Computer Support Blog

Kickstarter, the website that popularized the crowdfunding model on the Internet, recently announced that it has surpassed 100,000 total launched projects.  This milestone indicates the effect Kickstarter has had on both today’s creative and startup cultures, as the website gives many would-be artists and entrepreneurs the chance to fund projects when more traditional means aren’t available.  The Kickstarter model is simple.  Someone launces a project in any number of fields that Kickstarter lists on its site, including music, film, technology, games, art, and so on.  Once a creator launches a project, other users pledge specific amounts of money in a fundraising effort so that through many donations, they completely fund the project.  Those who fund a successful project are rewarded by the creator with “perks” for their support, which are often early versions of a product.  Only completely funded projects receive pledged money and Kickstarter itself takes a small cut from those as well.  Of the 100,000 plus projects launched to date, roughly 43% have been successful, putting the odds for a new project to reach funding goals at a bit less than one in two. Read more »

Busywork taking time away from productivity is a problem in many workspaces, but one of the most damaging places this issue pops up in is education.  Teachers waste many hours hand-grading quizzes and tests when they could spend those hours on lesson plans and finding better ways to engage students every semester, both in primary and secondary education settings.  However, the team at Design by Educators, Inc. has developed an iPhone app that they believe could help solve this problem for good.  Quick Key is an application that allows for quick, efficient grading and it only requires a smartphone to work.  In theory, this program could be able to save many teachers’ hours of time grading that they can put back into making the classroom a better space for learning.  Read more »

Yahoo has been making big moves lately, possibly attempting to rejuvenate its image in the modern market by revitalizing some of its brands and acquiring new ones.  The first major move by the company was the acquisition of the social network and blogging site Tumblr.  Yahoo acquired the New York company for $1.1 billion dollars, which one could break down into roughly $3.67 per each of Tumblr’s 300 million unique visitors.   The two companies made the deal almost entirely in cash, with the exception of a small amount of Yahoo stock for Tumblr CEO David Karp.

What does this change for Tumblr users?  Not much will be different, according to official statements by Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.  Mayer claimed on Yahoo’s own Tumblr page that her company is “delighted” about the acquisition of the social network and candidly promised “not to screw it up.”  She has also said that Tumblr will operate independently and the entire team will remain in place under their CEO David Karp.  However, Mayer has also publicly said that her company is committed to monetizing Tumblr, which means some changes, most likely in advertising, are bound to come eventually.  Read more »

There has been a major shift in consumer purchasing behavior in the personal computer market over the last two years.  Traditional desktop and laptop PCs, have seen significant decline in year-over-year sales.  In the first quarter of 2013, there was an 11.7% year-over-year drop in shipments for the traditional PC market in the United States.  Meanwhile, US tablet shipments grew 49.6% year-over-year in the same quarter.  These statistics show an important shift for consumers towards mobile computing.  These numbers also made Rescuecom’s decision to include tablets as part of the RESCUECOM Computer Reliability Report for Q1 2013 that much easier.  It’s clear that many users are choosing to take their computing mobile with tablet purchases.  It would be foolish to ignore this trend. Read more »

Many entrepreneurs and innovators have tried to find ways to utilize social media to enhance the educational experience.  One such man is Michael Lucia, CEO and President of LanguageTwin, which is an online service that connects students from different countries so they can improve their conversational skills in foreign languages.  Lucia founded LanguageTwin because of his experiences studying abroad as a college student.  He found that despite his many years studying French at the college level, actual French conversation was still a struggle. “A lot of conversational exposure is needed for true proficiency,” Lucia told Rescuecom. With the rise of video conference technology, Lucia saw an opportunity to connect native speakers of different languages easily and use that connection in a classroom setting. Read more »

Social media is quickly becoming a bloated market these days.  It seems there are a million different social platforms all competing for your attention at any given moment. So how does Pheed, a new mobile-focused social network, intend to stand out from the pack in such a competitive space?   According to Chrysta Olson, the company’s Communications Director, Pheed offers an “all-in-one” solution to social networking and media sharing that the company believes will appeal to a large audience.  “People are getting overwhelmed managing so many separate accounts,” Olson told Rescuecom, explaining that Pheed intends to put all forms of social media—text, video,  music, voice recording, photos, and even live broadcasting—into one online space.  The concept is that rather than go through the tedious process of managing several different social media accounts such as Twitter, Instagram, and Youtube on a daily basis, Pheed users will be able to access all forms of media in one convenient space.  Read more »

Recently, there has been a malicious browser extension discovered that is threatening the Internet security of Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox users.  The browser extension has been hijacking users’ Facebook accounts and gaining access to many people’s personal information.  However, the extension doesn’t only access your information.  It also actively takes complete control of your Facebook account and performs multiple actions without your consent.

This Trojan, identified as Trojan:JS/Febipos.A, can perform many actions when it gains access to your Facebook profile.  These actions include liking pages, commenting on pages, sharing links, inviting friends to new groups and even directly chatting with your friends through Facebook Messenger.  The Trojan uses these capabilities make posts that link other Facebook users to malicious websites.  People have also reported this software as posting links to a website for automobile sales on infected users’ profiles.  Read more »

Most of us have experienced it at one point or another: you’ve finished your meal at a restaurant and its taking far too long for the servers simply to close out your bill.  Many have probably wondered if there was a way for recent advances in mobile technology, like smartphones and tablets, to improve this process.  TabbedOut sets out to do exactly that.  TabbedOut is an app found on both iOS and Android devices that allows patrons to check in to a restaurant and then pay their check when they are finished via their mobile device.  In theory, this could save both the customer and servers valuable time and improve the overall experience of eating out.  While there are many apps and services for purchasing take-out food, TabbedOut is unique in that it focuses on the experience of dining out.  However, if you have problems operating the mobile app, you should ask mobile support for help. Read more »

Many businesses use a number of online services in tandem for their operations.  However, a common problem many companies have encountered is the wasted time and productivity from having to input information into all of these services separately.  One example would be creating a lead in Salesforce manually for every HTML form filled out on Wufoo.  Even something as simple as manually uploading every e-mail attachment to a cloud service like Dropbox could become tedious for a small business after some time.  Wade Foster created Zapier as a solution for this dilemma.  Zapier is a tool that automatically integrates services together for you, taking tedious steps away from several processes.

Foster told Rescuecom that he came up with the concept for Zapier when he was working in marketing.  As he was working, he found himself repeatedly using the same integrations over and over again.  When he asked if there was a way to automate these processes, people told him to “go check out the API.”  Unfortunately, as a marketing employee, that was not very useful to Foster, who knew very little about programming code.  Foster then set out to hire his own coders and start Zapier in the hope of making service integrations easier for businesses. Read more »

Image editing is a task most of us have to do on our computers at one point or another.  We often need to fix our vacation photographs, create a flier for an event, or a myriad of other possibilities.  Unfortunately, most image editors fall into two categories: they’re either simplistic and mostly useless or expensive and overly complex.  This doesn’t have to be the case.  Gus Mueller, founder of Flying Meat Software, has developed an image editor for Mac OS X called Acorn.  Mueller designed Acorn to be accessible for those who want to make their photo editing an easier experience. Read more »