Computer Support Blog

Bootlegging live recordings from concerts has been a tradition of many artists’ fan bases since long before the Internet came into existence.  However, due to a lack of professional recording equipment, most fan-recorded concerts have very poor sound quality.  Fan recordings also can be risky due to copyright issues if used outside of very specific settings and situations.  Lively is a cool product that lets people listen to live shows without any of the downsides of bootlegged recordings.  With Lively, you can listen to professionally recorded audio tracks of the concerts you attend as soon as the show is over.  If you want to relive an amazing performance you just attended, all you have to do is turn on your smartphone and download the concert right away.  Anyone who’s only experienced low-quality fan-recorded bootlegs will quickly realize the advantages of professional, high-quality recordings that they can conveniently access wherever they go.  For help downloading performances to your iPhone, find Apple support. Read more »

Companies have given smartphones a myriad of functions as they’ve grown more powerful and versatile over the years.  Smartphones can now be your GPS and navigation device, mobile computer, weather tracker, and gaming device.  Max Perelman sees a lot of potential is smartphones as well, but not simply as personal consumer devices.  Perelman is a cool person in technology that’s working to make it possible to turn a smartphone into a portable DNA diagnostics lab.  He and his team envision a future where you can connect your smartphone to a small device wirelessly and immediately have a solution for genetic diagnostics and on-site disease tracking.  If Perelman’s vision comes true, it could be much easier and much cheaper to track developing diseases and treat them more efficiently. Perelman also wants to keep his device simple to use.  He doesn’t want lab assistants having to call tech support just to hook up their smartphones and run tests.  It’s an ambitious project, but if successful, Perelman and the team at Biomeme could make a huge difference in the future of public health.  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 »

With the wide diversity of people in the United States, not everyone is fluent in English. When non-English speakers suffer emergencies or want to transact normal business, they may require interpretation assistance to explain the situation. Today’s cool product is the ELSA (Enabling Language Service Anywhere) device from RTT Mobile Interpretation in Minnesota, which provides on-demand interpretation services.

Charles Howerton invented ELSA and founded RTT Mobile Interpretation. ELSA has been interpreting since December 2012. Read more »

When you have multiple credit cards and bank accounts, keeping track of all your monthly purchases to ensure their legitimacy can be a time-consuming and harrowing feat.  This is especially true if you are already lacking for free time because of the many hours that your job and family require of you.  This can often cost you money thanks to grey charges—items and services charged to your credit card that you are unaware of but keep piling up because you fall behind on checking your bills.  Yaron Samid, the CEO of Billguard, is a cool person using technology to help consumers combat these grey charges and save money in the process.

Billguard is an iPhone app that keeps track of all your credit card bills at once.  This keeps all your billing data in one convenient place for review.  Arguably more important than that, Samid’s app flags transactions it believes to be grey charges for user review.  Samid is a cool person in technology who believes he can save people a lot of money and frustration by bringing their attention to unwanted charges and helping to make the management of monthly credit card bills easier.  If you have downloaded Billguard for your iPhone but need help getting it to work, iPhone support is the best option. Read more »

Every great mobile application starts with an idea.  The effort and resources it takes to turn that idea into a working prototype that you can show to others costs serious amounts of time and money.  POP (Prototyping on Paper) is a cool product that makes the process of demonstrating your idea for a mobile application quicker and easier.  All you need for POP to turn your idea into a working prototype is a pen, paper, and a smartphone.  POP turns your sketches and drawn concepts for an app into prototypes that you can show others on a mobile phone.  You simply take a picture of your concept’s sketch with your smartphone’s camera, and, in POP’s own app, you can edit it to create a functional design with buttons and links to show off your concept to others.  POP is available on iPhone with an Android version in development.  If POP gives you technical issues, smartphone tech support can help you get the app working properly. Read more »

It’s one of the most common problems people have: lack of time.  Many of us have so many things to do in our lives that we forget the smaller tasks, even when they’re important.  Only the most affluent among us can hire personal assistants to take care of those smaller tasks and ensure they are completed.  However, Ted Roden is a cool person in technology that envisions a future where his service, FancyHands, allows everyone the benefit of a personal assistant.  FancyHands is an online service that Roden created where members can immediately request the completion of any task that doesn’t require a physical presence.  You can assign any scheduling, research, calls or other Internet and phone-based tasks that you need done to the FancyHands team.  Roden and his team use tech to make this process even easier with a mobile app that simply lets users speak their request into their phone.  Roden has created a system where anyone can free up their time with the help of a virtual personal assistant. 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 »

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 »