Computer Support Blog

Being a successful young entrepreneur is never an easy thing to accomplish.  Founding a company, directing it in its early stages and turning it into a successful business are things that many people struggle to do even after years of experience in an industry.  That’s why cool person Katherine Fleischman, the twenty-eight year old founder and CEO of Blink PR, is so impressive.  Fleishman has built Blink PR from the ground up and has garnered a long list of clients.  Fleischman founded her PR agency in 2008, less than two years after graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in art history and psychology.  After only a year of working as a media coordinator at agency212, Fleischman made the bold move of stepping out on her own and trying to build something from nothing.  Five years later, Blink PR is the result of her efforts.  While working on Blink PR in New York City, Fleishman also managed to get a Master’s degree in public relations from NYU. Read more »

When you have a service that you believe people in multiple markets throughout the world will appreciate and buy into, the clear and obvious goal is to make your business global.  However, doing so requires a massive amount of work, but cool technology product Startling wants to make one part of that process easier.  Startling offers companies translation management software that allows them to translate their content in both websites and mobile apps, allowing them to open their service to a global user base.  Smartling’s software helps companies manage all translation and localization projects and supposedly makes it easier to keep your content updated properly across different local markets in multiple languages.  Smartling uses a cloud system to ensure that uploaded website content and updates about various translation projects is always accessible via the web.  Smartling’s translation turnaround times vary based on the scale of a project, but companies can also pay premiums if they need a project finished in a certain amount of time.  Smartling’s goal is for companies not to have to worry about customers in foreign markets calling phone tech support because of poorly translated instructions on a website. Read more »

Finding the right company to enjoy a game of football, baseball or basketball and talk about your favorite teams usually isn’t much of an issue for local sports fans.  Sports bars and restaurants are littered throughout every major city with a professional sports team and even many that aren’t, but what happens when you move away from your local team for a new job or another opportunity?  You suddenly find yourself separated from everyone you can talk to about your favorite team.  That’s why cool person in tech Leigh Goldstein has founded Exiles, a social networking site designed specifically to cater to communities of displaced sports fans.  Exiles hosts several micro-sized social networks on its site, and each one is specifically dedicated to a particular sports franchise and its displaced fans in other areas of the country.  Goldstein and his team are aiming for these microsites to replace the community feeling of a local sports bar or club.  Fans can share team-specific stories, ask questions of the community, share related news articles, and even form local meetups if you find other displaced fans in your area.  By transferring teams’ fan community online, Goldstein believes he can recreate the communal experience that local sports fans have for fans that live away from their team. Read more »

Using the Internet to network and increase your web of contacts in the professional world is hardly a new concept.  LinkedIn has been doing this for ages.  However, simply clicking a link to add another “connection” on your profile can be impersonal and even undermine the chance to make a true connection through networking in the first place.  This is why cool product Peer tries to add a more personal touch to online professional networking by incorporating video messaging and chats into the process.  Peer lets you make professional connections, leave video introductions and schedule video chats on your phone so you can make a real connection while networking rather than just a name on the screen.  The team at Peer believes this process can help facilitate stronger relationships through networking that will be more helpful than the typical ones made through social networking.  Currently, Peer uses LinkedIn to help users find others to connect with over their service.  If you do not have a LinkedIn profile and don’t know how to create one, you will need computer tech support to help you. Read more »

The print journalism and publishing industry is shrinking yearly as digital magazines and newspapers become the new standard.  This shift has created a new barrier for those who want to get their publications out to the majority of the market online.  Getting a magazine or newspaper to the widest possible audience now requires technical skills that one did not need in the print era.  However, cool product Prss takes down that barrier of difficulty for professional writers and publishers who want to release their work as high quality digital publications.  Prss is a web platform where users create, design, and fill their digital publications with content. It also includes a distribution service to release those publications globally via the Internet.  Prss gives publishers the tools to design and create their own mobile app for their digital magazine even without excessive technical knowledge or skill.  Readers can access the apps you publish via digital distribution services such as Apple’s Newsstand in iOS.  If you don’t understand what Newsstand is or how it works, an Apple tech support service will be able to help you. Read more »

Cool person in technology Alex Austin used to send emails to his parents and attach his recent pictures to them every month so his family could keep up with his activities.  However, this proved awkward and cumbersome, especially since his parents had to take the effort and time to print out their favorite photos locally. Austin felt that there had to be a better way to handle this process.  As a solution, he created Kindred, a mobile application that collects all your digital photos and lets you quickly and simply design print photobooks to send to whomever you want directly from your phone.  His app lets you automatically send photos to those family members who might need hours of computer support to print one out normally. Read more »

Losing your keys is not a fun experience.  You end up locked out of your home and unless someone who lives with you has a spare key, you have to go to great expense and effort in order to enter your house or apartment again.  The August Smart Lock is a cool product that removes the risk of this happening to you.  The team at August claims that, with their product, the only thing needed to enter your home is your smartphone.  The device uses the combination of a mobile app and Bluetooth technology to recognize your phone when you approach and automatically unlock so you can enter as soon as you get to your door.  You can log into the app from any mobile device, so you won’t have to worry about problems if you change your phone.  However, it is probably best to make sure you have a smartphone computer support service available in case your phone breaks at an inopportune time.  Read more »

Voice control is a growing trend in the smartphone arena.  Both of the two biggest smartphone operating systems—iOS and Android—have voice-activated virtual assistant features built in to their system (Siri and Google Now, respectively).  However, these virtual assistants often don’t work within many specific applications, limiting how many actions they can actually perform.  This is why cool person in technology Stuart Patterson is making virtual assistant style voice control available for individual mobile applications with his company Xtone.  Consumers have responded well to the ease-of-use presented by Siri and Google Now, so Patterson sees an opportunity for app creators to transplant that experience into their own mobile software.  Patterson targets Xtone’s services at small and medium-sized app developers who want to add a Siri-like experience to their product.  Xtone’s own website lists various potential applications of such a feature.  One could use Xtone’s technology for booking hotels and rental cars quickly with a travel app, transferring money or paying bills with a banking app, or even connecting to an online tech support service when you have trouble operating an app.  While virtual assistants like Siri and Google Now can only let you open certain programs or access specific OS commands by voice, Xtone’s technology lets people commit these essential tasks the same way.  Read more »

Kairos is a cool product in technology that utilizes biometrics to form the base for a timeclock system at a place of work.  Kairos runs on a smartphone or tablet and checks employees in and out of their shifts through facial recognition technology.  When an employer uses Kairos, all an employee supposedly has to do to punch in for their shift is look at the smartphone or tablet camera.  Kairos will automatically recognize the employee as legitimate and record their punch-in time.  If this cool product works as advertised it could be seriously advantageous for small businesses.  It doesn’t require any extra equipment beyond a working tablet or smartphone that a company might be able to repurpose.  It can also effectively prevent any type of timecard fraud.  If employees must have their faces recognized by the camera in order to punch in or out of their shift, then it would be impossible for someone to punch in someone who wasn’t on time or absent.  In theory, this would increase the accuracy of timecards and avoid any potential abuse of the system.  Employers who want to take advantage of Kairos but have no experience with smartphones or tablets can seek help from business computer services. Read more »

Keeping track of your life, remembering every detail and keeping your calendar updated can be a seriously tedious task.  This is so much the case that those who can afford it often hire personal assistants to handle the job for them.  Unfortunately, many people do not have the means to outsource their life upkeep.  That’s why the people who work on cool product Gini believe they can reach an untapped market.  Gini is software that utilizes AI technology to sort a person’s life automatically based on their documents.  Whenever someone gets a new batch of paperwork, whether physically or digitally, they can input it into Gini and the software will recognize the important pieces of text in the document—dates, names, and addresses.  The software will then automatically sort this information into a digital calendar and address book.  Users then get alerts, reminders and updates about events, appointments, and bills so they never have to worry about keeping track of this information manually.  Gini lets users upload documents of multiple different file types.  However, that does mean users have to scan physical documents to make digital copies that are uploadable to the software.   If you have difficulty with your scanner, you will need computer tech support available to take full advantage of Gini. Read more »