Technology - Google News

Apple and Salesforce create a strategic partnership to bring Siri to enterprise customers
Roku's new $40 Premiere is the cheapest 4K streaming player you can buy
Apple completes deal for music identification service Shazam

Apple and Salesforce create a strategic partnership to bring Siri to enterprise customers

Posted: 24 Sep 2018 07:39 AM PDT

Salesforce and Apple have announced a partnership "that brings together the number one customer relationship management platform and iOS." The biggest direct result of the collaboration will be a redesigned, native Salesforce app for iOS coming in early 2019. Salesforce is working with Apple to implement features like Face ID, Business Chat, and the new-in-iOS-12 Siri Shortcuts.

Siri definitely seems to be a large focus of this — at least on Apple's side. "If you look at enterprise in general, voice has not been used as much as in consumer," Tim Cook told Reuters in an interview. "We're going to be able to provide the sales rep instant access to things using your voice instead of clicks and going through different apps. We're changing the way people work, and that's always been at the heart of what Apple is about — changing things for the better."

The two companies will also work together on a Salesforce Mobile SDK that's optimized for Apple's Swift coding language. With an SDK, developers will be able to build iOS apps that use the Salesforce Lightning Platform as a cloud backend; around 5 million developers are using the Lightning Platform today, according to Reuters, versus the 20 million making apps for Apple devices. The SDK will launch "by the end of 2018."

Still, those are valuable developers to appeal to, and the enterprise segment is one that Apple has pursued aggressively. It announced a "landmark partnership" with IBM in 2014 and followed that up with deals involving Cisco, SAP, and others. Salesforce will also bring Trailhead, its portal for learning Salesforce skills, to iOS as a mobile app by the end of this year, and it has already introduced courses on building iOS applications using Swift.

The companies will preview their collaboration at Salesforce's Dreamforce conference in San Francisco this week.

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Roku's new $40 Premiere is the cheapest 4K streaming player you can buy

Posted: 24 Sep 2018 06:00 AM PDT

Roku is today announcing the Premiere and Premiere+, two new devices that offer 4K HDR video streaming for prices starting at $39.99. The latter will be exclusively sold at Walmart and include a remote control with voice search capabilities that's more convenient than the IR remote bundled with the regular Premiere. But aside from that (and a higher $49.99 price), the Premiere and Premiere+ are identical. Both support 802.11n Wi-Fi and have a quad-core processor inside for responsive performance. With regards to HDR, you're getting HDR10, but not Dolby Vision.

At $40 for the standard Premiere, Roku is getting extremely aggressive on price. Amazon's 4K-capable Fire TV costs around $70, as does Google's Chromecast Ultra. And even at $40, you're still getting an HDMI cable in the box. The Premiere has a low profile that's not quite as slim as a streaming stick, but not far off. It looks a lot like the prior Express device.

The Premiere and Premiere+ go up for preorder today and will be available starting in early October. Separately, Roku is also "updating" its top-tier Roku Ultra by adding JBL earbuds to the box; the hardware is otherwise identical and will sell for the same $99.99 price. That's also coming next month.

Remember that Roku CEO Anthony Wood has made clear that he doesn't consider Roku to be in the hardware business. It's an advertising company. Roku's streaming players are merely a vehicle for racking up active user accounts and generating more advertising revenue. Aside from listening to the Vergecast episode linked above, I also highly recommend Wood's recent interview on Peter Kafka's Recode Media if you want more details on the ins and outs of how the company makes money. But Roku definitely still makes a lot of hardware. Here's the entire current lineup:

For many apps on its platform, Roku receives a monthly slice of each subscription that originates from a Roku device. The company has also been putting a big emphasis on The Roku Channel, an in-house, ad-sponsored app that offers a mix of catalog TV shows, movies, and live news that can be viewed for free. And Roku has recently given more prominence to free, ad-supported content from its streaming partners with a "Featured Free" section of the home screen that brings together shows and movies that don't require a login or subscription to stream.

The shortcut buttons on Roku remotes? Paid placement. And now the company is even adding branded sounds to its "lost remote finder" feature. (There's a button on top of the Roku Ultra that you can press to have the remote emit a sound.) Starting in November, you'll be able to replace the default sound with ESPN's SportsCenter alert sound or the Game of Thrones theme song. An advertising company, indeed.

But $40 sure is a cheap gateway to an endless array of streaming apps and 4K.

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Apple completes deal for music identification service Shazam

Posted: 24 Sep 2018 08:23 AM PDT

While Apple's full plans for Shazam aren't entirely clear, the company announced on Monday that the deal for the music identification service is complete, and the app will go advertising-free soon.

"Apple and Shazam have a long history together. Shazam was one of the first apps available when we launched the App Store and has become a favorite app for music fans everywhere," said Oliver Schusser, Apple's vice president of Apple Music. "With a shared love of music and innovation, we are thrilled to bring our teams together to provide users even more great ways to discover, experience and enjoy music."

Apple says that Shazam has been downloaded over one billion times around the world, and users identify songs using the Shazam app over 20 million times each day.

Beyond song identification, Shazam has an augmented reality technology it calls Visual Shazam, that it launched in 2015. As a follow-on to that, Shazam announced a "massively scaled augmented reality platform" in March 2017. At launch, the platform allowed users to scan "Shazam Codes" with the content from partners displayed on a smartphone after the scan.

At launch, the functionality existed within the Shazam app. The primary partner at launch was liquor company Beam Suntory. The effort was praised because of market penetration that the company had with its Shazam app —now eclipsed many times over by Apple's rollout of ARKit in iOS 11.

Word first surfaced in December that Apple was close to buying Shazam. It was said that the price was about $401 million —a significant discount from the $1 billion the company was valued at in its last funding round in 2015.

Shazam started life in the UK in 1999 as a product called 2580, named after the number users had to dial to reach the service via text. Since its debut on the iOS App Store, and subsequently Mac App Store, Shazam has evolved into a comprehensive audio fingerprinting service that allows users to identify songs, movies, TV shows and other media by capturing short audio segments.

Currently, Shazam features integration with a number of music services, including iTunes and Apple Music. While iTunes hooks feature simple track purchasing options, Apple Music subscribers can use Shazam to quickly add identified songs and to a customized playlist.</span>

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