Computer Support Blog

The quantified self is becoming a more and more popular concept in the world of technology.  Metrics, analytics, and measurements are no longer only the domain or marketing professionals and salespeople.  Consumers use fitness measurement tools like Fitbit to see how active they are and measure their health down to the calorie.  Taking data about the physical self is only just the beginning apparently.  Cool person in technology Nicholas Felton has created an iPhone app that measures your preferences, activity, productivity and personality as well.  This cool app goes by the name of Reporter and collects any data that a user gives it voluntarily to create a detailed profile about that person’s life. Read more »

There are services that allow people to share images with friends and family in multiple ways.  Facebook and Twitter allow people to post or tweet images publicly to other users.  SMS service allows people to send private photos, as does SnapChat, though the latter deletes photos once a recipient has seen them.  However, these apps and services keep image sharing in a bubble of sorts, at best allowing people to accompany photos with a text caption.

Cool product Lutebox breaks away from this standard by combining image sharing with voice-chat over the web.  Lutebox essentially combines voice-chat services like Skype or Viber with image sharing services like Instagram or SnapChat to produce a new experience that conveniently combines the two.  Lutebox is hoping to appeal to people who want to share media with each other as they speak, whether for personal reasons or professional ones.  With this cool product, users don’t have to switch back and forth between apps or waste battery life on a phone call in order to share pictures with someone while speaking to them.  Lutebox users that have trouble connecting to the service may want to consult a smartphone computer repair company to ensure that their wireless receivers are working properly.  Read more »

It’s easy for people to forget about where they have been and what they have done when people are so caught up in the now every day thanks to social networking.  Sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Vine constantly keep us up to date with the moments happening around us in the present.  However, Jonathan Wegener is a cool person who has created a product that lets people remember and reflect on their past through social networking.  Rather than only focus on the present, Wegener’s iOS app Timehop shows people their activity on social media from the past as well.  Timehop shows people what happened on someone’s Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts on the same date in previous years.  Essentially, Wegener has created a personal digital time capsule for people to take advantage of when they want to remember where they’ve been as much as where they are right now.  Wegener takes past information from multiple accounts and presents them all in the same app to give users a complete presentation of what their life was like at the same time in previous years.  Users who might be interested but have issues with the Apple App Store should get iPhone tech support to address the problems. Read more »

Large families constantly have trouble keeping their days organized, especially when every member has their own commitments on a daily basis.  Cool product Hub is a mobile app that wants to make it easier for families to stay informed of each other’s schedules and what they’re doing at any given time.  Hub lets each member of a family have their own profile on the app.  Hub groups profiles into family units that have access to each other’s information at any time.  This system makes the app a place where a family can put all their important information to check on quickly and conveniently on any smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device that runs iOS or Android.  This way, when there are parent-teacher conferences, football games, book clubs, dance lessons, and more all going on in the same week, no one in the family has to lose track of each other.  Hub could be especially useful for any families that depend on each other for transportation.  With Hub, there is no excuse for one sibling or parent to forget to pick up another family member from an event or activity.  Any users who want to take advantage but struggle with mobile technology can get help from a mobile computer support company. Read more »

Reviewing places and things has become an essential aspect of the Internet.  Every major online retailer has a review system for customers to use with the products they sell. Most blogs and news sources on the Internet contain sections for product and entertainment reviews. Even major web companies like Google incorporate reviews into their online services.  However, with so many reviews spread out across so many sites, there is no easy way to get the full picture on the quality of a product without investing significant time into the project.  Cool person in technology Ryan Charles wants to change that with his service called Consumr.  Consumr is a website and mobile app that provides people with a collection of the available online reviews for any packaged good on command.  Consumr is an unbiased third party that simply gathers information about products from reviews that already exist on the web.  This fact means users can trust Consumr to provide a complete and objective picture of a product’s quality based on all of its online reviews.  Charles’s company collects both professional and customer reviews to ensure that people have all the information they need about any given item.  Any user who needs help downloading Consumr’s iPhone app can get Apple tech support to fix the problem. Read more »

Motivating yourself to go to the gym when you’re trying to get in shape is difficult enough.  In many ways, it’s even harder to push yourself to go as hard as possible during your workout routine.  How many people do you think have cut exercises out of their routines, or done fewer reps in their sets because it’s more comfortable to do the minimum?  GymFu is a cool product available for smartphones that gets you to work harder when you work out.  GymFu aims to make sure that you push yourself and intensify your workouts to get the absolute most out of them every time.  If you are someone that constantly gets stuck in the same workout routine and benefits little from it, then this cool product might be exactly what you need.  GymFu helps users increase the reps and sets in their workout routines over time.  On the company website, it says that so far, 40% of the app’s users double the reps in their workouts.  Assuming these numbers are accurate, GymFu is clearly working for the people who have downloaded it so far.  The GymFu app is currently only available on Apple devices.  That means you’re going to need iPhone support if you’re unfamiliar with Apple mobile products and have trouble with them. 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 »

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 »

Health and fitness is an area where technology is in a bit of a boom.  Wearable devices like watches and wristbands count the calories people burn and quantify their daily fitness stats.  There are hundreds of apps that help you track people’s eating and exercise habits, and there are even ones in which the sole purpose is to motivate users to exercise more.  Still, there aren’t many apps that help people with the process of exercising itself.  Cool person in technology Arel English founded Vitogo to change that fact.  Vitogo is an iPhone app that acts as a personal trainer for its users.  Vitogo stores exercise related data to help people achieve specific goals with their workout schedules.  Rather than simply provide users with metrics about how many calories they have burned, Vitogo provides actionable workout plans to help users achieve specific workout goals.  English has incorporated enough fitness data into his app that Vitogo provides users with specific long-term plans to achieve their goals.  This cool person in technology has even made it so his app will adjust a user’s workout plan every 4-6 weeks to ensure that the person’s exercise regimen does not plateau.  While fitness apps that merely track calories are akin to non-actionable computer diagnostic tools, Vitogo tries to be the fitness equivalent of a full-service computer tech support program. 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 »