Computer Support Blog

Skateboarding has grown from a niche interest to a major aspect of pop culture over the last few decades.  With the interest in skateboarding having increased so much for younger kids, there is a need for a stable source of skating instruction.  Cool person in technology Rob Dunfey wants to fill this need with his company Go Skate.  Go Skate is an online web portal that offers skateboard instruction in various formats to anyone who wants to learn.  Dunfey’s company uses the web to offer those interested in skateboarding a convenient resource from which they can acquire lessons and help.  The site has connections to instructors in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and even Ireland.  Users can book lessons on the site directly.  People can search and filter by both price and location.  Dunfey has even created a gift certificate program for his site.  Gift cards sold in stores such as Wal-Mart and Target work universally as payment for skateboard instructing across continents.  Anyone who has trouble booking a lesson on Dunfey’s website or needs help navigating the site in any way can get assistance from a remote tech support provider.    Read more »

Having a great idea is only ever the first step.  Many inventors and entrepreneurs will tell you this is the truth.  Once someone has a smart idea for a business or product, that person then has to spend long hours carefully developing and refining idea until it becomes something workable.  This is true whether someone is developing a business strategy or a new piece of technology.  Turning ideas into successes takes hard work, and people do a lot of that hard work alone, at least at first, in fear that someone will take their idea.  Cool product AHHHA is aiming to create a space on the web where creators can safely post their ideas and discuss them, getting input and insights from fellow inventors and entrepreneurs to refine their concepts.  The company derives its name from the epiphany moment in which an idea is born—when someone internally says “Ahh ha!”  It’s an appropriate title for a company dedicated to helping others develop their ideas from infancy into maturity.  Entrepreneurs who have an idea but who do not have backgrounds can contact home computer support if they need help using the website. Read more »

ELearning and education technology are two of the hottest areas in the tech industry currently.  Startups are attacking this area from many different angles. While some companies, such as Coursera, are trying to transplant the traditional experience of college-level education onto the Internet, many other companies are trying alternative methods to propagate learning on the web and through technology.  One such cool person who is working to accomplish this is Emily Foote.  Foote is the co-founder and vice president of curricular design at ApprenNet.  ApprenNet is a web-based learning tool that Foote and her colleagues designed to promote educational discussion about a variety of topics.  Foote is a co-founder of the company and an originator of the idea.  She handles the curriculum and the application of it ApprenNet programs while her partners and other co-founders—Karl Okamoto and Paul Tzen—handle other aspects of the company.  Okamoto works with business aspects as CEO and Tzen is the engineer who builds the backbone of ApprenNet’s software.  Since Foote and her team designed the ApprenNet product for use in large institutions, organizations that want to use the product will need large-scale computer support help to integrate and maintain it.  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 »

Have you ever been at a theme park, but been without an easy way to find out when certain shows and attractions occurred?  Maybe you’ve been at a museum and walked through hundreds of exhibits with no way to get more in-depth learning about them.  Venues such as museums and theme parks could invest in more workers to fill these gaps, but the costs are usually too much for them.  Cool person in technology Todd Marks wants to provide a solution to these institutions that will solve these customer-related problems in an affordable way.  Marks’s company viaPlace has developed technology to deliver people useful information on their mobile phones based on their location at a given time.  For example, theme parks could provide maps and attraction times to users’ phones with viaPlace.  Marks’s company could help museumgoers get more details when they’re at certain exhibits.  These use cases are prime examples of when Marks’s location-based content delivery system would be useful.  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 »

Mobile advertising has become an important aspect of marketing in this era, where it seems everyone spends most of their time on their smartphones.  Unfortunately, most mobile advertising is more intrusive then engaging.  Some mobile ads are reminiscent of Internet banner ads, taking up valuable real estate on a phone’s screen while someone uses an app.  These ads distract and annoy people more than anything else, but even worse are the ads that take up your entire screen for thirty second intervals, interrupting the use of an app completely for a period.  What’s even worse about these mobile ads is that when people click on them, they only bring them to the store page of the software they’re advertising.  There is no context or way of knowing how much a user may like the advertised application.  Cool person in technology Tim Cheng has developed technology that he hopes will make mobile advertising more engaging for users.  Cheng’s company Voxel sells cloud-based technology that turns ads into live demos as opposed to static banners.  With Cheng’s program, users can actually demo an app and try it within an advertisement.  This interactivity should encourage users to engage with ads rather than ignore them.  Users who have trouble with streaming on their phone should get smartphone tech support service. Read more »

It seems there are countless new messaging apps popping up every month for mobile devices.  Mobile chat is currently one of the most popular platforms in consumer technology and many different companies are trying to jump on the bandwagon.  However, most of these apps aren’t very different from each other.  Many use basic text, others use photos, and some even use videos.  However, with such an explosion of options becoming available, it is very difficult to find a messaging app that does something truly different or unique.  Cool product Pingtune is a messaging app that manages to stand out from its competition due to its creative medium for messaging: music.  Pingtune lets users send messages in the form of songs to their friends.  Pingtune users can take music available from SoundCloud and YouTube and embed them in special messages to send to others.  Users who have difficulty getting songs to embed correctly in their messages should seek help from a mobile IT support service. Read more »

Networking is an important aspect of running a business, but finding times and places where one has an easy chance to do so without coming off as pushy or awkward isn’t an easy task.  Cool person in technology Nick Martin believes business professionals are making a big mistake by ignoring one particular place that could be a proverbial gold mine for networking: airplanes.  On most flights, professionals sit quietly or sleep. Some might read, but the hours spent on flights between major cities are usually time idly spent.  Martin thinks these hours are a prime opportunity to develop mutually beneficial business relationships with other professionals and build a list of contacts.  That’s why Martin founded Planely, a startup that tries to facilitate professional networking on flights all over the world.  With Planely, professionals can find out what other people they will be traveling with on their next flight.  Martin’s web app allows users to make connections pre-flight so businesspeople can plan to meet up at the airport or on the plane in order to start discussion and conversation.  If someone has trouble connecting to Planely on the web, there is home tech support available at all times.  Read more »