specific applications, limiting how many actions they can actually perform.  This is why cool person in technology Stuart Patterson is making virtual assistant style voice control available for individual mobile applications with his company Xtone.  Consumers have responded well to the ease-of-use presented by Siri and Google Now, so Patterson sees an opportunity for app creators to transplant that experience into their own mobile software.  Patterson targets Xtone’s services at small and medium-sized app developers who want to add a Siri-like experience to their product.  Xtone’s own website lists various potential applications of such a feature.  One could use Xtone’s technology for booking hotels and rental cars quickly with a travel app, transferring money or paying bills with a banking app, or even connecting to an online tech support service when you have trouble operating an app.  While virtual assistants like Siri and Google Now can only let you open certain programs or access specific OS commands by voice, Xtone’s technology lets people commit these essential tasks the same way.  Read more »

Most eCommerce depends heavily on a discounted mass-market model that focuses on items produced in very high volumes and shipped from big warehouses.  It’s a very functional, but very dry system.  Wherein the world of physical retail, there are often specialty shops that depend on unique products and craftsmanship, these types of products and retailers commonly get lost in the shuffle on the Internet.  Grand St. CEO and cool person in technology Amanda Peyton wants to change this and help the visibility of unique, specially crafted products on the web.  Her company works a curator for eCommerce, seeking out and partnering with makers of specialty items and offering a limited number of these items as deals through the Grand St. website.  Rather than fill warehouses with everyday products, Peyton wants to give exposure to unique items.  For example, Grand St. has featured a Bluetooth thermometer for your grill that alerts you when your food finishes cooking, an inflatable solar-powered LED lantern, and a digital pen that records your handwritten notes and syncs them wirelessly with your smartphone.  Clearly, these are not everyday items you’ll find in Wal-Mart, but specialized tech toys that focus on niche markets.  If you ever need help with an electronic item purchased from Grand St.’s website, you should find a good tech support provider. Read more »

There are many job listing websites on the Internet, but the vast majority of them amount to a simple position and résumé aggregator.  While they make it easier to find potential jobs and candidates by pooling them all into one place online, most sites don’t try anything that significantly affects or changes the hiring process.  Elli Sharef is a cool person in technology who believes this is a missed opportunity to take advantage of the Internet and new technology.  To address this, she founded HireArt, a startup focused on finding ways to enhance the job application process.  Like other job listing sites, HireArt has companies post available positions and applicants make personal profiles to apply.  However, applicants do not simply upload or copy over their résumé when making their HireArt profile.  HireArt requires potential applicants to provide work samples and complete an interview that is specific to the type of work they wish to find.  Sharef herself is the main developer of HireArt’s interviews.  Generally, Sharef’s interviews include two written responses and two video responses for each candidate.  If you want to create a HireArt profile, but have trouble using a webcam for video replies, you will need home computer support to assist you. Read more »