Charlotte Henry

Apple CEO Tim Cook will talk with Salesforce boss Marc Benioff tomorrow at the firm’s Dreamforce conference, MacRumors reported.  It will take place at 1:30 p.m. Pacific Time at the Yerba Buena Theater, and will also be live-streamed. It also announced new iOS enterprise apps.

Apple and Salesforce formed a strategic partnership in 2018. Salesforce has since redesigned its customer relationship management app with support for the latest features on iPhone and iPad, including Siri Shortcuts and Face ID. The new Salesforce app is available in the App Store. Salesforce has also announced a Trailhead GO learning app with more than 700 modules covering business and tech skills. Trailhead GO is available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad. Additional features, including support for Dark Mode and Sign in with Apple, are expected to be available later this year.

iOS 13.3 is heading our way soon, and it is set to contain a powerful new security feature. Forbes reported that it will support NFC, USB, and Lightning FIDO2-compliant security keys in Safari.

The move is revealed in Apple’s release notes for the second developer beta, which says iOS 13.3 supports NFC, USB, and Lightning FIDO2-compliant security keys in Safari. In other words, when the iOS 13.3 update drops, you will able to use physical security keys such as Yubico’s iPhone compatible YubiKey 5Ci–which was previously unavailable to browsers such as Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. However, it could be used with some password manager apps such as 1Password.

GitHub announced a beta iOS app at its Universal conference on Wednesday. The Microsoft-owned company also extended its sponsor program, Techcrunch reported.

The new mobile app, which is now out in beta for iOS, with Android support coming soon, offers all of the basic features you’d want from a mobile app like this. The team decided to focus squarely on the kind of mobile use cases that would make the most sense for a developer on the go, so you’ll be able to share feedback on discussions, review a few lines of code and merge changes, but this isn’t meant to be a tool that replicated the full GitHub experience, though at least on the iPad, you do get a bit more screen real estate to work with.

Siri may soon be able to interpret your emotions using facial recognition. That’s according to a new patent, reported on by AppleInsider.

Intelligent software agents can perform actions on behalf of a user,” says Apple in US Patent Number 20190348037. “Actions can be performed in response to a natural-language user input, such as a sentence spoken by the user. In some circumstances, an action taken by an intelligent software agent may not match the action that the user intended.” “As an example,” it continues, “the face image in the video input… may be analysed to determine whether particular muscles or muscle groups are activated by identifying shapes or motions.” Part of the system entails using facial recognition to identify the user and so provide customized actions such as retrieving that person’s email or playing their personal music playlists.

Facebook Pay launched in the U.S. Thursday, Computing reported, following a trial in India. The service supports payments on the Facebook and Messenger platforms.

“Facebook Pay supports most major credit and debit cards as well as PayPal,” said Deborah Liu, vice president of Facebook’s marketplace and commerce division. She continued: “Payments are processed in partnership with companies like PayPal, Stripe and others around the world. Facebook Pay is built on existing financial infrastructure and partnerships, and is separate from the Calibra wallet which will run on the Libra network.” In addition to enabling users to buy goods on the social network’s various platforms, it will also enable them to send money to friends and donate to fundraisers.

Disney+ surpassed 10 million subscribers on its first day, The Verge reported. The app has been downloaded over 3.2 million times, despite tech teething-problems.

The Mandalorian, the live-action Star Wars show easily considered the crown jewel of Disney’s streaming service, saw north of 2 million streams over the first day, according to people familiar with the matter. That number has more than likely grown due to overnight and second day viewing. By the end of the day, Disney+ was also the top app in the App Store, according to Apptopia. Launching with a bundle — ESPN+ and ad-supported Hulu — also helped bump up both apps in app stores, according to Apptopia’s report. Sources familiar with the matter told The Verge that the bundle also saw a notable increase in sign-ups following the launch of Disney+. To put everything into additional context, analysts projected that Disney+ would have anywhere between 10-18 million subscribers in its first year. Disney has signed up more than half of those projected numbers in 24 hours.

Google is going to partner with banks to start offering checking accounts. Techcrunch reported that the consumer service will begin next year.

The initial financial partners that Google is working with include Citigroup and Stanford Federal Credit Union, and their motivation per the WSJ piece appears to be seeking out and attracting younger and more digital-savvy customers who are increasingly looking to handle more of their lives through online tools. Per Sengupta’s comments, they’ll also benefit from Google’s ability to work with large sets of data and turn those into value-add products, but the Google exec also said the tech company doesn’t use Google Pay data for advertising, nor does it share that data with advertisers.

Twitter announced proposals for its policy to tackle deepfakes on Monday. Now, The Verge reported, it wants users to help it finish the job.

Late last month, the Twitter Safety team announced it’d be seeking feedback on what a deepfake and synthetic media policy would look like on the platform. In a blog post on Monday referencing that announcement, Twitter vice president of trust and safety Del Harvey wrote that if manipulated media was flagged on the platform, Twitter could end up placing a notice next to it alerting users that it’s been distorted, warning them that it’s false before they share it, or adding context in the form of a link or news article breaking down why others believe that it’s untrue. Twitter could also remove the content, Harvey wrote.