Google’s Tech Support Care Package – for Parents
Will you be home for the holidays? Don’t worry. This season, you won’t have to play the role of personal tech support to your parents.
Search giant Google recently unveiled an online “tech support care package” at TeachParentsTech.org, anticipating instances in which tech-savvy users are asked by their moms and dads to help out with a long list of basic – but nonetheless taxing – tech support issues.
The site, built by Google to “help keep tech support a family business”, allows users to select any number of simple instructional tech support videos to send to their parents. The videos are organized according to categories, which include The Basics, World Wide Web, Communication, Media, and Finding Information. And while these video packages won’t cover all the questions and issues that computer beginners may have, they do provide instant help – without users having to spend hour after hour explaining to dad what a blog is, or teaching mom how to attach her files to an E-mail.
For more information, visit www.teachparentstech.org.
Tumblr Raises $30 Million in Venture Capital
Popular blogging platform Tumblr may have been “tumbling” recently due to its downtime problems and outages, but these woes haven’t stopped the company from bringing in $30 million in venture capital funding.
After serving billions of views across more than 11 million blogs, and despite a 24-hour service outage early this year, Tumblr managed to raise this latest round of funding thanks to backers and investors like Sequoia Capital in California, Union Square Ventures in New York, and Spark Capital in Boston. The company has plans to beef up its engineering team as well as expand into a second data center, which will triple its capacity in preparation for much faster growth next year.
(Check out our recent post on who should use Tumblr – and why)
Tumblr joins Twitter, Foursquare, Squarespace, among many others, as yet another example of how venture capitalists are investing in upcoming social media sites, online publishing platforms, and Internet startups.