Cool Product of the Day

Researching the fastest way to get somewhere on public transportation can be an extremely inconvenient process.  This is especially true if you need to take more than one form of transportation.  You have to look through several websites to try to find the best route that matches up most conveniently with your schedule.  Catapulter is a cool product that wants to make sure its customers can avoid this burdensome process.  Catapulter finds the fastest and cheapest ways to travel between two points by public ground transportation.  Catapulter surveys multiple ground transportation providers, including Greyhound, Amtrak, and several public transport organizations in major cities.  It then automatically checks each provider’s schedule and comes up with the most convenient solutions for travel scenarios.  Those who want to use the website but have problems connecting or technical issues with their search results can receive help from a cloud tech support service. Read more »

Large and medium-sized design teams have to communicate with each other constantly and this leads to enormous amounts of e-mail with design mock-ups and feedback attached.  Sorting through all of this e-mail can potentially be a Herculean task that takes significant amount of time from actual design work.  The problem only compounds itself when you consider that teams often also solicit feedback from investors and developers as well as other team members.  InVision is a cool product that looks to erase this time-sink and help design teams improve their productivity.  InVision provides users with a single environment based in the cloud that connects all the members of a design team.  Teams connected to InVision can upload mock-ups and design documents to the cloud and share them with either the entire team or specific members of it.  The rest of the team can then comment on a document and leave public feedback from which everyone can potentially benefit.  Along with cloud computer support service, this is one of the many applications that advances in cloud computing can provide workplaces.  Read more »

It is common for people to have an experience where they remember an item of clothing by its color or pattern, but cannot remember the brand or the store where they purchased it.  ASAP54 is a cool product that solves this conundrum by letting you search through fashion websites and online clothing stores by simply uploading a picture.  If an ASAP54 user wants to find a piece of clothing they see someone wearing, they can just snap a picture, upload it to the app and ASAP54 does all the work.  The app recognizes the image and scours the Internet trying to find visual matches for the item you photographed.  The app provides users with all the matches that it can find, and then lets the user filter further by looking for specific brands, types of clothing, and colors within their results.  Users who have difficulty operating the search filters can always call iPhone support for help navigating the app. Read more »

When Instagram launched in 2010, it changed the way many people approached mobile photography.  While anyone could snap pictures just for themselves and their close friends to see, Instagram offered users a simplified way to make artistic-looking photos that people wanted to share publicly.  Instagram’s filters gave people a sense of performance when taking and uploading their pictures and allowed many people without photo editing skills to feel like pros with their smartphone camera.  Magisto is a smartphone app that wants to recreate this experience on mobile, but this time for video rather than photography.  Magisto is a cool product that lets you upload your mobile videos to its app and choose a “theme” to apply to them.  Each theme dictates an automated editing process, which gives your video a more artistic look.  Themes add different visual filters to your video, not unlike Instagram does with photos, but also actually edits the video itself to make it more dynamic. Those who have have trouble recording videos with their mobile devices can get smartphone IT support to help them with their camera. Read more »

Spambots, hackers, and other intruding forces constantly create problems for businesses that provide online services and products.  That’s why companies are constantly looking for new solutions to verify their users.  RingCaptcha is a cool product that adds phone verification as a feature for any website or app.  Companies only have to add a few lines of code to their site or program and RingCaptcha automatically integrates phone verification security into their product.  RingCaptcha contacts customers who try to create new accounts or sign in from unfamiliar locations by phone.  By providing these customers specific verification codes by phone, the service confirms that a user’s phone number is both real and their own.  Theoretically, this keeps out spambots or any fake accounts that people create to use for illegal or questionable means.  RingCaptcha means to provide an added security for companies that want to avoid the hassle of illegitimate user accounts and fraud.  Any business that has been the victim of a malware attack, knows how costly office virus removal service can be if they don’t have the proper security measures on their site. Read more »

Crowdfunding has deeply affected the way many people look at their entertainment and the artists who create it.  Where popular art, fiction, music, and even games once only came from monolithic institutions that had a disproportionate amount of say over what the public got to consume, now Kickstarter, Indiegogo and its brethren have made it so the public can access and fund any work they want to see or hear, independently of larger industry trends.  Still, most people consider crowdfunding solely as a way to fund the actual creation of a project, not to directly compensate creators for their work.  This is why most art that people fund on sites like Kickstarter are projects that take large amounts of cash to complete such as albums, movies, comics, and video games.  However, cool product Unbound wants to use the crowdfunding model as an alternative to the book industry and, even more significantly, want to use it to compensate authors directly. Read more »

Solar power can potentially save homeowners significant amounts of money on electricity every year.  However, installing solar panels into a home can be extremely costly.  It also requires significant amounts of time and effort many working people simply don’t have.  Cool product Sunrun is a service that makes these issues irrelevant by repackaging solar power as a cheap, fixed-rate service to consumers.  Rather than having to purchase solar panels for a high price and install the technology themselves, consumers who sign up for Sunrun receive free panels and installation in return for signing a contract that requires a monthly fee. Sunrun says on their site that they offer locked-in rates for twenty years, so a customer’s electric bill remains static over long periods of time.  Sunrun proposes that it can still save homeowners money with its solar power as a service model, while offering lower fixed rates compared to traditional electricity’s unstable month-to-month prices.  With Sunrun’s fixed monthly fees, consumers shouldn’t have to worry about electricity-hogging activity like air conditioning or keeping the computer on for long periods during remote computer support sessions. Read more »

Urban professionals often work sixty to eighty hour weeks if they’re part of a major industry.  That schedule leaves very little time for errands like housework, furniture assembly, and moving.  Cool product Handybook is using the Internet to try to make getting these services booked as faster and easier.  Handybook lets users book home services through their website by simply filling out a quick online form.  The site then connects its customers to one of their pre-screened home service providers.  The idea is to eliminate the time and hassles required to do proper research on home service providers, make several calls, get quotes, and choose a provider.  Read more »

The healthcare industry is constantly a controversial topic and many believe it is an industry ripe for disruption.  GoGoHealth is a cool product in tech that is trying to shift the way people think about healthcare and technology.  GoGoHealth targets individuals who have experienced and had to pay for unnecessary doctor visits.  Going to a doctor’s office for an appointment over a simple health issue can have serious costs attached to it.  Cancelling work costs you productivity and probably money as well.  You waste gas by having to drive yourself to the office, and the visit itself costs you a certain amount of money out of pocket depending on your insurance provider.  This may not seem worth it when all you have is an ear infection and all you need is a simple prescription.  Small health issues like these take up many people’s time and money and the company behind GoGoHealth wants to eliminate that from happening.  GoGoHealth provides consumers with an online connection to health professionals that they can consult over the Internet to determine whether it is worth it to pay an actual visit to the office.  If you have trouble connecting with GoGoHealth online, you should find a home tech support service that can help you connect once more. Read more »

Startups often hit a snag when trying to find quality beta testers or early adopters to try their young products.  Cool product Erli Bird offers startups their services to help solve this problem.  Erli Bird uses their community of enthusiastic early adopters to give startups a pre-collected group of consumers to try early release and beta versions of their mobile apps and websites.  Erli Bird advertises startups that sign up on the front page of their website for a given period.  Users can sign up to test services and software that they find interesting and then give the startups direct, focused feedback.  This can save the startup time by preventing it from having to go out and look for quality groups of testers.  It can also potentially give startups a large dose of useful feedback for the next iteration of the product.  This process lets new companies find out which parts of their product require tech support to use and which parts work seamlessly.  Erli Bird wants to offer new companies an easier way to get customer feedback early on the product development process so startups can have a chance to optimize products before wide, public release.  Read more »