Table of contents for January 2017 in PC & Tech Authority

In this end of year issue of PC & Tech Authority we’ve compiled a list of sites we think are the most important and influential. Of course it will be contentious and no doubt you may be wondering why we chose the sites we did, or why we did not include sites you may regard as worthy. That’s absolutely to be expected. As the list was being compiled, and discussions flared, I thought more and more about the early days of the web, and how it’s led us to where we are today. Perhaps in the future we should do a story about the most influential sites of the early days... It all struck me with a moment of profound understanding when I read a comment by someone it’s fair…

MIGHTY POWER BOX TI Computers Strix Dream PC $2,980 • http://tinyurl.com/z8z4bvy Winner of the recent Upgrade Australia 4.0 event’s Power Arena competition in the professional class category in which this PC was tested, benchmarked, overclocked and stressed against all the other entrants, it’s easy to see how this came out top dog. A top end CPU paired with an air cooler that rivals the cooling power of many AIO water cooling solutions easily affords you plenty of overclocking headroom. The GTX 1080 gives class leading gaming performance, and if that wasn’t enough this STRIX edition even has the GPU core factory overclocked by a further 10% for even more grunt. KEY SPECS CPU: Intel i7 6700K Cooler: Noctua D15 Motherboard: Asus Z170 Pro Gaming Graphics: Asus Strix GeForce GTX 1080…

It’s been a full 25 years since Tim Berners-Lee published the first ever website. Since then, best estimates suggest it’s been joined by well over a billion others – although nobody is quite sure how many of those are defunct, duplicates or devoted to cats (it’s an unreasonable percentage, that’s for certain). Each of the top 20 sites carries an “influence ranking” (a small nod to the site that tops our list), a score out of ten that’s derived from how influential that site is deemed to have been. Our Editors’ Picks don’t carry a score, but instead reflect the more esoteric choices that have made an impact on the web without necessarily capturing the wider public’s attention. Oh, and the bonus 26th site you’ll find honoured here? That’s the…

The new Google Pixel phone and its supersized cousin, the Google Pixel XL, represent a paradigm shift in the smartphone world. Although this isn’t the first time the search giant has sold smartphones under its own name, it’s the first time it has marketed them under the Pixel brand. That’s important, because this is Google finally stamping its own mark on a phone – and it’s a signal that it’s going directly after Apple. The clue is in the pricing, which is going to be a huge disappointment to fans of the now-defunct Nexus brand. The Nexus name always stood for reasonable prices, great specifications and a chance to keep up with the freshest, most up-to-date version of Android. The Pixel brand retains only two of those key strengths, ditching…

D-Link’s external chassis team obviously have a thing for giant robotic spiders, while its marketing team just likes high prices. The DIR-879 fills both needs, looking suitably evil, while carrying a premium street price for its AC1900Mbit/sec capability. Is it worth it though? The four “legs” you can see are actually antennae, but they only fold out – there’s no way to adjust the direction they’re pointing, which is a bummer. However, this router does incorporate beamforming tech in the form of SmartBeam, which electronically adjusts each antennae to optimise the direction the signals are travelling. Unlike most recent D-Link routers we’ve seen of late, this is aimed at your normal household kind of users. There’s just 1900Mb/sec of combined bandwidth – one 5GHz and one 2.4GHz network. Four Gigabit…

Fractal is well known for its stylish, silent computing efforts, presenting cases to enthusiasts for years that elegant and quiet. The new Define C is also compact, but it also ticks every other box that Fractal’s known for. The Define C is available in two versions – the windowed case we’ve reviewed here, and one with a more solid side-panel. With motherboards, video cards, and even RAM now replete with LEDs and lighting effects, wanting to show off your PC’s blinking, pulsing innards makes perfect sense, and the Define C’s separate power supply and drive compartment keeps your PC interior even neater. In fact, the case has some wonderful cable management features – Velcro ties to keep cabling neat, rubber grommets to protect those cables, and lots of room for…

The updated version of Belkin’s first Thunderbolt dock makes one huge, and much needed improvement from its predecessor straight out of the box – it comes with a Thunderbolt cable (and so it should at that price). As well as this there are a few new handy additons, a USB 3.0 and 3.5mm audio jack on the front for easy access and a HDMI output on the rear (in place of the old Firewire 800 port). In total it has 3x USB3, 2x Thunderbolt 2 (20Gb/s), ethernet, HDMI and 2x 3.5mm ports and all this in a smaller package then the original model. It might be expensive, and it might seem a little odd, but there is no denying that this is one handy, good looking piece of deskwear that…

Ahundred and fifty bucks is a steep price to pay for a 6700mAh battery pack – even with the Belkin premium aspect factored in. But this one offers a very neat trick – it uses a cordless induction charging system for the Apple Watch in the same way as Apple’s own plug-in charger does, so just rest it on the big white circle and let the charging commence. It also sports a standard USB port for charging an iPhone, or anything you fancy plugging into it. To charge itself the microUSB port runs at 2.4 amps, so it’s not too slow to power back to full capacity. Its value all comes down to how much of a hardcore Apple Watch user you are, and how hard you hit your apps,…

This cleverly designed device is, in effect, a wireless HDMI cable. Using the open Miracast standard, it allows any Miracast-compatible device to sling its screen to a TV. Thus, your desktop is viewed on the big screen, and controlled by your device. It supports resolutions up to 1920x1080 and twochannel stereo and 5.1 surround, However – performance is laggy and stuttery with video, so it’s not a tool for that job. One end goes into an HDMI port, and another into USB for power. Unlike Chromecast, it does not require a Wi-Fi network or router, big plus there. In testing with a Surface 4 Pro, it connected perfectly first time via Action Center/Connect, but the second time I connected the Surface froze during the connection process, needing a cold boot.…

You’ve got to admire Asus’ ambition with the Republic of Games Spatha wireless mouse. In the square inch where your thumb rests, it squeezes in six backlit, programmable buttons to join the three shortcut buttons on the top. You can even change the function of the left- and right-mouse buttons. Oh, and there are five different profiles, each of which can have their own shortcuts. That’s even before I come to the look of the Spatha, which is suitably gladiatorial. The scroll wheel, side buttons and logo are backlit, and you can choose their colours. Unhappy with sensitivity or button response time? You can customise all of those too. Heck, you can even replace the Omron switches to adjust the resistance of the click. Although it’s a wireless mouse, it…

If you’re the kind of person who gets annoyed by the sound of other people’s keyboards clacking away, I suspect you’ll love the M330 Silent Plus. There is the tiniest of noises when you press the click buttons, but it’s subdued and almost – strange as this is to write – comforting. Like navigating pages with a blanket wrapped around you. In stark contrast to the Triathlon M720, there are no other buttons here. All you get is a scroll wheel, which is also suitably quiet – there was a tiny squeak on every rotation, but that seems only appropriate on a mouse. It doesn’t feel as high quality as its sibling, with a plastic-looking construction that’s available in red, black or blue. The grips are made of rubber, and…

The Elite Pro is one of the heavier headsets we’ve looked at and probably the heaviest in the roundup, but despite the bulk it’s also possibly the most comfortable, thanks to the large memory foam and gel earcups that not only remain cool over long periods but also feature a small channel cut into the foam making them fit around glasses without pushing them into the side of your head. A suspended strap nicely distributes the weight of the headset, but for even more customisation two sliders in the headband allow for fine tuning of tightness and fit on the left and right. The tight clamp makes for some excellent sound occlusion and the 50mm NanoClear drivers supply some excellent sound at all ranges. As comfortable as the Elite Pro…

Unlike most other cloud CRMs, Act! Premium Cloud lets you install a desktop version that then syncs with your CRM database, hosted on the Act! servers. In theory, this provides the ease of software -as-a-service combined with the convenience of a desktop application. This would hold more true if the interface didn’t feel so old-fashioned. The busy interface is reminiscent of Microsoft Office before its makeover. In one sense this is good. Act! is complicated because it comes with a lot of features. There are, for example, five user roles — and the program allows you to specify how they interact not just with the different screens or records, but even with individual fields on a single screen. The downside is that it means there is much more to learn.…

Connected toasters, smart coffee machines, and remotely accessible kettles are the silly side of IT, making the Internet of Things (IoT) sound more like laughable hype than the future of technology. But Elvira Wallis disagrees, and as the senior vice president of IoT at business software giant SAP, she reveals serious examples of how the combination of sensors, connectivity and data analytics can change how a company does business. It’s one reason SAP has announced plans to invest $4 billion in IoT. SAP has covered Trenitalia’s superfast Frecciarossa trains with hundreds of smart, connected sensors that pull in 5,000 data points a second on components and how they’re running into its cloud. By applying its analytics and Big Data-churning software to the task it can predict when maintenance is needed.…

SCHEDULE THIS Our PCs are been brought to a standstill because of tasks and services that are automatically downloaded without permission and done incessantly to update and collect information. Computers can be frozen for as much as ten minutes or more while endless scheduling of what can be often noncritical operations are carried out. Hard discs, CPU’s, ram, and cache can be completely swamped by scheduled tasks that have not been approved by the user or administrator. The wear and tear on CPU’s is enormous and computer users should not be surprised if their computers go dead in no time, requiring replacement parts or a new computer. Many of these updating and service programs are nosy and collect all sorts of information that users are not aware of and have…

PENTIUM ANNIVERSARY LEGACY? The Pentium Anniversary Edition CPU, or as the other catchy title it goes by, the G3258, was a standout CPU for Intel. Intel wanted to celebrate its heritage in overclocking (typically done with cheap CPUs back in the day) and took a commercial chance by offering a product that is about as cheap as they come yet allowed you to clock the socks off it! With a 3.2GHz clock speed and just two unthreaded cores, people were getting 1.0GHz even 1.5GHz overclocks out those puppies easily. With widespread acclaim, Intel seemed to hit the nail on the head with the G3258. The thing is, it said that depending on how sale went would determine if it might consider offering such a product again in the future. Two…

With Christmas rolling around it’s time for the decorations and lights to go up once again, but what if lighting and decorations didn’t have to be limited to your loungeroom or front of house? What if you could pimp your PC too? The PC pimping scene has been alive for well over a decade, possibly even two, it really began to kick off when case manufacturers started putting windows into the side of their case offerings (after seeing modders cut gaping holes out of their prized cases and shoving Perspex into them) to show off the insides of the computer. Only then did people realise it was kind of dark and dingy in there and it needed some lighting so one could see those glorious innards better. This began the…

You won’t find better reviews anywhere in Australia! TROUBLE FOR TEAM RED We’ve all lived through many years of AMD vs Nvidia shenanigans, but none as profound as we see with the new Pascal vs Polaris battle, which is exemplified by the blow Nvidia has landed on AMD with its GTX 1050/Ti series. As you can see from our feature (starting on page 46), Nvidia now owns the low-end space. We’re all hanging out for AMD’s high-end card – where the Red vs Green battles usually take place. When Vega lands early in 2017 it had better be good. We need it to be good for a healthy competitive market. Come on Team Red! VR ENTERS THE MAINSTREAM After writing a few words last issue about our first experience with…

The Echo isn’t horribly expensive, but if you want one in every room then the cost will quickly rack up. Amazon’s answer is the cut-down Echo Dot – the hockey-puck-shaped appliance pictured opposite. At US$50 it’s far more affordable than the Echo, yet it can do all the same tricks. The same seven-microphone array picks up commands from anywhere in the room, and the Dot can access all the same services, devices and skills as its sibling. What’s missing is the woofer: the Dot can talk and play music just like the full-sized Echo, but its tiny built-in speaker is much quieter, and wholly lacking in bass. Still, it’s good enough for a kitchen or bedroom, and for more juice you can connect an external speaker, via Bluetooth or the…

At just $30 more expensive than the non-Ti GeForce GTX 1050, buyers of the Ti-version get basically the exact same percentage of performance improvement as the increase in price, at approximately 15% faster, and more expensive. In some cases this can jump to around 20%, making cards like this Gigabyte model a very tempting way to spend just that little bit more. This card uses another twin fan design, this time known as the Windforce 2X cooling system, which uses twin 90mm fans. Like all of the cards in this roundup, it’s basically silent – we couldn’t hear it operate over the sound of our All-in-One CPU cooler. It also includes 0dB tech like the other cards, where the fans are switched off when the card is below a certain…

Streacom cases are expensive. There’s no getting around it. But with heavy-gauge aluminium on all surfaces plus bespoke mounting systems and a true fanless design robust enough to handle an overclocked i5 6600K, at least the big dollars make sense. And if you need your PC to be a beautiful object, we think the cost is worth it. Just. The DB4 isn’t for everyone. It’s neither big enough to take the full range of components on the market right now, nor small enough to disappear into minimalist home or office interior designs. But it does strike a good balance between compact elegance and do-anything flexibility. The DB4 uses Streacom’s heatpipe system to pipe waste heat to the outside skin of the case, which acts as the heatsink. The DB4 can’t…

Bitdefender Internet Security is notable for its Autopilot mode, which suppresses all popups and alerts in favour of silent protection. If you’re regularly tinkering with obscure downloads and tweaking your network settings, you might prefer a more interactive approach, but for those who are less technically inclined, or simply don’t like being interrupted, it’s a big attraction. It’s an established performer, too: according to AV-Test.org, last year’s release of the suite scored 100% against both established malware and zeroday threats; in the latest labs tests, the 2017 release matched those impeccable scores. But while BIS 2017 lives up to its predecessor’s performance, it brings little extra to the table. The ransomware protection module is now apparently faster, so if a rogue process starts encrypting your documents, Bitdefender will now step…

We occasionally look at Volans gear here, despite the products being relatively mundane items like USB hubs and adaptors. Because, despite the great many such devices you can buy pretty much anywhere, Volans takes an almost uniquely stylish and high quality approach that we do like around here. In our hot little hands we hold rather lovely USB Type-C adaptors. One to HDMI, another to DVI. Each is sheathed in very attractive matte black aluminium with a nice beveled edge creating a nice silver highlight. And that is why we like this stuff. On our carefully laid-out desks with mostly sexy black gear, who wants the look and prestige feel ruined by dull white plastic? This stuff brings a bit of class to the ordinary.…

‘Iron’ is an apt word to make part of this USB 3.0 key’s name. It’s heavy and feels so tough you could (eventually) smash through a brick wall with it. The zinc casing is also waterproof to 4ft by way of a rubber seal that creates a snug fit when the cap is in place. Inside this armor the components are smothered and sealed with an epoxy resin to make it difficult to access the memory chips physically. That’s only half the story. As with previous iterations of Kingston’s Ironkey series it employs 256-bit AES encryption. All encryption and decryption is done on the key itself, and Kingston claims no trace is left on the host PC. The D300 device, as seen by Windows, also uses digitally signed firmware, so…

For the price, Corsair’s latest midtower case is pretty much exactly what you should expect. There’s a nagging feeling that it’s more or less unfinished – there’s an inset mesh panel on top waiting for fans or a radiator, but the off set mounting points look odd, and it really looks as though it was designed with a removable dust filter in mind. Every hard drive mount – and these are vertical jobbies on the back of the motherboard plate – has rubber grommets for sound-proofing, and there’s reasonable space for cablemanagement. One thing in the 270R’s favour is the inclusion of a separate chamber for the PSU. It’s not likely to alter your system’s temperature profile much, as it’s basically an open cage, but it certainly makes the interior…

You’re probably familiar with the Air Mouse concept: for those times when you don’t have a solid surface in front of you, perhaps while lecturing students or pitching a presentation, you can swoosh your wrist around and the cursor responds on-screen. It works intuitively, too – you only need to remember to press down on the trigger on the mouse’s underside. Unless you’re more dextrous than us, though, you’ll need to hold it in two hands if you want to click the left- or right-mouse button at the same time.You will need to install Gyration’s MotionTools software if you want to activate the three shortcut buttons and gestures. All of these allow you to “bind” actions to each movement or button, such as activating a “laser pointer”, zooming into areas…

Just occasionally, Microsoft’s hardware design team comes up with something remarkable, and the Arc Touch Bluetooth Mouse is certainly that. It wouldn’t look out of place in Minority Report, with a curved design that fits snugly in your hand when you’re using it – and snaps back to flat when you’re not. Combined with the fact it isn’t fussy about surfaces, even working on a leg, it makes a great travelling companion. There are no moving parts, with the scroll wheel replaced by a touch-sensitive strip between the buttons. By default this will act like a normal wheel, but Microsoft expects you to download the Arc Touch app to customise it (note it doesn’t work with Windows 7). Once you do, you can add a sound/vibrate effect so it feels…

The Astro A50 is far and away the most expensive headset in the roundup and is one of the most expensive headsets on the market. While the hefty price tag may be a real turn off, the performance of these cans is anything but. It is, without a doubt, one of the best headsets, wired or wireless we’ve had the pleasure of reviewing. The large charging dock acts as both a pairing station and 7.1 surround DAC. Initial pairing is as simple as placing the headset in the charging cradle. A full charge lasts around 15 hours. The large, comfortable earcups have a good clamp, passively muting a lot of outside noise and the performance of the drivers is stunning across the full range, with deep bass, clear highs and…

The huge cushioned earcups of the ManO’War 7.1 headset squeak and hiss a little when you first put the headset on, and the plastic construction creaks and moans, but after they settle in they are some of the most comfortable earcups we’ve felt in quite a while. Unfortunately, if you have a large head, the same cannot be said for the sparsely cushioned headband that presses down rather uncomfortably on the top of the head, making extended gaming sessions a little unpleasant. When it comes to actual performance, the ManO’War 7.1 headset shines. It can be connected via a straight 3.5mm jack for crisp stereo, but the headset really shows its true potential when connected through the USB surround sound dongle. In game directionality is extremely good. The basic soundscape…

Salesforce Lightning Professional includes email integration, contact management, pipeline management, email marketing, sharing and collaboration tools, and lets you send 5,000 emails per day. For $105 per user, per month, you can have unlimited contacts. Using a mixture of roles, record types and profiles, Salesforce allows you to control who sees and controls cases, contacts and opportunities. You can also limit access by IP address and create profiles that define how a user can access features and settings within the program. You can then add those settings to as many user accounts as you like. Collaboration features include Groups, which give users with a common interest a place to share messages, files and links to important records. Users can upload and share documents, while administrators can assign records, such as…

The latest trends and products in the world of technology Samsung has sent its Note 7 phablet to landfill after failing to solve its overheating battery problems, but an industry expert has told PC & Tech Authority that the crisis is far from extinguished. Samsung was forced to recall and replace millions of devices following reports of several Galaxy Note 7 handsets catching fire. Recurring faults with replacement devices forced Samsung to eventually cease production of the Note 7, costing the company billions of pounds and incalculable damage to its reputation. But the PR disaster is unlikely to be the last in an industry that’s pushing battery technology to the limits. “I think there is a temptation for battery manufacturers... with phone manufacturers, to get the energy density up. The…

John, TI Computers: “We have not focused quite so much in products and features related to PC aesthetics as yet, as we focus more in the PC builds for professional editing, server and business desktops, which the side panel is not transparent most of the time. To date, even when we use products with aura lighting effects, we only use them as a thermal monitoring tool to reflect to the change of CPU and the GPU temperature instead of blinking lights. However, we do receive a growing demand for fancy lighting effects by younger generation customers.”…

2D TESTS Desktop PCs and laptops are tested using our own custom bench testing suite, which has been carefully designed to test all aspects of a system and rate them in a way that’s useful to you. Our benchtesting cover three main tests: a typical video editing test, a demanding 4K video editing test and a multitasking test that stresses all aspects of the system. We look at the time it takes for each test to run, which is then compared to our reference PC to produce a normalised result. This score is shown on a graph, and to help you understand just where the PC we’re reviewing sits in the grand scheme of things, we will often include other system’s scores. The median score of 100 is based on…

Nvidia’s new Pascal architecture has been doing the rounds of late, starting at the top end with the GeForce GTX 1080, then the 1070 and 1060. It has managed to impress at every level, delivering performance that is leaps and bounds ahead of the last generation. Now Nvidia’s latest and greatest architecture has hit the entrylevel, where it aims to show AMD a thing or two about performance per dollar. We’ve been mightily impressed by the other Pascal offerings, especially their ability to hit stratospheric frequencies, but how does Pascal handle when it’s been chopped back to sub $270 prices? A FRACTION OF ITS FORMER SELF At the heart of both new cards is the GP107 GPU, and it’s a rather different beast to the other Pascal products. For starters,…

The Qihoo 360 Smart Camera and accompanying smartphone app (iOS and Android) pack in a dizzying array of features in such a diminutive package. The camera itself has a 110 degree wide-angle lens and broadcasts in H.264 format at up to 720p at 20 fps. It connects to any wireless-N network and has a micro SD card slot for local storage, or when used with the smartphone app can record to the handset, or to the cloud (with a subscription). The app is where you can view the feed, specifying the quality you require and – with the two-way speaker on the camera itself – allows you to hear what’s going on during the recording and send audio from the smartphone. Throw in night vision via infrared and real-time alerts,…

This gem of a tool came in very handy recently when trying to clone an OS from a dynamic disc. None of the usual free tools I use (Easus, usually), could handle the dynamic format, while OS boot partitions also created insurmountable issues. Research led me to Minitools, and with the Professional Edition the job was done effortlessly. The control Minitools gives over your drives is complete, and this is one app that’s staying installed. Changing from dynamic to basic took just a minute and was executed safely, where doing this manually is a major chore and relatively high risk. Minitools also opened the way to simply extending a partition on one drive, and merging two partitions on another. Again, all doable manually but of all similar tools I’ve used…

If you suffer from wrist strain after years of using a mouse, Anker is offering what could be an affordable solution. For $35, this shark-fin-shaped rodent could transform your mousing life. It feels odd at first, as if you’re shaking hands, so foreign is the vertical hand position. But the rubberised finish is pleasant to the touch and it didn’t take long to get used to the new orientation. The left- and right-mouse buttons are instinctively placed, as is the scroll wheel, but I found the Back/Forward buttons trickier to hit. Don’t expect programmable buttons: this is a basic 2.4GHz RF mouse that connects via a small USB dongle, which tucks into a hole within the mouse when not in use. The Anker is surprisingly light at 95g so you…

WHETHER YOU’RE LOOKING FOR A TRAVELLING COMPANION OR WANT TO DECLUTTER YOUR DESK, TIM DANTON REVIEWS THE BEST WIRELESS MICE AROUND It’s one of those ideas that seems so obvious once announced: a mouse that can pair with three different computers at once. For those of us who flit between different systems, particularly if they’re laptops, it’s a brilliant idea. Logitech executes it well too. There are three shortcut buttons on the left-hand side, one of which rotates the pairing between 1, 2 and 3. The other two buttons are programmable, which is a theme of this mouse. For example, you can create application-specific settings that, say, bring up the spell check in Word when you press one of the buttons. Pairing is achieved via Bluetooth or using the single…

When it comes to PC gaming headsets there are ultimately two categories, budget and premium. This month we’re taking a look at the higher end of the scale with premium headsets starting at around $200 for fairly bare bones models. From that point there is really no ceiling on possible price, with some premium headsets costing $1,000 or more. For practicality, and general common sense we’ve put a soft cap on the prices around the $500 mark. By and large there is no point looking at gaming headsets priced in a higher range, as you’d be better off buying a premium audio headset and a separate microphone if you’re looking to blow all that money WHAT TO LOOK FOR If you’re thinking about buying a premium gaming headset there are…

$299.95 • au.creative.com • 4 out of 5 The Sound BlasterX G5 is an external soundcard, headphone amp and 7.1 DAC that sits between a headset and the PC, Console, Apple or Android device. The G5 can drive headphones up to 600Ω impedance. In extremely simple terms, lower impedance headphones can be used with more devices but produce less range of sound and less volume than higher impedance headphones that require some kind of amp. With an external headphone amp and soundcard like the G5 or Creative’s stereo amp, the E5, a less powerful headset can be made to perform much more impressively. We tested the G5 with the $129 Roccat Cross headset (32Ω) and the difference was clear. Aside from much more volume, the G5 delivered richer quality. 7.1…

Rather refreshingly, rather than taking the ostentatious RGB route that seems to be the go to design aesthetic for modern gaming headsets, Lucidsound had opted instead for elegance. Resembling a pair of studio headphones more than a gaming headset, the LS30 features two big 50mm drivers housed in large, round and well cushioned earcups. The padded band is quite comfortable and the clamp is good, making for some very noticeable passive sound occlusion. Although billed as a “universal gaming headset”, the LS30 is not as yet officially supported on PC, but even so setup is just a matter of plugging in the Bluetooth dongle, setting it as the default audio device and then marvelling at the excellent sound quality that comes with very good drivers and 2.4GHz of uncompressed bandwidth.…

We wanted to spend some time with each CRM package in real-life business scenarios, so we could properly get to grips with the different systems. So, we tested all of the CRMs with real business data and used them over the course of a month on real sales and with ongoing customer relationships. SETUP AND CONFIGURATION The first challenge was to get the systems up and running. We set up each CRM to work with our Google Apps email account, the one we use every day for our business. How we did this differed depending on the recommended setup with each CRM. These ranged from installing an Outlook plugin to adding routing and delivery rules to our Google Apps account. Where necessary – for instance, where there were Outlook plugins…

Everyone knows YouTube. It’s as famous as the BBC, bigger than Netflix and, according to Alexa, the second most popular site on the web. Only its parent company, Google, beats it. In turn, it’s launched the careers of countless YouTube stars, who broadcast everything from news and reviews to make-up tips and movie trailers. Even for those who prefer to stay behind the camera, YouTubing can be lucrative: reputedly, certain cat video channels earn their uploaders thousands of dollars a month. To make it big on YouTube requires a degree of luck. We can’t give you that, but we can show you how to go beyond the basics, offering you the best chance yet of earning yourself both a following and an income. WALKTHROUGH Upload and edit Most professionals assemble…

ETERNIME Upload your social accounts and chat messages, create a 3D avatar, and once you pass away, those you’ve left behind will be able to have text conversations with your Siri-like replacement. Your great-great grandchildren can learn about you without listening to dull stories from their grandparents, but by talking to you and hearing your stories. The site remains in private beta, but more than 33,000 have signed up. eterni.me LOGGACY This is a social network, letting you upload photos and videos, tag family and friends, and create a timeline of your favourite memories. But unlike Facebook, it’s considered death. Your profile will remain the same after you pass away, letting “future generations learn all about you, as you intended them to”. Of course, it’s entirely up to you if…