Last month, I hung out with a friend from college that was impressed by the gadgets I carried and how I used them, but didn't have the spare time necessary to set everything up like I have (stuff like moving downloaded movie files to a TV for viewing, being able to check 5 email accounts on your iphone using gmail/imap, etc).
After each explanation of how I set things up grew increasingly longer, I realized there's probably a simple business model in place for a Personal IT staff kind of thing for regular users of technology that aren't uber geeks. I picture something that isn't the Geek Squad (they only do work piecemeal, right?) but is more like a subscription service, maybe $20 a month, where you as a customer can basically get your home computer and mobile phone updated remotely with the latest time-saving tweaks. I bet someone that reads lifehacker religiously, can do IT and PC Support work, and could figure out a way to do it remotely (either remote desktop sessions, or having customers' computers phone home to grab updates and configuration scripts) could build a pretty nice business off of it.
Is there anything like this out there today?
I’ve seen (latenight) tv commercials for this sort of thing – limited to home PC support. I think it was around the $20/mo price point
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I’d like to hire somebody just to tell me which HDTV to buy, which provider to use, and set that all up in my living room for me.
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Sign me up! I am a historian who is being drawn into the digital turn in the humanities and every day I find myself floundering with something that all the cool kids have been doing for years. Today it is setting up Skype for podcast interviews, tomorrow creating a custom banner for my blog, next week finding out the best way to digitize and clean up old oral history tapes. And why the hell can't I get Robogeo to geotag my pictures?!!
I need a digital valet.
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