GoDaddy has entered into an agreement to acquire South African social content startup Over for an undisclosed amount.
Over is an DIY app that lets content creators, small businesses and entrepreneurs create visually engaging content for popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and, Pinterest.
This should then help customers to build their online presence, grow their business and build a brand right from their phones.
Acquired
Launched in 2012, Over was recognized by Apps as the “Best app of 2019” on the App store.
The company claims that it has more than a million users and is being used by people in more than 150 countries to create 220,000 projects every day.
This acquisition falls in line with GoDaddy’s host of services under its Websites+Marketing branding, which is not limited to just creating and hosting websites, but also offering tools to increase a company’s online presence.
Lauren Antonoff, President of GoDaddy Experiences said, “No matter how easy website and marketing tools get, customers still face the challenge of creating engaging content that reflects their unique brand. Together, we’ll help entrepreneurs succeed online by building an engaging online and social presence that fuels business growth.”
As per the official announcement, Over’s iOS and Android apps will remain standalone while the office will continue to be based in Cape Town.
HP’s Pavilion Gaming Laptop may seem like a relic from years past, given the rise of HP’s Omen line. Granted, the Pavilion line lacks Omen’s “For Gamers, By Gamers” cred, but…well, what’s in a name, really? The Pavilion Gaming Laptop is really just an Omen in disguise, an entry-level peer with mainstream branding.
Storage is a place you can skimp, depending on your needs. On hp.com, opting for only the 256GB SSD saves $100, though you’ll be packing games in like sardines at that point. A 512GB SSD might be the better option—still small by modern standards, but more than enough to keep a few games installed at all times, and you’ll still save $50 over the 256GB SSD/1TB HDD combo.
The difference is in the details—some small ones, but also some very important ones. Let’s start with the aesthetics.
The Pavilion Gaming Laptop looks every bit as good as HP’s Omen lineup. It features the same centered hinge as the Omen 17 we reviewed in November, the same almost-rectangular shape. But where the Omen opted for a brushed-metal look inside and outside, the Pavilion goes with a matte-black finish—and a proper HP logo, instead of Omen’s demon-face.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Honestly? I prefer the Pavilion Gaming Laptop to the Omen cousin. It’s a go-anywhere laptop, a day-to-day workhorse that also plays games on the weekends. Even the “Acid Green” variant we reviewed is fairly inoffensive. The electric-green keyboard backlighting invites Razer comparisons, but HP went with a jewel-tone emerald accent for the lid logo that’s eye-catching but not eye-searing, a fine line to walk. I recommend paying $10 for the white logo and backlighting if you really want to blend in, but I have no problem with the Pavilion Gaming Laptop aesthetically.
Unfortunately most of the other differences between the Pavilion and the Omen go in the latter’s favor. First and foremost, the 15.6-inch display. This is an area where lower-cost laptops often skimp, because the display is one of the priciest components.
The Pavilion Gaming Laptop defaults to a standard 1080p IPS screen with a 60Hz refresh rate. Not every laptop needs to be 144Hz or 4K resolution—but it does need to be bright enough to see. I’m frustrated because I just applauded HP for equipping the Omen with a bright 362-nit screen, a rarity for budget-conscious manufacturers. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop tops out at 250 nits plugged in, our baseline for viewing comfort. However, it dims to 200 nits unplugged, far short of that baseline, which we use for battery benchmarking.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
What that means for you depends on your use case. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop is plenty bright with the lights out, so late-night gaming sessions are fine. Even a single overhead light is enough to wash out the Pavilion Gaming Laptops’s display, though, and window glare can be a real problem during the day, especially unplugged. Picture: Those huge glass panes at the airport, and you squinting to see your screen.
HP does offer two additional display options: 1080p at 144Hz, and 4K. Assuming the 144Hz variant is the same used on the Omen though, it’s probably worth the $100 upgrade. That alone would add a half-star to our rating here.
Below the display, you’ll find a row of upward-firing speakers. This, too, differs from the Omen, and I don’t necessarily hate the change in isolation. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop gets loud, and the audio output is reasonably clear. These speakers are decent for watching YouTube, fine for listening to some slightly tinny music, and…well, pretty unpleasant for gaming. Use a headset.
The larger issue, though is that the speakers came at the cost of a larger trackpad and dedicated mouse buttons.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
I’ve said it again and again, but I think dedicated left- and right-click buttons are a must for gaming laptops. Sure, you’ll plug in a real mouse for anything serious, but there are plenty of times when I’m on the road without a mouse, or where a mouse isn’t feasible (i.e., airplanes). In those situations, having reliable left- and right-click buttons is crucial to playing even simple adventure games. Tap-to-click isn’t good enough, and it’s a shame HP went that route with the Pavilion Gaming Laptop. It’s the one aspect where head-to-head the Omen definitively comes out on top.
You could also argue the Omen keyboard’s zone RGB lighting is better than the flat single-color lighting on the Pavilion, though that’s less crucial. Just be sure to get the color variant you prefer, either green or white. Regardless, HP’s laptop keyboards continue to impress me. They’re stiff, but with a satisfying click.
Lastly, ports. As I said in our Omen review, “Accolades for putting all the ports on the side.” Too many gaming laptops put important I/O on the rear—great for keeping cables out of the way on a desk, but a pain to access on the road. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop includes power, two USB 3.0 ports, and a 3.5mm jack on the right side, plus HDMI-out, an additional USB-A 3.0 port, ethernet, an SD card reader, and a USB-C port on the left.
Performance
Don’t expect record-setting benchmarks here. Yes, we tested the “high-end” Pavilion 15 with a Core i7-9750H, GTX 1660 Ti, and 16GB of RAM, but the quotation marks are there for a reason. What’s high-end for the Pavilion line is solidly mid-tier elsewhere, the reliable family sedan of gaming laptops.
With both the Omen and Pavilion lines, HP opted for Intel’s familiar Core i7-9750H part, allowing us to do some head-to-head testing. And you know what? The Pavilion Gaming Laptop really is an Omen in disguise. Below you’ll see the results of our HandBrake test, wherein we use the free utility to encode a 30GB MKV file down to the “Android Tablet” preset.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
We’ve tested and tested and tested the Core i7-9750H and the Core i7-8750H before it, so any deviation sticks out. Notice that the Pavilion Gaming Laptop drastically underperforms compared to the Dell G7 and MSI GS65—with the Omen 17 sitting right alongside. Both struggled with this task, taking nearly five minutes longer than the norm.
As I said in our Omen 17 review, it doesn’t really matter. Most games are constrained by the GPU, not the CPU. Day-to-day use is unlikely to tax a CPU as hard as HandBrake, and short-burst performance is less impacted, as evidenced by our Cinebench testing below.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
The HandBrake results are interesting, though, if only because there’s a clear relationship between the Omen and Pavilion lines. These really are two flavors of the same laptop, one aimed low-end and one high-end, with some minor overlap in the middle.
I do wish we’d tested an HP Omen with a GTX 1660 Ti so we could do further direct comparisons. Alas, the Omen 17 we tested in November contained a full-size RTX 2070, a high-performance powerhouse.
The GTX 1660 Ti is a humbler card, somewhere between the power of the last-gen GTX 1060 and the RTX 2060, and without the ray-tracing capabilities provided by the latter. It handily beats out the GTX 1650, though—important, given that it’s a lower-cost option for the Pavilion Gaming Laptop. You’re much better off with a GTX 1660 Ti, as evidenced by our 3DMark testing.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Is the GTX 1660 Ti worth the extra $270 HP charges? That’s a steep price, but I think so. The GTX 1650 works, but barely. With new consoles coming next year, the GTX 1660 Ti is a slightly more future-proofed option. It’s still going to struggle to run newer games with all the bells and whistles, but it should remain viable an extra two or three years longer than the GTX 1650—and by then we’ll be well into the next hardware cycle, and upgrading won’t feel as volatile.
The performance gap is even more evident in real-world testing, where the GTX 1650 struggles to run Shadow of Mordor at Ultra—a six-year-old game—while the GTX 1660 Ti breezes past the 100-frames-per-second mark. Rise of the Tomb Raider is less impressive as that game is more CPU-constrained, but there’s still a jump between the GTX 1650 and the GTX 1660 Ti.
IDG / Hayden Dingman IDG / Hayden Dingman
Per usual, we end on battery. Based on our chart below, the Pavilion 15 handily beats the Omen—and several other gaming laptops as well. Lasting well over five hours, battery life is actually very respectable.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Remember that the numbers don’t tell the whole story. We typically do our battery testing at 250 nits, but as I said earlier the Pavilion Gaming Laptop dims to 200 nits when unplugged. Thus our result here comes with an enormous asterisk, because the screen might be too dark for you to actually use the Pavilion Gaming Laptop, no matter how long it lasts. That said, the Omen 17 we tested had a better screen but terrible battery life. It’s a compromise either way.
Bottom line
I came into this thinking I’d find a pitched battle between HP’s Pavilion and Omen lines. Really, they’re just two sides of a coin. The Pavilion’s your entry-level Omen, whether HP’s willing to call it that or not.
As such, I think the Pavilion Gaming Laptop that we reviewed is a hard sell. It’s close in price to a similarly configured Omen, but with a dismal display and no mouse buttons. You’d be better off spending more for the Omen, I promise.
The Pavilion Gaming Laptop nevertheless punches well above its weight in the entry-level range. If you’re looking for a sub-$1,000 gaming laptop, HP’s built one every bit as sturdy and refined as its high-end counterparts—because at the core, they’re the same laptop. Branding is funny sometimes, eh?
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The world premiere for Birds of Prey was last night in LA, meaning a whole wave of first reactions have hit social media. The overall response to the Suicide Squad spin-off starring Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn seems really positive, with praise for the movie’s action, cast and choice of tone.
First reactions don’t necessarily represent the eventual consensus around a film – just look at the reactions to The Rise of Skywalker after its premiere, some of which sound like they’re about an entirely different movie – but they’re a decent indicator of what to expect. The whole phenomenon of first reactions has been parodied extensively by Ben Mekler on Twitter.
With that in mind, the responses to Birds of Prey are promising, and this movie is almost certainly going to be better than Suicide Squad by default. So let’s get into them.
First up, we’ve got kind words for the ensemble cast of the movie, which includes Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Huntress, Jurnee Smollett-Bell as Black Canary and Ella Jay Basco as Cassandra Cain (the second Batgirl in the comics). The movie’s villain, Black Mask, is played by Ewan McGregor.
So #BirdsofPrey was an absolute blast. Harley feels exactly like the human Looney Toon she ought to be, Black Mask is a scene stealer; Dinah, Helena, Cass, and Renee all rule. This was everything I want from DC movies and then some.January 29, 2020
Then we’ve got some favorable comparisons to 2019’s Shazam!, which was largely praised for being a different and fun take on a superhero movie. It was more fun than Justice League was, anyway.
Just saw #BirdsofPrey and am happy to report that it’s my favorite modern DC movie yet. Like Shazam, it carves its own path with totally unique aesthetic, action, and tone. Margot, Ewan and all the rest are 100% fantabulous. Why aren’t there more roller skate action scenes?? pic.twitter.com/BDipKiB0qUJanuary 29, 2020
“A criminally fun celebration of sisterhood,” is how writer Millicent Thomas puts it. There are a few comparisons to Deadpool, too, in terms of the movie’s cheeky tone and fourth wall-breaking.
The only fair comparison for #BirdsOfPrey, if you want one, is Deadpool. They have a lot in common, especially their use of fourth-wall breaking and R-Ratings! pic.twitter.com/yGemqvJmMaJanuary 29, 2020
People really seem to enjoy Ewan McGregor’s performance, with one writer suggesting he deserves awards recognition.
#BirdsofPrey is a totally campy and brutal carnival ride; a colorful, chaotic and cheeky blast. FYC: Ewan MacGregor, Best Supporting Actor.January 29, 2020
Then we have some “awkward plotting” called out in Birds of Prey, but amid overall praise for the movie.
#BirdsofPrey is KILLER. A slow start and awkward plotting doesn’t stop the movie, and these characters, from soaring in the end. Wildly violent, F bombs out the wazoo, and the best bat fight scene since The Raid 2. If Margot Robbie could control this part of the DCEU, she should. pic.twitter.com/bewnj8npaJJanuary 29, 2020
Birds of Prey, directed by Cathy Yan, will be released on February 7. It’s the first of two DC Comics adaptations coming this year, with the other, Wonder Woman 1984, coming on June 5. Margot Robbie will next appear as Harley Quinn in 2021’s The Suicide Squad, directed by Guardians of the Galaxy’s James Gunn.
Few of us could have predicted that data breaches would become so common and part of the major news cycle. It almost seems like there are leaks reported on a daily basis, such as compromised accounts on Facebook or credit card account leaks from major companies. With the proliferation of web and mobile apps in high abundance, there is also a constant stream of negative press related to criminals breaking into company data stores.
Fortunately, there’s one smart option for those who are concerned about deploying a new website, application, or cloud service and how that could open up an attack vector.
AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud) provides an isolated and secure virtual cloud for companies to deploy websites, apps, and other services. It’s a private, provisioned portion of the Amazon virtual cloud and has the extreme flexibility and scalability to help a tiny startup launch a new website or a massive enterprise deploy a new web application.
Security is a primary reason to use AWS VPC, but there’s also the flexibility to configure the virtual cloud the way you need to run it. This can include using either IPv4 or IPv6, setting your IP address range, creating subnets, and configuring gateways and route tables.
One example of how this works is with subnets. A large company might decide to use VPC because they have public-facing and private-facing applications. Launching a new rich application for consumers, they might create a subnet that is still secure and reliable. Yet they might also need a second subnet, configured according to their technical requirements, that is not available to consumers nor over the public Internet.
The private subnet might be intended only for a legacy backup system or a secure database used only by internal employees who access the server over a private network and not the internet. This type of control over what your web server in the cloud can do, for both public and private applications, means you can take control of your security infrastructure.
Within the subnets, you can use EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) instances that you deploy and control instead of relying on a data center at your own site and having to configure, maintain, and update the IT infrastructure for your various apps and data stores.
Because the VPC is all part of Amazon Web Services, you also can deploy Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) within each instance, and even restrict which AWS account can access the subnets. One way to understand how this all works and the benefits is to think of VPC as a private container for your web apps, each one secured and restricted in a way that reduces the chances of a data breach. You’re in full control of where the data resides within your own private cloud, which instances are deployed, and how the storage is configured.
Benefits and examples of AWS VPC
Because of all the flexibility in having your own AWS Virtual Private Cloud, companies can scale and deploy business apps and reach an audience faster, without the typical concerns over data breaches and configuring the infrastructure. Companies can deploy the VPC right from the AWS Management Console. This is all template-driven so that you can focus more on the apps, your database, and your new website rather than the complexity of configuration and setup.
As with many Amazon Web Services, the VPC also helps you reduce the costs associated with a private cloud. One example of this is when a company is faced with the need to deploy a secure disaster recovery portal. In the past, creating the infrastructure for disaster recovery is a major undertaking, especially when there are complex regulations and compliance issues involved. It is often an expensive, time-consuming endeavor. Companies know they need to plan for a major event that is weather-related (e.g., a tornado that destroys local servers) or some other catastrophic event, but actually doing so is not an easy process.
With VPC, you can use your own private cloud as a disaster recovery site for a much lower cost than doing it on your own with a second data center location. You also have the benefit of using EC2 instances to add compute performance if the primary infrastructure is not available. There are additional benefits related to extending the compute performance of an existing data center or server room, even for companies with an extensive array of web servers.
One last example of how a company might use VPC is for experimentation. Deciding to launch a new website is not typically something you can do overnight. Yet, even a small company can create business requirements, build the features and functions, and then rely on a virtual cloud for running the application without having to first make it secure and reliable.
Netflix isn’t giving up on becoming a global hub for anime properties, with a new live-action series of the bestselling manga and anime franchise One Piece now on its way to the streaming service.
What is One Piece? The Japanese manga series first kicked off in 1997, with an anime adaptation only two years later bringing its world of swashbuckling, treasure-hunting, and the stretchy arms of its protagonist Monkey D. Luffy – blessed or cursed with a rubberized body after eating the ‘Gum Gum Devil Fruit’ – to a massive global audience.
While the adaptation has apparently been in the works for a while now, this is the first explicit confirmation we’ve had from Netflix itself, which revealed it had commissioned ten episodes of the live-action series. There’s no release date confirmed, but given the paucity of details it’s likely we won’t see it until 2021 at the earliest.
King of the pirates
One Piece is one of the best-known anime series in the world, and Netflix nabbing the rights for a live-action adaptation is no small feat.
It’s not the first time Netflix has given a big-name anime the live-action treatment. It made a Death Note show starring Willem Dafoe, and has produced anime such as Devilman: Crybaby, Aggretsuko, or B: The Beginning. With a CGI Ghost in the Shell series on its way in April 2020 too, the streaming service clearly has big plans going forward.
The One Piece series has Lost’s Steven Maeda attached as showrunner, and the production studio behind Snowpiercer and the live-action Cowboy Bepop – Tomorrow Studios – helping to executive produce.
For financial institutions and banks, security tools are an essential part of their business, not only in terms of keeping their customers’ accounts safe but also with regards to internal compliance. These organisations have a responsibility to safeguard both their customer’s money and information. Consequently, it’s vital they have the tools and technology in place to protect these critical assets.
About the author
Gareth Jones is Chief Information Officer at Fraedom.
As technology continues to develop at pace, in 2020 we will see more banks begin to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) paired with machine learning (ML) to offer their customers enhanced security features. Additionally, as misconceptions and myths about cloud security are dispelled, the adoption of cloud technology will also increase. Now, in 2020, what will the increased uptake of these technologies among financial institutions mean for security in the banking industry in the next year?
AI & ML
Through increased use of AI and ML in 2020, banks will be able to help customers keep their accounts more secure by detecting any anomalies and fraudulent activities much quicker than previously possible. The beauty of using AI and ML in this way lies in their ability to understand what is ‘normal’ for each account or card by recognizing patterns based on past transactions and behaviors.
For example, if 99% of the transactions for one account happen Monday to Friday, a transaction that occurs at the weekend will be seen as abnormal and flagged as such. With AI speeding up the detection of any deviations from normal patterns, banks will be able to respond more rapidly when informing their customers if their accounts appear to have had unusual activity. As businesses currently lose an average of 7% of their annual expenditure to fraud and 2017 seeing a record 16.7 million victims of identity fraud, the use of AI and ML should see this figure reduce.
Of course, anomalous transactions aren’t always fraud. Often, they’re just out of the ordinary, requiring some more investigation and flagging them to the business would allow for this. These new technologies will ensure businesses are able to deal with discrepancies in their accounts immediately, rather than finding out about them months down the line when it’s harder to get a clear picture of events at the time when the transaction took place.
Although it’s unlikely to happen in 2020, in the future, we may get to a point where fraud detection can be done in real-time in order to stop fraudulent transactions in their tracks. In these cases, we could see the account being frozen or the card being blocked in order to prevent the transaction from being completed.
AI and ML will also be pivotal for cybersecurity and maintaining regulatory compliance, both of which are hot topics for the financial services sector and will continue to be moving into 2020 and beyond. We will see more banks use ML to code platforms to identify user patterns and detect anomalous network behavior, which is becoming increasingly essential as cyber-attacks are often disguised with inconspicuous data or code.
Cloud
Cloud adoption has historically been slow among financial institutions, in part due to misconceptions about security. However, banks are beginning to realize that cloud computing services present no more of a security risk than current technology, as public cloud providers have invested time, money and effort into meeting security standards.
Ultimately, cloud providers have commoditized security services so instead of banks needing to build their own encryption capabilities, for example, industry experts such as AWS have made it possible for them to implement security services at the click of a button straight out of the box. This provides banks with a far quicker and easier way to be secure than deploying or retrofitting security features into their own environments. This will help banks to ensure they are storing customer information in a secure and compliant manner, adhering to banking regulations more widely.
Making physical payments more secure
Biometrics have been used to make accessing accounts and making payments more secure for a number of years now, but only for those with certain devices and with certain banks. However, it is predicted that by 2020, nearly all smart devices, including mobile phones, tablets and wearables, will have some form of biometric security enablement, and so this functionality will soon become more widely available. Consequently, more people will be able to make payments through fingerprints and facial recognition and by 2023 it is estimated there will be over 2.6 billion biometric payment users.
Although biometric authentication currently tends to only be available to consumers, 2020 could be the year that corporate clients gain access to the same functionality. As biometric functionality extends into the corporate card arena, the commercial payments process will not only become more secure but also more seamless. We could also see mobile wallets that defer to the individual’s personal attributes to make secure payments on these cards, whether authenticated through fingerprint or facial recognition.
While cybersecurity threats such as malware and the risk of fraud is never going to go away, in 2020, we will see banks adopt new and more sophisticated measures to prevent these instances and improve security within the financial sector. Key to this will be the increased adoption of AI and ML technologies which will help banks detect anomalies faster and perhaps one day stop them from occurring altogether. The efficiency of these technologies is already being realized by corporate banks, with Visa’s use of AI having reduced global fraud rates to less than 0.1%.
As more banks recognize the significant impact AI and ML can have not only on security but their organisations in 2020 and beyond, it is likely we will see more companies turning to fintechs for support. In such a competitive market, this will be a vital step to learn how to best leverage these technologies to improve security and maintain compliance in order to retain customers and attract new ones. These technologies will also offer banks the benefit of becoming more agile and innovative, therefore helping them to retain their existing customers and attract new ones.
The Samsung Galaxy S20 and its siblings are the early-2020 phones with the most buzz around them, but based on a specs leak the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro could be just as deserving of attention.
A screenshot shared on Twitter by Xiaomishka (a source with a limited track record but known for their Xiaomi leaks) seemingly shows the ‘About phone’ screen of the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro, complete with an almost full specs list.
Highlights of this leak include a Snapdragon 865 chipset and a massive 16GB of RAM. Currently no smartphone has that much RAM, and paired with that top-end chipset this could make the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro the most powerful phone of early 2020.
Other listed specs include a huge 5,250mAh battery, 512GB of storage, and a quad-lens camera, with a 108MP main sensor alongside 16MP, 12MP and 5MP ones. Presumably they’ll be joined by zoom, ultra-wide angle and macro lenses, in some configuration.
The only aspect of the listed specs that’s slightly less impressive is the 6.4-inch screen, because it apparently comes in at a resolution of just 1080 x 2080 – making it FHD+, where most big name flagships now have QHD+ screens.
It’s worth noting however that these specs are at odds with an earlier leak, so we’d certainly take them with a pinch of salt for now.
In any case, we should know just how powerful the Xiaomi Mi 10 Pro really is soon, as it’s likely to land alongside the standard Xiaomi Mi 10 very soon, with one rumor pointing to February 11 – the same day as the Samsung Galaxy S20.
