Computer Support Blog

With so many great ideas in the tech sector, wooing venture capitalists for your start-up can be a full-time job.  Every idea that is pitched to a venture capitalist is competing for the resources and attention of investors; it can be hard to set your website, app, or web-based service apart in order to get funded.  Funding means the difference between having an idea and having a business.  So, when the venture capital specialists at August Capital put money into a company, it is an endorsement of the quality of the idea being presented.  With August Capital leading the three million dollar investment in DITTO, DITTO must be doing something right! Read more »

If Myspace taught us anything, it was that if you give a teenage girl a cellphone with a camera, she will invariably hold it at arm’s length at a sixty five degree angle above her head, take a picture and post it as her profile photo.  That demographic of youth, with their oft-photographed cleavage, has since migrated to Facebook.  Before they can migrate further, many serious photographers are using the infancy of Google+ to jump ship from Facebook and establish a serious presence on Google+ that promotes art and adulthood. Read more »

There are few entrepreneurs, even in the tech sector, who have the ability to create a hit product with every one of their major releases.  Mike Harrington, creator of Half-Life and Picnik, is one such innovator.  Interestingly enough, Harrington’s partner in co-founding Picnik, Darrin Massena, also has had an uncommon number of successful ventures, especially for his young age. Read more »

Social networks come and go; that is rapidly becoming one of the realities of the Internet.  What is fascinating to see is how the different social networks attempt to appeal to different niches, whether they try to make their appeal from the interface device or to a target demographic.  LinkedIn appeals to professionals, Facebook appeals to friends with shared interests, Twitter appeals to cellphone users who are on the go; each social network has a niche.  Until now, no social network has been built around the sudden prevalence of video technology on smartphones.  That changes with the emergence of Viddy!

Viddy is most analogous to Twitter in that it is a social network built on very short communications.  Like Twitter, Viddy appeals strongly to the smartphone users who love to stay connected and share material through their smartphones.  As a more sophisticated way of social networking, Viddy uses videos as a platform for its network!

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Brilliant ideas often need to come at the right time in order for it to be recognized.  Occasionally, there is an invention in the tech sector that fails simply because the marketplace was not ready for it or the supporting technologies did not exist to make it a success.  But the success of online digital photo editor Picnik is the result of a good idea hitting the marketplace at precisely the right time.  Much of the credit for Picnik’s success, then, comes from co-founder Mike Harrington.

At one point in his career, Mike Harrington was best known for the immensely popular video game Half-Life.  Harrington was the lead programmer for Half-Life and he was a co-founder of Valve, the software company that produced Half-Life.  Prior to starting Valve with Gabe Newell, Harrington was a software developer for Microsoft.  His work in the tech sector began in 1985 when he went to work for Dynamix as a programmer.  Following the success of Half-Life, Harrington took a sabbatical and traveled with his wife.

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Serious photographers who live on the cheap and use computers for their digital photography are feeling the squeeze.  One of the best sites for altering digital photographs is closing down on April 19, 2012 and the virtual world of the Internet will be a little worse off for it.  The site is called Picnik and is has announced that it will be ending service soon, sending many photographers scrambling.

Picnik is, at least for the next few weeks, a free website where you could alter photographs you took.  The site was simple.  You uploaded a picture to their site, where Picnik provided tools to crop, resize, alter lighting and color settings, reduce red eye and do several other alterations to your photograph.  When you had the picture looking the way you liked it, you could download your altered picture and move on to more pictures.  This was a wonderful alternative to expensive, licensed programs like Adobe Photoshop or Photo Explosion.  Through Picnik, you could transform the photo you actually took into the photo you wanted it to be.

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You may already be familiar with the poplar flash-based holiday entertainment website, “Elf Yourself,” but if you have not looked at it in a few years (when it was oh-so-popular) or if you have forgotten what it is, take a few minutes to try it out again–you’ll find that it really doesn’t get old. Besides, the site has many new features that make it a great deal more entertaining.

Using a simple interface, the website allows you to plug in a photo of yourself, or even several ones to include friends or people you know, and then mounts the facial pictures onto dancing Christmas elves. The result, as you can imagine, is a fairly hilarious clip of you dancing in absurd and wild Christmas settings surrounded by snowmen and other holiday critters.

The process is very simple and well worth the short amount of time it takes to get things ready. First, the site asks you to upload a picture of yourself. To do so, you can choose a saved picture from your computer, or you can link to your Facebook account and choose one from your profile. If you have a webcam and would prefer to take a picture on the spot, you can do that too. Of course, doing so requires the dreaded Facebook permission option, but once you’ve had your fun, you can simply remove the application from your Facebook account to eliminate (or at least reduce) threats to your Internet security. Uploaded pictures have to be in either JPEG or PNG format and are limited to 3MB in size (which might be a problem for photos shot with high-resolution cameras that produce much larger file sizes).

The interface also allows you to zoom in and accurately outline or rotate your face within the picture you upload. You are also required to outline the area between your jaw line and upper lip to allow for the singing animation effect that accompanies the dancing in the final clip.

Once you add all the pictures you want, you can select what kind of dancing you want your elfed-self to perform. Choose from disco, 80’s, country, singing, hip hop, surf, and classical. The site allows you to link the short clip of yourself dancing in elf costume to your Facebook account or email it to friends. The online video has an expiration date, so once it’s over, the site prompts you to download it, naturally, for a small fee.

Overall, elfyourself is an easy way to laugh hard and get a last minute dose of the holiday spirit. If you like your video so much that you want a permanent souvenir, you can buy a DVD of your elf dancing to all the available options, custom mugs, mouse pads, and other items. To create other funny animated clips starring yourself, check out Jib Jab’s website.

About RESCUECOM:

RESCUECOM provides computer repair and computer support, 24/7: Meeting every tech support need including data recovery, virus removal, networking, wireless services, and computer support for all brands of hardware and software. For computer support or information on products, services, or computer repair, visit https://www.rescuecom.com or call 1-800-RESCUE-PC.

For More Information, Contact:

David Milman, CEO

315-882-1100

david@rescuecom.com