Computer Support Blog

It’s a problem everyone who uses e-mail faces: inbox clutter.  Even with a solid spam blocker installed on your PC as part of an Internet security solution, there are many legitimate e-mails we get every day but don’t always want to read.  Perhaps you’ve signed up for band newsletters, online magazine subscriptions, or promotional offers.  You don’t want to block these e-mails because they occasionally give you useful information, but most of the time they simply clog up your inbox and make it a pain to navigate your e-mail.  Unroll.me is a cool product that aims to solve the problem of inbox clutter.  The team at Unroll.me has developed a service that takes all of your promotional and newsletter e-mail subscriptions and combines them into one e-mail per day called “The Rollout”.  They organize and keep all of your promotional e-mails in one place, making it easy to scan for useful information.  This way, your e-mail subscriptions are not taking up inbox space or wasting your time. This could make e-mail a much more organized experience. Read more »

With the advent of MP3 players, music streaming sites and smartphones that contain entire music libraries in the palm of your hand, music has become an increasingly individual experience over the last decade.  Billy Chasen is a cool person in technology who wants to use his online service, Turntable.fm, to make music a social activity once more.  This may seem counterintuitive, as most online music services, such as personal Internet radio sites Pandora and Slacker Radio, focus on making music a personal experience.  Chasen wants to people to interact while listening to music.  That’s why Turntable.fm combines the concepts of chat rooms and Internet radio.  Users log into rooms designated by genre or mood and interact while through chat while music plays in the background.  Users, as oppose to algorithms, also choose the songs that play in each room.  People fill in specific “DJ spots” in each room that allow them to pick the upcoming songs for everyone to listen to and (hopefully) enjoy.  This allows groups of people to share their tastes and potentially discover new music through their friends.  If you have trouble connecting to the Turntable.fm service online, finding PC tech support is essential. Read more »

You want a clean house or apartment, but you just don’t have the time to keep it that way. Today’s cool product, Homejoy, wants to create happier homes by making professional housecleaning more affordable. Book someone to come clean your home through the Homejoy online platform and spend more time on your work or with your family. Use Homejoy for a one-time cleaning or to find a reliable person to continue cleaning your home on a regular basis.

Founded by brother and sister Aaron and Adora Cheung in July 2012, Homejoy is located in San Francisco, California. The service is now available in more than 20 cities. Phoenix, Arizona, recently joined the list in June 2013. Some of the other cities where Homejoy provides service are New York City, San Francisco, Toronto, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Seattle and Philadelphia. Read more »

One of the best gifts parents can give children is a lifelong love of reading. Today’s cool person is Julie Stubblefield. Along with her husband, James, she founded Reading Glue. It enables parents to help young children improve their reading skills and comprehension. For those going to school, the Reading Glue website wants to build on the skills learned in school. The name refers to reading strategies that stick. Reading Glue mainly applies to readers through elementary school age.

Parents can provide reading activities to stimulate and enrich a child’s reading experiences. Beginning readers, which Reading Glue defines as children in pre-kindergarten and kindergarten, should know their letters and sounds and read some short words. Books for this group should have many pictures and few words on a page, Stubblefield suggests. Read more »

Designers often need feedback for their work but want more than a limited pool of responses.  Dribbble CEO Rich Thornett is a cool person in technology that has created a social network made specifically for designers to showcase their work.  Dribbble allows designers to post the projects their working on and get feedback from other designers.  It also allows designers to put their portfolio online to increase their visibility in the design community.  Thornett works to keep Dribbble a space where designers can interact, give feedback and promote their own work within the community easily.  The Dribbble CEO doesn’t limit what types of designers can use the service, explicitly stating on the site that the social network is for “web designers, graphic designers, illustrators, icon artists, typographers, logo designers, and other creative types”.  Being open to so many forms of design works towards Thornett’s vision of an open community where ideas can cross breed even across design disciplines.  Non-technical designers that would like to post their work on Dribbble may want to find online computer support for help getting started.  Read more »

Bundled content with a pay-what-you-want pricing model has become a major Internet trend in the last few years.  While the team at HumbleBundle made bundling content and selling it to consumers for whatever price they want a popular, many other sites and companies have followed suit in recent years.  However, there are many content creators out there who would like to sell similar bundles as special promotions or fundraising events but do not have the resources to create a website and billing system for the purpose.  That’s where cool product Bundle Dragon comes in to help anyone sell their content under a pay-what-you-want model through their online bundle marketplace.  Bundle Dragon makes it easy for those who want to sell pick-your-own-price bundles by giving them easy tools to post their content and sell them online.  Now, those who want to increase their content’s visibility with a special promotion or raise money for a cause by selling bundled content have an easy solution for getting their sale up and running.  Content creators who want to use Bundle Dragon but need help setting up their storefront should contact tech support for assistance.  Read more »

Crowdfunding via websites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter has become an Internet phenomenon.  These platforms have given life to many creative projects and new products that may have otherwise never seen the light of day.  However, new businesses and organizations are not the only ones who can benefit from the crowdfunding concept.  The team at Smallknot has created a crowdfunding platform aimed specifically at supporting established local businesses.  Smallknot takes the crowdfunding model and applies it to already successful businesses that want to expand by letting people “invest” in their favorite local mom-and-pop businesses.  Smallknot is a cool product on the Internet that lets you support your favorite established businesses in ways beyond just being customer. If you have trouble providing an online payment to support a business through Smallknot, get computer support to find the root of the technical difficulty. Read more »

Crisis support and counseling can save lives. However, not everyone has support for when they are in a difficult life situation and need advice.  Someone might not be comfortable speaking to someone else about their issues without anonymity.  Heidi Allstop, a cool person in technology, has found a way for people who need help and life advice to get support online confidentially through her website SpillNow.com.  Allstop is the CEO of Spill, the company that runs SpillNow.com, and she has built the site in hopes that those who need help can find an easy way to access life advice and support from others even if they are uncomfortable giving up their identity.  Users “spill their guts” as the site refers to it, posting descriptions of their situation and then asking advice of the larger community.  Others can respond, also anonymously, giving them advice on what to do or even just emotional support based on their situation.  Allstop has made sure the site has guidelines regarding users’ responses to avoid intentionally rude or offensive posts.  Find computer support if you want to try the website but run into trouble posting or replying. Read more »

Video editing is a tasking process for many computers.  For a reasonably smooth experience editing videos, you must have a somewhat powerful PC. Furthermore, if you want to do serious editing, professional software can cost hundreds of dollars.  Vidmaker attempts to solve these problems by giving you a video editing option performed in the cloud.  This cool product provides web tools that you can access from any Internet-connected device, allowing you to upload your videos and edit them right in your browser.  When finished editing a project, users can post videos on social networks, e-mail them, or save them on cloud storage services like Dropbox.  Vidmaker gives you powerful video editing tools that you can access through the web, so you can edit your videos even on an underpowered device.  Those who have trouble accessing or using Vidmaker should contact computer support when they need help. Read more »

Employee training is a costly, time-consuming process for most businesses.  Large meetings and in-person training courses take large amounts of time and effort to institute, which severely takes away from your overall productivity.  Fortunately, cool person in technology Donna Wells is working to fix these problems as the CEO of Mindflash.  Mindflash is a company that develops web-based tools to help companies create online and cloud solutions for employee training.  Wells wants to make online training courses an accessible option for most businesses and furthermore, aims to make the process of developing online courses easy for employers.  Mindflash gives employers an online platform where they can quickly create and organize several online courses and quizzes for new employees.    Mindflash allows users to upload their own PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and PDF files in order to create web courses for their employees quickly.  Employees can then access these courses online whenever and wherever they want.  This potentially eliminates the need for in-person training courses and could help businesses put employees through the training process faster.   If your business needs help using online tools such as the ones Mindflash provides, business IT support probably has the best answers for you. Read more »