BetaNews Staff

Speak to most app developers and they’ll tell you it’s much harder, more complicated and less interesting to produce an Android app, compared to iOS. Indeed, ask for a quote and both will be priced separately as both require separate development time and teams.

This might all be about to change with the final first release of a new cross-platform development tool from Google. Imagine a toolkit that you can use to program the functionality, allowing the UI framework to be provided to you separately and seamlessly.

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There are some firms you look at with a kind of wary admiration primarily because they were a marketing pioneer of their time. Or that’s what we thought.

Uniblue is one of these companies and, you should believe this is no understatement, it used to be major software developer, with adverts in every location, as little as eight years ago. Before it all went horribly wrong. Now Uniblue has closed the company for good with no prior warning whatsoever.

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After listening to years of security advice, many of us now use different passwords to access various websites. Problem is, how do you store and synchronize this data across your devices? You can’t remember every unique password.

The secret is a password manager which enables you to store a central 'master password' (which you can remember) and then gain access to this securely stored data on any supported device. Problem is, can you trust a centralized password manager after previous security issues?

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Emerging technologies are set to revolutionize project management. That won’t come as much of a shock to the average reader -- there’s been plenty of media coverage about the extent to which new technology like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and the Internet of Things (IoT) will transform industries from the bottom up.

However, people often struggle to isolate the challenges that emerging technologies will solve, and the specific practices they will change -- even within their own industries. There’s a tacit assumption that change will come -- but the 'what', 'how' and 'when' of these seismic shifts remains unclear. Project managers want to tackle the challenges and grasp the opportunities of today’s workplace faster and better than their competitors. It’s vital, therefore, that project managers not only understand the potential of emerging technology, but how to use it to best effect.

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Smartphones are still shrouded by various myths. Reports say that long telephone conversations may cause tumors, your signal may weaken if you move too quickly, and strong signals from base stations could kill people. Whether or not these things are true remains a mystery, but one thing that we do know is real is the threat of mobile malware.

Malicious programs are able to steal funds from your bank account, extract personal information, lock your phone screen, and render a smartphone useless, among other things. According to Statista, as of March 2018, "the total number of Android malware detections amounted to over 26.6 million programs." All of this got me wondering about how easy it is to infect the phone with a virus, so I decided to try it out and document my journey.

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Innovation is difficult to come by. It is a fleeting concept that eludes most companies. In fact, the odds of a new product idea reaching full commercialization are less than 4 percent. And that is the best case.

But, there are 5 sure-fire ways you can make certain innovation never sees the light of day at your company:

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Analytics have become an important part of the decision-making process for many companies in the past few decades, particularly with corporations using data assets as a core competency and point of origin.

My work in the past few decades in the data and analysis field have brought forward six predicted trends to watch for in the near future:

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In today’s pressurized environment, decisions not only have to be right, but they also have to be made quickly. But with so much information coming from numerous different sources, it can be hard to pinpoint the important data.

Since its launch in 1985, Excel has undoubtedly transformed the way businesses operate. However, over 30 years later it has not evolved to meet the speeds and efficiencies of other, more automated, solutions. Recording, analyzing, categorizing and reporting thousands of changing data points back to stakeholders is far more complex than plugging numbers into a table. Consequently, the cutting-edge technologies of yesterday are now seen by many employees as archaic and prehistoric when compared with today’s instant digital information experiences they have come to expect in their personal lives.

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Cyberattacks are a global epidemic today. They target organizations, critical infrastructure, and governments around the world with timely, sophisticated attacks. Examples of this include ransomware attacks like Petya and WannaCry. These put some of the world’s most critical functions on hold for a while.

Another example was the Equifax data breach that affected about 143 million Americans. With the persistence of these attacks many people believe that by 2021 cybercrime will cause $6 trillion in damages.

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The entire point of purchasing a security suite is so you know it has your back. You want it to be assured the company has invested heavily in development to make sure it can counter the latest threats.

German-based independent security institute AV-Test regularly tests the latest security suites, pushing them through a range of measures including performance against the latest threats, plus how they impact your system. You don’t want a security suite to slow your PC.

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For many years, Virtual Reality was seen as just a futuristic concept, but in 2010, the prototype of the Oculus Rift was released, before eventually being rolled out for general consumption in 2012. Since then, other companies have followed suit, including Samsung, Sony (PlayStation) and HTC (Vive). The use of Augmented Reality has also started to rise, both in the gaming world and in many other sectors. Both technologies are now being referred to as Extended Reality (XR), and there are huge plans afoot to develop them for a range of industries.

Here are the industries that will be utilizing XR technology the most in the next four years:

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How many of us have time to keep an eye on every website, especially when you need to track the latest news, promotions, offers and deals? Some of us dislike all-in-one apps such as iTunes, but at least they bring together a range of sources within one handy tool.

With this in mind, we’ve created an Update Scanner for our Downloadcrew website, which enables you to follow the latest software releases, check for updates against your installed desktop apps, the latest news, store promotions and whether there’s a full software Giveaway available.

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There once was a time not all that long ago when security teams could plead ignorant to IT security risks, with minimal possible consequence in terms of any significant damage coming to the company. Those days are long gone. We’ve reached an era where the "I see nothing" perspective no longer works for network security. In today’s era of advanced cyberattacks, information security is too important an element of business success to dismiss.

In fact, ignorance of information security matters is prohibitively costly, as regulators can use it to justify the imposition of fines. Take GDPR’s penalty scheme, for example. Is ignorance of digital security worth €20 million or 4 percent of an organization’s global annual revenue? That’s just one data protection standard -- others such as Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme and the NY Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Institutions come with their own fines and penalties. Given that we’re also in the era of insufficient resources, the challenge for security teams is how to deploy limited resources to have the greatest impact. As the title of this post makes clear, the obvious answer is to stop spending time on the wrong things.

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With cyberattacks becoming more prevalent, Microsoft introduced a number of new or vastly improved security features in Windows 10, which officially hit the market in July 2015. The enterprise gave a collective nod of approval, and the Windows 10 migration was underway -- but at more of a crawl than a sprint. Although businesses wanted to take advantage of the Windows 10 benefits, the realities of deployment (associated time, cost, resource drain, and general complexity, to name a few) resulted in a slower-than-anticipated adoption process.

Now, three years in, Windows 10 has reached critical mass and continues to gain momentum. According to Adaptiva’s third annual Enterprise Endpoint Security Survey, the majority of respondents for the first time reported that their companies are running Windows 10 on most machines. In fact, more computers are running Windows 10 than all other versions combined.

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From November 11-15, 2018, Singapore hosted the 33rd annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference. While there, people mingled with the 20 world leaders who attended and may have even seen a security robot on patrol.

Singapore's security robot is a four-wheeled device that moves independently along a pre-defined route. It has flashing red and blue lights that increase visibility, but the bot also features onboard obstacle-avoidance technology. Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the security robot is one of its main cameras, attached to a long, thin component attachment that moves up and down and lets the camera swivel around.

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