Cool Person of the Day

We still use paper and plastic in many unnecessary situations despite the rise of mobile technology.  Loyalty cards, gift cards, boarding passes, concert tickets, and coupons are all still most commonly physical items that are inconvenient and to both customers and businesses alike.  Some time ago, Apple created Passbook to encourage people to replace these physical items with digital version on their iPhones.  However, while use has grown steadily, Passbook has still only seen relatively limited uptake.  Kevin William David is a cool person in technology that wants to change that.  David founded Walletkit in 2012 to help businesses integrate Apple Passbook into their model.  David designs, codes, and delivers professional grade passbook passes to Walletkit’s clients to suit their specific needs.  David clearly believes in a more convenient future based on mobile technology and he’s doing his part to spread it with his company.  If you’ve never tried Apple Passbook, but are interested in using it, you should speak to iPhone support to learn more about it.  Read more »

Many of us remember sharing story time with our parents as kids or even to our own kids as parents.  The tradition of storybooks remains strong because it is a strong bonding experience between parent and child.  Mobile technology has made it even easier to share this experience with your children wherever you are, as mobile apps for narrated and interactive storybooks have become more and more commonplace.  However, cool person in technology Woody Sears believes he can make it even easier and more convenient with his new service iStorytime.  iStorytime is a subscription-based service that offers a large, growing collection of digital storybooks to its customers for a monthly charge.  Parents can also buy these digital storybooks a la carte within the iStorytime app.  Sears wants to consolidate the digital storybook experience into one app, so parents have an instant collection of books for their kids whenever they need it.  In theory, this takes away some of the headache of finding new material to read to your kids.  It also ensures that children have access to more varied content to help them learn. Read more »

Historically, musical instrumentation and composition has always developed alongside technology.  The potential tools at a songwriter and performer’s disposal have always determined the music that people have written and performed.  With mobile technology now such a prominent part of social existence, how can it impact the development of music now?  Mike Butera and his company Artiphon believe they have a possible answer with his newly developed device—“the Instrument 1”. Butera claims that the Instrument 1 combines modern mobile and touch technologies with the form factor of a string instrument to create a new experience for composers and performers.  While many have played with the idea of integrating a smartphone into a musical instrument as a gimmick, Butera and his team have taken a more sophisticated and serious approach.  The Instrument 1 has professional grade components and a hardwood finish that make it clear Butera and Artiphon want this piece of tech taken seriously.  Read more »

People spend thousands of hours watching web video content, but finding videos specifically tuned to your tastes is not always an easy task.  Video websites like Youtube and Hulu have vast arrays of video content and while they do their best to organize it for their users, it can be overwhelming to sift through everything on your own.  Reece Pacheco is a cool person in technology who believes you shouldn’t need computer support just to navigate video content on the web.  To help, he has created Shelby.tv, a video curation service that creates a personalized “channel” of web video content for you based on what you find most important.  Pacheco wants to create a one-stop space for users to view and discover all of the web’s video content.  Pacheco created Shelby.tv to simplify and personalize the process of finding and watching videos online so viewers can simply focus on enjoying content rather than sifting through endless options on a video service.  Read more »

One of the downsides to the gesture and touch-based UIs of today’s mobile devices is that they don’t leave many options for the disabled.  If you are visually impaired or otherwise unable to navigate device using a touchscreen, taking advantage of today’s mobile technology is a near-impossible process.  Cool person in technology David Bong doesn’t think that should have to be the case.  As CEO of Angle, Bong leads a team that’s developing smartphone applications that use voice control to give the visually impaired the ability to use mobile devices as easily and safely as everyone else.  Bong founded Angle in the hope that they could provide more options for those who have difficulty with the current options for accessing content on smartphones and tablets.  Read more »

While many people make an attempt to grow healthy food at home, it can be difficult to optimize the growing conditions for fruits and vegetables.  Without the correct expertise, many who grow food in our gardens are merely making educated guesses about the best methods to treat plants.  Jason Aramburu is a cool person in technology who wants to change this by giving people the power to measure things such as the nutrient content, pH, temperature, and moisture of their soil accurately.  Aramburu wants to give people the appropriate help so they can grow healthy, sustainable food at home.  He calls the device and system that he’s developed to give people this help Soil IQ. Just as good computer support makes using technology easier for many people, Aramburu wants Soil IQ to have the same effect on those trying to grow their own food. With Soil IQ giving people the data they need to ensure they’re doing everything right to cultivate their own fruits and vegetables, Aramburu is hoping that more people will choose to grow healthy food at home in the future.  Read more »

SAT prep is a major business market with several major players dominating, such as The Princeton Review and Kaplan.  The majority of SAT prep companies use methods revolving around large instruction booklets and classroom instruction.  While some companies have begun using technology to support their curricula, it is often an afterthought and they focus their efforts mainly on web-based testing.  Cool person in technology Michael Weiler believes that a different approach will be more effective on today’s high school students.  Weiler’s company Edupath handles SAT prep with a mobile-first strategy.  Most students these days spend immense amounts of time on their smartphones and tablets so that is where Weiler wants to make SAT prep tools accessible for them.  He believes a mobile-first strategy encourages a constant connection to the materials students need to improve their scores.  Weiler wants to leverage the popularity of mobile technology to help kids get into the colleges they want to attend. Read more »

When your company or organization is holding an event or sponsoring a conference, you want your visitors to engage as much as possible.  Lawrence Coburn is a cool person in technology who wants to help you keep attendees involved at all times by creating special mobile applications for your business’s events.  Coburn founded DoubleDutch in 2010 and since then has been helping companies get a better return on investment for every major social event or conference they hold.  Coburn’s company create apps that aim not only to help visitors get the most out of a company’s events, but also help each company optimize its events as much as possible in the future.  Coburn’s goal is to ensure that each event or conference a business holds provides as much benefit to the business as possible in the long run.  Read more »

The term “Internet of Things” continues to evolve in meaning, just as innovators continue to create this connection of all objects, both physical and virtual, to a global network infrastructure.  Using increasingly more complex means of data capture and communication capabilities, engineers build new pathways in this global network.  One such engineering innovator is Taylor Alexander, founder of Flutter Wireless, an alternative to traditional Wi-Fi.  It’s what Taylor calls a “second network”.  The alternative to Wi-Fi can cover 100 times as great an area, using relatively little power.  Read more »

You may soon be taking something new with you on your smartphone as you head over to your favorite venue.  You won’t want to leave home without Belly card installed as an app.  Your reward for scanning your Belly card may be to arm wrestle the chef for a burger or make like a monkey and grab a free banana.  In addition to unusual loyalty rewards like these, your Belly app will also tell you where you can get a Belly Bite – a free taste of something special.  Belly gets to know its partner merchants and customizes the rewards with unique options for every business. Read more »