With so many great free archiving tools around for the PC, commercial packages need some seriously powerful features to stand any chance of success. Berlin-based developer Ashampoo has taken the plunge anyway by releasing their $29.99 Ashampoo ZIP Pro -- but does the program have what it takes to win us over?

ZIP Pro’s Windows 8-like interface gets it off to a good start, pastel-shaded tiles floating over a white-gray background. And if this isn’t quite to your taste, there are a few alternative skins to try out.

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Even though most IT and business leaders are certain that their business will benefit from smart devices in the next three to five years, very few organizations actually have a clear strategy on how to take advantage of the new market. That’s the result of a survey conducted by Gartner. The company surveyed almost 500 IT and business leaders and found that 40 percent believe the Internet of Things will benefit their business in the next three years, while the other 60 percent believe it will happen in the next five years.

However, basically nobody has thought of a clear and concise strategy on how to take advantage of the emerging market.

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A secret UK court has ruled that the UK's intelligence agency GCHQ acted unlawfully by intercepting information gathered by the NSA. Investigatory Powers Tribunal said that because the rules surrounding the UK’s access to the NSA's PRISM and UPSTREAM program data were secret, data sharing between the US and UK was illegal. A case has been brought against GCHQ by Privacy International, Bytes for All, Liberty, and Amnesty International.

But while the IPT said that accessing this information breached human rights laws this is no longer the case. Why? The illegality of sharing data collected through these surveillance programs centered on the very fact that they were secret. In blowing the whistle about what the NSA was doing, Edward Snowden unwittingly made this data sharing legal. Whoops.

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I have never used a case with any of my smartphones. When the back is all plastic and there is no metal in sight, the added width and thickness that a case adds is not something that I can justify just to cover some superficial scratches that are not off-color. But then I got an iPhone 6.

With nothing but metal surrounding the 4.7-inch display, I soon had a feeling I would be getting a case after all. On iPhone 6, scratches would look terrible, especially on my Space Gray model. I haven't found it to be as slippery as my colleague Joe Wilcox has, but this has also been of concern, more so than with any of my previous smartphones. Enter Acme Made Charge for iPhone 6.

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The emoji heart was, perhaps not surprisingly, the most used "word" of 2014. It’s the first time that the Global Language Monitor has awarded the title to a symbol, a significant moment for the English language.

New digital formats continue to change communications; text speak was the first widespread digital vernacular and, although it might be out of fashion now, we still use words derived from that language today. We live in an era of images and video, where Pinterest, Vine and emoticons are prevalent in our lives. If people do use words at all, they communicate in 140 characters. Social and digital tools have also made people see symbols differently. Before the smiley face emoticon first appeared in a post to Carnegie Mellon University Computer Science General Board, from Professor Scott E Fahlman in 1982, or indeed prior to this in a public appearance in Puck magazine in 1881, would our brains have recognized the punctuation pictorially? Probably not. However, digital technology has taught us en masse to recognize the position of the open parenthesis relative to the hyphen and the colon.

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One-hundred and seventeen in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps and games released for Windows in the past seven days.

Microsoft released preview versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint on systems running the latest official Windows 10 Technical Preview build. The company optimized the universal apps for touch and mobile use, and first reports indicate that they run fine on all devices regardless of screen size.

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If CES is any indication, wearable technology is going to be huge this year, so it’s no surprise that the Wearable Technology Show has doubled in size for its second outing.

Boasting twice as many exhibitors and product launches as last year, the UK show moves to a new home at ExCeL in London, and will be co-located with the Augmented Reality Show, an event dedicated to AR, VR and smart glasses.

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If your PC has several users -- or you’re checking its security -- then you might occasionally want to examine or tweak its user accounts. You can do this from Windows, but it’s far from easy. Information and options are scattered across several applets, sometimes buried in the Registry, and it can take quite some time to find what you need.

Quick User Manager is designed to simplify user management by making all the important details and settings available from a single interface.

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The Internet has changed the way that you do business. No matter what industry you are in, you value what your cyber network does for you in terms of connecting with clients and staying efficient.

But, with advances in cyber technologies come more cybercriminals. No matter how sophisticated cyber security technologies and firewalls get, it seems that there is still a more sophisticated hacker capable of breaching your systems and stealing sensitive data. Believe it or not, three-quarters of businesses surveyed have reported that they have experienced a security breach in the last 12 months. As you can see, you are more vulnerable than you might think, and here’s how:

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The Pirate Bay re-launched last week to much fanfare after two months offline following a raid on the server room by Swedish authorities, but the new owners have revealed very little about the plan going forward.

What started off as curiosity quickly became finger pointing. Twitter user 'TheAnonMessage' claimed users should stop using The Pirate Bay, due to CloudFlare integration and potential FBI IP bugs.

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While the hype of Ebola is no longer the focus of the mainstream media, it remains a threat nonetheless. With that said, it is not a danger to the United States, as we are far removed from it. Even when it did come here, it did not cause pandemonium. Why? Because it is not easily spread; especially when safety precautions are followed.

All human beings deserve to be healthy, regardless of the country in which they reside. In other words, even though a horrible disease isn't in your neighborhood, you should still care. Microsoft, an American company, is indirectly helping to fight Ebola globally, thanks to an unlikely tool -- Kinect. Yes, the same camera accessory for the Xbox One (and Windows developers) is also a tool in the fight against a virus.

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For the deaf and hard-of-hearing, subtitles are essential. Blu-rays, DVDs and TV shows usually feature subtitling as an option, and it's also something that crops up on streaming media such as YouTube videos. The Google-owned video site attempts to automatically add subtitles to videos, but the feature leaves a great deal to be desired.

You may have noticed this for yourself but if not, vlogger Rikki Poynter would like to bring it to your attention. Rikki, who is hard-of-hearing, complains that YouTube's subtitling is often "completely nonsensical". YouTube acknowledges that it has a long way to go.

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Nowadays, many people use smartphones as their main camera. This is smart, because your phone is always with you. Something important may happen when you least expect it, and a fancy standalone camera at your house will be of no use. Still, I see value in having a standalone unit, as they often take superior pictures and videos thanks to better sensors and larger lenses. Not to mention, many new smartphones do not have expandable memory, while most standalone cameras do.

Today, Samsung announces a downright sexy camera called the NX500. Not only does it feature 28 mega pixels, but it does 4K video too. In other words, this is a great solution for things like vlogging, YouTube and most importantly, family moments.

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I should read Harvard Business Review more often. There, Juan Pablo Vazquez Sampere offers insightful and fresh perspective in post: "We Shouldn’t Be Dazzled by Apple’s Earnings Report". Of course, I would agree, having written something similar in past BetaNews posts. Point is the same, just the context changed. I lack his prestige and venue, and that's okay. The observations we both make aren't rocket science, or shouldn't be.

Simply stated: Atop the pinnacle of success, Apple stands at the precipice of failure. The scrappy innovator is gone, replaced by the, ah, Establishment cofounder Steve Jobs and his renegades challenged with years of guerrilla tactics. Apple has in this decade achieved huge success. But managing success is challenging, if your business model is innovation. The two objectives often work cross-purposes.

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WhatsApp today rolled out an update to its iOS app, which along with bug fixes adds a dialer button to its text messaging service. The dialer button -- as you might imagine -- is for placing voice calls, a feature that the Facebook-owned company announced last February. Earlier this week, the same feature was spotted on the WhatsApp’s Android client, and the company also confirmed that it was beta testing it with select users.

The feature, however, doesn’t work just yet, but changes in the user interface do give us an idea of what this forthcoming feature will look like. It is evident that WhatsApp has plans to roll out the voice-calling feature to its app shortly. But why is everyone in the press writing about it? How does the addition of voice calling functionality -- something which Facebook’s Messenger, Google’s Hangouts, and Microsoft’s Skype already offer -- change things? Here’s how.

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