Computer Support Blog

With the death of Steve Jobs and movies that focus on how Mark Zuckerberg and his friends created Facebook, many in the media are focused on looking out for the next tech sector wunderkind.  With so many of the current crop of rising stars in the tech sector focused solely on their Internet startups or technological breakthroughs, it is easy to forget that historically, the real geniuses of the tech sector have been well-rounded individuals with a lot of interests.  The fact that these creative geniuses who are interested in many things focus on the technology industry to leave their mark does not negate the fact that the inventors, CEOs and envelope-pushers of the tech sector all had more going for them than simply their career.  That is why Martin Kleppmann is the Internet entrepreneur to watch! Read more »

Living in a city and owning a car can feel both frustrating and pointless sometimes. Most of the day your car sits in a parking space with no one using it. You have to have a car to get to work, get out of the city for vacation, or go across town to meet a friend, but while you are at work or staying home for the day, your car remains idle, doing nothing. What if your car could be making you money when you are not using it? What if the car could pay for its own monthly payments? Would you be willing to let strangers rent your car for a few hours when you do not need it?  If you answered “yes,” a car sharing service, like the ones offered by the Getaround, RelayRides and JustShareIt apps, might be for you. Read more »

Hasbro is planning a busy 2012. First, there is the partnership with Zynga, which emulates the Mattel-Angry Birds collaboration. The toy company will be able to bring online games to the real world as well as making toys and accessories based on popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Now, Hasbro has announced that it is updating some of its classic board games. Read more »

Anyone who has visited a historical site or virtually any tourist destination has seen graffiti.  At many destinations, unsightly graffiti covers most available surface. Often, graffiti is just names and dates from former visitors, but it can be much more than that. Some people even write or carve poems or song lyrics into whatever space they find available. Usually there are several visible layers of the graffiti and more underneath. It can be very tempting to add your own mark to that wall, bench, or tree, but what if there was a better, legal, way to leave a piece of yourself behind? Read more »

GitHub has become the primary website for democratic open source coding. Open source coding, simply put, is the principle that many programmers work under in which they freely give away their programs and source code (basic programming language) to anyone who wants to use it. Open source software is quite common, though you may not know a program is open source if you are user, as opposed to a programmer.  The Android operating system is a well-known open source program. Google allows programmers to access the root code and write new programs for Android, which makes it open source.  By contrast, programmers who want to write applications for Windows must to access the source code and sign a contract for the right to use the proprietary code.

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There are billions of pages on the Internet and millions of things to do on those pages. Among other things, you can chat with people across the globe, learn about new computer support issues, write blogs about your favorite subjects, or watch streaming movies. So why would we ever run out of things to do online?  For those who face the overwhelming choices the Internet offers with a profound sense of indecision or who enjoy the thrill of discovery, there is StumbleUpon.

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Sometimes, an individual’s association with a company can make all the difference in establishing a business venture.  John F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to make a political magazine at a time when the market was pretty much strangled with political print magazines did not stop him from making George a success.  In a similar way, one of the new tech sector startups benefits greatly from the celebrity of one of the members of its management team.  Numecent is an emerging Cloudpaging company and it would be just another Internet startup if it was not for Hildy Shandell.

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At one time, not that long ago, Internet users looking for a social media experience went immediately to MySpace. There, they could update their profile, post messages, and talk to their friends. The site was mainly a hit with teenagers, but featured a great space for independent musicians to get their music featured because of the large media section on the site.

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The social network landscape continues to change.  With Facebook going public and changing their privacy policies and the rise of Google+, the media would almost have you forget there are any other social networks on the Internet!  Despite that perception, there are several other Internet social networks and many of them have benefits and intriguing aspects that the major social networks lack.  The differences in how the Internet social networks look, feel and operate are the result of each networks engineering department.  For Yammer, Kris Gale is the engineer in charge.

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For those who might not have heard of it yet, there is a social network challenging Facebook for supremacy on the Internet.  It’s not Google+, either!  The social network is called Diaspora and it is an open-source alternative to Facebook that was founded on the belief that users ought to control their information and social network experience.  Diaspora is a good idea that has been plagued by problems, not the least of which are a lack of name recognition (outside the hacker community) and the suicide last November of one of the company’s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy.  Despite the setbacks, Diaspora is poised to break out into popular culture.  If it does, it will no doubt be in part because of Rosanna Yau.

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