Virtual Reality is the perpetual motion machine of tech: every time you look around, there’s some wild-eyed inventor with a weird contraption and the same claim: ‘this time, it works!’

So we’ve gotten used to pointing VR over to the corner with the deathrays and cold fusion guys. But we could be wrong this time.

From a business viewpoint VR was less than a novelty in the 1990s, but VR or AR (Augmented Reality) apps could explode the way mobile apps did, and modern enterprises that aren’t involved in vending VR devices and services could still provide value to their customers via VR. Imagine what real estate will do with it, for instance!

So VR could work. But why should we dust it off now?

Why it’s (maybe) time to rethink VR

1: The tech is there.

The difference between VR nbow and VR in the way-back-when is the difference between 1982’s Tron and 2010’s Tron: Legacy. In ‘82, the ideas were there – but the tech? Watch the movie and you tell me. VR’s the same.While it meant yards of trailing wires and pixelated landscapes it was never going to go far with consumers – let alone businesses. But now that it means Google Glass, or even Oculus Rift, VR might have a fighting chance.

2: The price is right.
Early attempts at VR were truly wallet-busting, as early computing tended to be. The trade-off between price and performance meant VR was stuck in the same situation as very early mobile devices, where they didn’t really deliver and they cost far more than their performance merited. In some cases, like the presciently-named but ill-fated EyePhone, that could be half a million dollars. Now we’re talking about a price tag between $200 and a little over $1000, there’s a chance for a consumer market to develop.

3: Industry heavyweights want it to succeed

In its first iterations, VR was powered by individuals with dreams, and companies like Sega that were dipping their toes in the water. For the bigger players, it wound up as just another page on ‘10 Tech Flops You’ll Remember if You Lived Through The 90s.’ But this time around, Google is seriously committed to its ‘augmented reality’ Glass project, and has Maps, Hangouts, Drive, Youtube and search all ready to tie into it. Facebook, Sony, and Samsung join the list of those with deep pockets who want to see VR succeed.

4: The hacker’s paradox

As VR has professionalised, it’s also become open to hobbyists and hackers in a way that just wasn’t possible in the 90s. That means tens of thousands of people working on solving VR’s problems, coming up with sometimes-diverse solutions: the Ubuntu, Fedora and Korora of VR.

Productivity is increasingly moving away from the classic desktop machine. As mobile, BYOD and cloud transfigure the way we work – soon to be further disrupted by Google’s Chromebit,which can transform any screen into a computer for $100 – we need software tools that facilitate productivity in that new environment. our four slides on MS PowerPoint aren’t going to cut it. At the same time, you don’t want to spend a fortune. So what can you do? Choose from these free online presentation tools.

1: HaikuDeck

HaikuDeck lets you create slide decks on a range of devices. It’s been instrumental in showing off the productive powers of tablets and is particularly good for creating simple,yet crystal-clear, presentations. It’s not features-packed but it is reliable and effective. It’s also quite impressively free, in both its web app and iOS incarnations, and according to the company, ‘always will be.’

2: Empressr

Empressr devotes itself to storytelling rather than HaikuDeck’s emphasis on clarity. Here, you get a rich media tool for talking people through processes or narrating systems or stories. Right now you get unlimited presentations on Empressr for free, but it’s currently in beta, so don’t count on it staying that way.

3: Slides

If you work on a laptop, this might be your best choice. Slides is a browser-based presentation creator and editor with free cloud storage so you can easily device-hop. Like HaikuDeck it’s more about appearance than storytelling, so if you need clarity with style it’s a great choice. Slides.com presentations are referred to as ‘desks,’ and Slides.com is free as long as you don’tmind all your desks being public. If you want privacy, though, you have to pay for it, to the tune of between $6 and $12 a month.

4: PowToon

PowToon is a quirky, fun tool that lets you create step-by-step narrative cartoons, narrated by voiceovers. Behind the scenes you build on a series of storyboards, but when the presentation is shown it looks like a short animated film. If you want to stickj with PowToon and get the occasional basic presentation too, PowToon Slides does just that and comes bundled with the core app. The free version features watermarks and outros, so you’ll probably want Pro at $19 a month or Business at $57 a month.

5: SlideDog

SlideDog allows you to build presentations from a range of media and keep it all the right size and shape,with no file type or compatibility problems, so you can build a presentation with multiple different types of media embedded, then share it online or show it conventionally. You can use SlideDog offline, but if your presentation features online content like YouTube videos they won’t work without an internet connection. SlideDog is freemium, with a free plan that offers short trials of premium features.If you like them you’ll need to switch to the $8.33 a month Pro plan.

Apple hasn’t historically faced the same malware threats as Windows, mainly because it was simply used by fewer people. But now that mobile Apple products are everywhere, hackers are figuring out ways to attack the platform. Most of these are frightening only if it’s your credit card details in the hands of the Russian mafia; otherwise, business as usual. They’re just the same hacks as those used on Android devices. But there is an Apple-specific attack, based on a weakness in the iOS operating system, that could render whole areas iPhone-free.

Weakness in the system

In a way, the devilishness of this hack relies on iPhone users being a little bit unscrupulous themselves. Hackers configure a wireless router in a particular way and then use it to start an unprotected network. Once an iPhone or other Apple device connects to the network, it crashes, and from then on it will crash every time it’s restarted, without giving the user time to disconnect from the network. The only solution is to physically move away from the network’s range. Of course, you shouldn’t really be connecting to other people’s unrecognised wifi networks anyway, but who can honestly say they’ve never done it?

Security makes it worse

The hack utilises SSL certificates to force apps that use these certificates to crash. This is particularly ingenious, as Skycure CTO Yair Amit blogged, because ‘SSL is a security best practice, and is utilized in almost all apps in the Apple app store, [so] the attack surface is very wide.’

Hard to guard against

One solution would be to simply set your device not to connect automatically to unprotected networks. Should be pretty simple, right? Trouble is, your phone actually talks to wifi networks without necessarily connecting to them. That’s how it knows where they are and what they’re called. And when it does that, a vulnerability called WiFiGate means an attacker can force a mobile device to connect to an unprotected network automatically. Add these together and it would be possible for attackers to create a situation whereby all iOS devices in a certain area became unsueable regardless of how they were configured.

The good news…

…is that for now, there are no known exploits of this weakness. Somebody could make it impossible for you to use your iPhone until you physically move, but otherwise the actual damage to targets is minimal – for now. As far as anyone knows, this hack hasn’t been used to steal information or threaten any confidential data. How long that will hold true is obviously unknown, but Skycure says it’s working with Apple on a fix and advises iOS users to update to iOS 8.3, which offers more protection, as soon as possible.

You have a Google + account. You may not know it, but you do. Everyone who has a Gmail or YouTube account has one. Everyone who uses Google’s cloud productivity and storage suite has one. And everyone who has an Android phone has one. But the number of active users has always trailed far behind the number of accounts, drawing attention to the fact that Google’s venture into social hasn’t actually been very successful.

On Monday, April 27 this year, Google announced that it would be splitting its social network into two. Surrendering to the facts – Google + is a competitor for Facebook the way Bob’s Truck Shop is a competitor for General Motors – Google has broken the channel in two.

Speaking on April 28, Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of products, told MWC that: ‘For us Google+ was always two big things: one was building a stream, the second was a social layer, a common layer of identity; how sharing works across our products and services.’ That mirrors criticism leveled at Google for inventing Google+ to solve the company’s own internal problems, meaning users of Google products needed only a single login, allowing Google + to function like a foyer. No-one wants to hang out in a waiting room,though, so while Mr Pichai points to ‘a passionate community of users’ for the social side of +, it was never a contender when ranked against Facebook and Twitter.

Clarifying the future of Google+’s component services, Mr Pichai said: ’we’re at a stage where use cases like photos and communications are big standalone use cases.’ The future of Google+’s services will be in three parts: Streams, Photos and Hangouts.

Photos will focus on Google +’s image service. Photos on Google + have always been far better quality than those on other social channels, but in some ways that’s been part of the problem: while Facebook and Twitter moved onto mobile right along with their customers, Google + was held back by file sizes so large they took forever to load on mobile devices. The service gets good usage but cutting it loose from the social network will probably make Streams easier to access.

Streams will be the social element of Google +, separated from the photos service and providing faster (and more mobile-friendly) access for that passionate community who really do prefer Google + to other social networks.
Finally, there’s the future of Hangouts. Hangouts has lost ground to other communications services, but Google’s VP of product Bradley Horowitz argued in December that ‘It’s texting, it’s telephony, it’s one-to-one, it’s many-to-many, it’s consumer, it’s enterprise,’ and stated that its comprehensiveness made it unique. Hangouts does have some great features – but all this was being said a year ago about Google +.

Most businesses have clients, contractors or offices in countries that don’t speak English as a first language. Even if you don’t, you’re going to need to translate a document sooner or later. Unless you happen to be a linguist, when that day comes you’ll probably reach for an online translation service. But there is more than one. Google Translate doesn’t always do a perfect or even a comprehensible job. Here are five alternatives that offer serious competition.

Google Translate has one major factor going for it – apart from the brand recognition that comes with that Google name. It’s free. Not all the alternatives are, but if you’re looking for a quality translation for professional purposes these are all a lot cheaper than hiring a translator!

UnBabel

UnBabel is free for the first 150 words. You insert your text into a field and select your target language. It uses similar machine learning technology to Google Translate but then sends the finished translation to a human translator to be proofed and corrected. If you want credible communication with non-English speakers, consider UnBabel. Of the options it’s probably the fastest and most efficient. However, it’s not the most in-depth.
Price: $0.03 per word

Gengo

Much like UnBabel, Gengo lets you insert text and then select your target language. It comes with the advantage that you can simultaneously translate text to multiple languages and has a very wide range of languages, though this drives the cost up fast. It also helps you select an appropriate tone, helpfully based on where you intend to publish the result. It’s more comprehensive than UnBabel; it’s also more expensive.
Price: $0.12 per word

Duolingo

Most of us know Duolingo as a language learning site. But it also offers translation services. You can have a document ‘crowd translated. It’s free for individuals, but businesses should email for a quote.
Price: email for by-the-job quote

/r/Translator

Yes, it’s a subreddit. Users will sometimes translate individual words or short pieces of text for free, and you can negotiate prices with individuals for larger pieces. Consider /r/forhire too, if this route interests you: you can find freelance translators who will quote you for your text.
Price: variable

Translate.com

Translate.com offers both machine translation and human translation. It’s free, but sometimes you don’t get what you don’t pay for: there’s no guarantee that a human translator will see your text. If they don’t you’re no better off than if you’d used Google Translate.
Price: free