Cool Product of the Day

Having a great idea is only ever the first step.  Many inventors and entrepreneurs will tell you this is the truth.  Once someone has a smart idea for a business or product, that person then has to spend long hours carefully developing and refining idea until it becomes something workable.  This is true whether someone is developing a business strategy or a new piece of technology.  Turning ideas into successes takes hard work, and people do a lot of that hard work alone, at least at first, in fear that someone will take their idea.  Cool product AHHHA is aiming to create a space on the web where creators can safely post their ideas and discuss them, getting input and insights from fellow inventors and entrepreneurs to refine their concepts.  The company derives its name from the epiphany moment in which an idea is born—when someone internally says “Ahh ha!”  It’s an appropriate title for a company dedicated to helping others develop their ideas from infancy into maturity.  Entrepreneurs who have an idea but who do not have backgrounds can contact home computer support if they need help using the website. Read more »

Few things are more disappointing than paying an expensive monthly fee for a gym membership and then spending your time waiting in line to use sweat-covered machines and dealing with immense amounts of background noise every time you decide to go.  GymFlow is a cool product available for mobile devices that aims to help people avoid these frustrating circumstances.  GymFlow is an app that users can download to their smartphone and it tracks the traffic levels at nearby gyms.  Users can view traffic updates in real time to see how many people are working out at a given time compared to the gym’s maximum capacity.  Based on this traffic, people can choose what times will be most convenient for them to visit and complete their own exercise routine.  Rather than base their traffic statistics on social media check-ins, the team at GymFlow has opted to work directly with Gym owners to obtain data directly from membership card swipes and scans.  This provides GymFlow users with a far more accurate idea of how crowded a particular gym is since many people don’t track when they go to work out with their social networking accounts.  Many gym-goers don’t even have accounts for social media in the first place!  Read more »

The majority of travel sites essentially handle their business in similar ways.  They focus on specific partners, book through agents that work for the site rather than the transit provider themselves, focus on flights over other forms of travel, and charge convenience fees for booking through the site in the first place.  Cool product FromAtoB is a travel site that doesn’t follow these conventions and attempts to give customers a different, more pure experience.  Rather than have customers book their transit through the site itself as a surrogate, FromAtoB acts more like a search engine. It connects users directly to travel providers themselves.  This difference means that customers avoid unnecessary middlemen, and even potentially avoid unwanted “convenience fees” or extra charges incurred by booking through a surrogate.  FromAtoB lets users search through hundreds or providers and then links customers to those sites so they can purchase their transit and accommodations directly from the source.  FromAtoB wants to de-complicate the process of using a travel website, and this feature is one of its main tools in doing so. Read more »

A company’s logo is integral to its identity.  It’s the first point of interaction between a business and its customers in most cases.  It is the symbol of a company and is what comes to mind for most people when that business comes up in real world conversation.  However, for all of its importance, a logo is just a static image.  Even the best-designed logos can only engage so much with their audiences.  Cool product LogoGrab wants to change that fact.  LogoGrab is a tech startup that has developed a technology that links logos to digital content on the web.  When LogoGrab applies its technology to a design, the logo can then work the same way as a QR code might with a smartphone.  People in the physical world can scan the logo and it will take them directly to any web content of the company’s choosing.  LogoGrab adds a layer of interactivity to a company’s logo, making it more than simply a symbol to a business’s customer base.  In a way, LogoGrab makes designs that act as an ambassador to a company’s audience, since the interactive logos connect users to more content from that company.  Any company who wants to use LogoGrab and integrate it with an existing mobile app and mobile site will need sufficient mobile IT support resources. Read more »

When traveling, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the choice of places to eat, stay, or spend time.  This is especially true if you’re particularly unfamiliar with a certain city or area.  Cool product Locish helps tourists deal with this common problem by requesting the direct help of local experts.  Locish is an iPhone application that connects travelers with local residents to ensure the travelers make good decisions about what to do in a certain city.  Users ask for recommendations directly in the app, uploading their specific questions to the Locish database.  The company’s recruited team of local experts then go through questions and provide recommendations on what to do.  Locish’s network of locals can help users choose restaurants, bars, clubs, tourist attractions, museums, hotels or any place at all that you might find yourself in while on vacation.  Locish uses interactions with real people to get its customers recommendations rather than rely on a mathematical or computational solution.  While this means users won’t always get responses immediately, the responses they do get will be more personal and likely more helpful.  Anyone who has trouble posting questions on the app can get help from a smartphone tech support company. Read more »

Speech recognition and voice control are quickly turning from a fringe concept into a new standard for user interfaces.  Innovations such as Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and other voice control systems have shown the public how convenient speech recognition can be to control your devices.  However, all these voice recognition systems are platform specific and limited to consumer use.  There are situations where one might want a voice recognition system that works with multiple platforms.  Businesses may also need a system that doesn’t report data back to other companies, such as Google or Apple.  Cool product Verbble addresses these needs.  Verbble uses a platform agnostic system so users can incorporate voice recognition into their technology no matter what devices they use.  Verbble claims that it can work with any established system currently on the market. While it will take efficient business computer services to guarantee the Verbble system works properly, the technology would be a major benefit to many businesses.  Using voice as an input device is not only more convenient, but also more efficient. People speak faster than they type.  This cool product could seriously improve a business’s productivity if used properly. Read more »

Ephemeral messaging—sending messages where the content disappears after a certain period of time—has become a major trend in the tech world ever since the immense success of Snapchat.  Vocal is a cool product that continues this trend by expanding the scale beyond a message between two people.  Vocal is a mobile messaging app that supports chats between large groups of people.  One user starts a live group chat and anyone else can join through the app or by following a link.  Once a host closes a chat, Vocal deletes the text of the chat permanently, leaving no record of it.  This ephemeral approach to communication is likely the product of an Internet age where companies record and save almost everything you do say online.  Many people, especially in younger demographics, prefer the idea that their daily conversations won’t be around to haunt them well into their future.  This philosophy provides users of apps such as Vocal with a feeling of freedom to say what they want without worrying over consequences.  Embarrassing moments are less likely to become viral jokes on the Internet and job recruiters won’t comb through every single statement someone makes in a conversation, unlike what might happen if the conversation was on Facebook.  Users who have had problems deleting data or messages from social networks in the past can call a remote tech support company if they want assistance.  Read more »

Job interviews can be harrowing experiences.  Nervousness can negatively affect people’s performances and cost them the job they want, but it’s almost impossible to avoid getting nervous for such an important event.  Job interviews require people to think fast when coming up with answers while also appearing confident.  In many ways, performing well in an interview is a skill in itself.  Prept is a cool product that lets people work on this skill by contacting professionals who will perform mock interviews with them.  Jobseekers can use Prept to get help from experienced pros that will evaluate users’ mock interviews and give helpful feedback on their performances.  On the website, jobseekers can search through the company’s database of interviewers and select one appropriate to their career field.  They can then schedule a specific time to do a mock interview online through video chat.  In theory, these interviews simulate the experience and pressure of an actual job interview so users can prepare themselves mentally for the real thing.  Users with broken webcams will not be able to take part in the online mock interviews unless they get onsite computer repair to fix their cameras. Read more »

It seems there are countless new messaging apps popping up every month for mobile devices.  Mobile chat is currently one of the most popular platforms in consumer technology and many different companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.  However, most of these apps aren’t very different from each other.  Many use basic text, others use photos, and some even use videos.  However, with such an explosion of options becoming available, it is very difficult to find a messaging app that does something truly different or unique.  Cool product Pingtune is a messaging app that manages to stand out from its competition due to its creative medium for messaging: music.  Pingtune lets users send messages in the form of songs to their friends.  Pingtune users can take music available from SoundCloud and YouTube and embed them in special messages to send to others.  Users who have difficulty getting songs to embed correctly in their messages should seek help from a mobile IT support service. Read more »

It’s difficult for any small business to become profitable without taking credit cards as a form of payment.  So many people pay exclusively with their debit and credit cards that incorporating some sort of credit payment system is pretty much a requirement, even for one-person ventures.  Unfortunately, integrating credit card payments into a business can incur both extra costs and complications.  Flint is a cool product that takes the recent advances in mobile technology and uses them to make adding a credit card payment system to a small business model much easier.  Flint turns smartphones into credit card scanners with no extra attachments.  Rather than forcing salespeople to carry around a separate device for credit and debit payments, Flint simply uses a cell phone’s camera to scan cards visually.  Users simply act as if they’re taking a picture of the front of a card.  The app then scans for the credit card number.   All users have to do after that is input the verification code from the back of the card to complete the transaction.  This system could save many one and two employee businesses much of the hassle that comes with accepting credit cards.  Any users whose cameras are broken will need iPhone repair or Android repair services to use the Flint application. Read more »