September is Apple hardware season, where we expect new iPhones, a new Apple Watch and more. But what makes the good stuff run is the software within.

First revealed earlier this year at the company’s annual WWDC developer event in June, iOS 12 and macOS Mojave focus on a running theme: security and privacy for the masses.

Ahead of Wednesday big reveal, here’s all the good stuff to look out for.

macOS Mojave

macOS Mojave will be the sixth iteration of the Mac operating system, named after a location in California where Apple is based. It comes with dark mode, file stacks, and group FaceTime calls.

Safari now prevents browser fingerprinting and cross-site tracking

What does it do? Safari will use a new “intelligent tracking prevention” feature to prevent advertisers from following you from site to site. Even social networks like Facebook know which sites you visit because so many embed Facebook’s tools — like the comments section or the “Like” button.

Why does it matter? Tracking prevention will prevent ad firms from building a unique “fingerprint” of your browser, making it difficult to serve you targeted ads — even when you’re in incognito mode or private browsing. That’s an automatic boost for personal privacy as these companies will find it more difficult to build up profiles on you.

Camera, microphone, backups now require permission

What does it do? Just like when an app asks you for access to your contacts and calendar, now Mojave will ask for permission before an app can access your FaceTime camera and microphone, as well as location data, backups and more.

Why does it matter? By expanding this feature, it’s much more difficult for apps to switch on your camera without warning or record from your microphone without you noticing. That’s going to prevent surreptitious ultrasonic ad tracking and surveillance by malware that hijack your camera. But also asking permission for access to your backups — often unencrypted — will prevent malware or hackers from quietly stealing your data.

iOS 12

iOS 12 lands on more recent iPhones and iPads, but will bring significant performance boosts to older supported devices, new Maps, smarter notifications and updated AIKit .

Password manager will warn of password reuse

What does it do? iOS 12’s in-built password manager, which stores all your passwords for easy access, will now tell if you’re using the same password across different sites and apps.

Why does it matter? Password reuse is a real problem. If you use the same password on every site, it only takes one site breach to grab your password for every other site you use. iOS 12 will let you know if you’re using a weak password or the same password on different sites. Your passwords are easily accessible with your fingerprint or your passcode.

Two-factor codes will be auto-filled

What does it do? When you are sent a two-factor code — such as a text message or a push notification — iOS 12 will take that code and automatically enter it into the login box.

Why does it matter? Two-factor authentication is good for security — it adds an extra layer of protection on top of your username and password. But adoption is low because two-factor is cumbersome and frustrating. This feature keeps the feature security intact while making it more seamless and less annoying.

USB Restricted Mode makes hacking more difficult

What does it do? This new security feature will lock any accessories out of your device — including USB cables and headphones — when your iPhone or iPad has been locked for more than an hour.

Why does it matter? This is an optional feature — first added to iOS 11.4.1 but likely to be widely adopted with iOS 12 — will make it more difficult for law enforcement (and hackers) to plug in your device and steal your sensitive data. Because your device is encrypted, not even Apple can get your data, but some devices — like GrayKeys — can brute-force your password. This feature will render these devices largely ineffective.

Apple’s event starts Wednesday at 10am PT (1pm ET).

A recent user survey sent out by Dropbox confirms the company is considering the addition of an electronic signature feature to its Dropbox Professional product, which it refers to simply as “E-Signature from Dropbox.” The point of the survey is to solicit feedback about how likely users are to use such a product, how often, and if they believe it would add value to the Dropbox experience, among other things.

While a survey alone doesn’t confirm the feature is in the works, it does indicate how Dropbox is thinking about its professional product.

According to the company’s description of E-Signature, the feature would offer “a simple, intuitive electronic signature experience for you and your clients” where documents could be sent to others to sign in “just a few clicks.”

The clients also wouldn’t have to be Dropbox users to sign, the survey notes. And the product would offer updates on every step of the signature workflow, including notifications and alerts about the document being opened, whether the client had questions, and when the document was signed. After the signed document is returned, the user would receive the executed copy saved right in their Dropbox account for easy access, the company says.

In addition to soliciting general feedback about the product, Dropbox also asked survey respondents about their usage of other e-signature brands, like Adobe e-Sign, DocuSign, HelloSign, and PandaDoc, as well as their usage other more traditional methods, like in-person signing and documents sent over mail.

Given the numerous choices on the market today, it’s unclear if Dropbox will choose to move forward and launch such a product. However, if it did, the benefit of having its own E-Signature service would be its ability to be more tightly integrated into Dropbox’s overall product experience. It could also push more business users to upgrade from a basic consumer account to the Professional tier.

This kind of direct integration would make sense in the context of Dropbox’s business workflows. If, for instance, a company is working on a contract workflow, being able to move to the signature phase without changing context (or to share with a user who doesn’t use Dropbox) could add tremendous value over and above simply storing the document.

Companies like Dropbox have been looking for ways to move beyond pure storage to give customers the ability to collaborate and share that content, particularly without forcing them to leave the application to complete a job. This ability to do work without task switching is something that Dropbox has been working on with Dropbox Paper.

While it remains to be seen how they would implement such a solution, it might be a case where it would make more sense to partner with existing vendors or buy a smaller player than it would be build such functionality from scratch — although it’s not clear from a simple survey what their ultimate goal would be at this point.

Dropbox has not yet responded to requests for comment.

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created a method to turn one video into the style of another. While this might be a little unclear at first, take a look at the video below. In it, the researchers have taken an entire clip from John Oliver and made it look like Stephen Colbert said it. Further, they were able to mimic the motion of a flower opening with another flower.

In short, they can make anyone (or anything) look like they are doing something they never did.

“I think there are a lot of stories to be told,” said CMU Ph.D. student Aayush Bansal. He and the team created the tool to make it easier to shoot complex films, perhaps by replacing the motion in simple, well-lit scenes and copying it into an entirely different style or environment.

“It’s a tool for the artist that gives them an initial model that they can then improve,” he said.

The system uses something called generative adversarial networks (GANs) to move one style of image onto another without much matching data. GANs, however, create many artifacts that can mess up the video as it is played.

In a GAN, two models are created: a discriminator that learns to detect what is consistent with the style of one image or video, and a generator that learns how to create images or videos that match a certain style. When the two work competitively — the generator trying to trick the discriminator and the discriminator scoring the effectiveness of the generator — the system eventually learns how content can be transformed into a certain style.

The researchers created something called Recycle-GAN that reduces the imperfections by “not only spatial, but temporal information.”

“This additional information, accounting for changes over time, further constrains the process and produces better results,” wrote the researchers.

Recycle-GAN can obviously be used to create so-called Deepfakes, allowing for nefarious folks to simulate someone saying or doing something they never did. Bansal and his team are aware of the problem.

“It was an eye opener to all of us in the field that such fakes would be created and have such an impact. Finding ways to detect them will be important moving forward,” said Bansal.

Meet Paysend’s global account, a new way to hold, spend and send money in multiple currencies using a mobile app and a card. It looks a lot like Revolut’s basic features. But the company is trying to provide a more focused and robust experience from day one.

“We are quite different from both a technical infrastructure and consumer offering viewpoint. We own and control our own processing and this gives tremendous ability and flexibility to deliver a wide variety of services whilst controlling the entire consumer journey,” Head of Product Alex Murashko told me.

“But for me an important distinction is that we have a different approach to designing the product. We believe in simplifying the consumer experience so that instead of feeling like they are bombarded with a long list of features they have available a focused group of benefits.”

And it’s true that Revolut has launched so many different features that it’s hard to keep track of what you can do with your Revolut account. For instance, you can insure your mobile phone, save money using vaults, buy cryptocurrencies, subscribe to a travel insurance package and more.

So Paysend went back to the drawing board to focus on the essential. The company lets you top up and hold money in EUR, GBP, USD, Russian rubles and Kazakhstani tenge. Paysend is partnering with Bitstamp so that you can buy and hold cryptocurrencies in the app as well.

You can then covert your money into any of those currencies at interbank exchange rates with a 1 percent markup. Revolut adds between 0.5 percent and 2 percent markup depending on the currency.

What if you’re traveling to another country? You can use your Paysend card to spend money and withdraw cash in 125 currencies. You decide in the app the backup currency that you want the company to use.

When it comes to sending money, you can send money for free to other Paysend user, or send money instantly for €1 or £1.5. The company doesn’t initiate regular bank transfers. Paysend has worked on card-to-card transactions instead. You enter the card number of your friends and family members to send money to their card directly.

Sometimes, you need to send money to someone you don’t know that well. You don’t have to ask them for their card number. You can generate a payment link and send the link. The recipient can then enter their own card number to receive the payment.

This card-to-card transfer feature has already been live for a while as a standalone product. Going forward, global accounts will become the flagship product, but standalone transfers will remain available.

Paysend has already raised $20 million and there are 130 people working for the company. Global accounts are still in beta and should roll out to European users soon.

While Paysend is still a young and intriguing product, it’s going to be interesting to see how it evolves. In addition to card-to-card transfers, the company will differentiate its product from its competitors even further over time.

[gallery ids="1709755,1709756,1709757,1709760,1709759"]

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency pegged 1-to-1 with another “stable” currency. In most cases, these coins are pegged to the US dollar and, as such, allow for true transfers of actual fiat currencies between parties using the blockchain. If you’re nodding off right now thinking about this, I would posit that these moves, however minor right now, are an important step forward in cryptocurrency acceptance.

The latest stablecoin to hit the virtual streets is the Gemini Dollar. This coin comes on the heels of the much-ridiculed Tether, a stablecoin created in 2014 that has been the the brunt of much criticism including suggestions that the team has been artificially pumping the currency with wash trades.

The new currency by Winklevoss-run Gemini is pegged directly to the US dollar on the Ethereum blockchain. This means that for every Gemini Dollar there is one actual dollar in a bank account. The Gemini Trust Company holds the deposits and has been officially accepted by the New York Department of Financial Services, the regulatory body associated with banking and finance.

The GD, in other words, is the first stablecoin to gain a truly official imprimatur.

“As the financial technology marketplace continues to evolve, New York is committed to fostering innovation while ensuring responsible growth. These approvals demonstrate that companies can create change and strong standards of compliance within a strong state regulatory framework that safeguards regulated entities and protects consumers,” said Department of Financial Services Superintendent Maria T. Vullo.

From the release:

DFS issued a limited purpose trust company charter to Gemini in October 2015 to operate a virtual currency exchange through which it offers customers services for buying, selling, sending, receiving, and storing virtual currency. DFS issued a limited purpose trust company charter in May 2015 to itBit, now Paxos Trust Company, which operates the itBit exchange, to offer services for buying, selling, sending, receiving, and storing virtual currency.

The NYDFS requires that the Gemini dollars “are fully exchangeable for a U.S. dollar” and that Gemini will maintain records of their movement. The requirements also include controls including AML and OFAC controls to present money laundering or terrorist financing. An independent accountant will examine the fiat-holding bank account to ensure that all of the stable coins are accounted for. You can convert and withdraw Gemini Dollars directly onto the Ethereum blockchain.

What all this means is that there is now a stable, regulated coin that should offset some of the traditional volatility of crypto. It’s an interesting – if limited – move by a big player in the crypto space.

If you had a cup of delicious coffee this morning, there’s a good chance those beans came from Colombia, which has famously been growing and selling them for centuries. But the country hasn’t produced any coffee makers — until now, anyway. The FrankOne is a clever device that puts a versatile vacuum-extraction technique in a compact, single-cup form factor.

Of course, it’ll have to hit its Kickstarter goal first. Eduardo Umaña, the designer of the FrankOne, explained that he encountered the idea one day when chatting with a Colombian roaster.

“He was making coffee then by using the ‘reverse french press’ method and I thought I could improve on that,”  Umaña told me in an email. “Some time after, I got very curious to test what high vacuum brewed coffee would taste like. I did some simple experiments and was very surprised by the rich and sweet flavor. One thing led to another and I ended up designing a new product.”

The FrankOne is closest in operation to the big glass vacuum drippers you might have seen in fancy coffee shops. This interesting and quite old method uses the gas pressure created by the boiling action to force the water upwards through a tube into the grounds, and then as it cools, the brewed coffee is pulled back down through a filter by the changes in air pressure. The siphons you’ve seen are elegant but not exactly convenient.

“They implement a similar principle in a very different way,” Umaña said. His device doesn’t require this dance of hot and cool;  You put the cylindrical device, about the size of two cans of tuna perhaps, on a carafe of the right size (or mug for that matter) and add the ground coffee in. Pour in the hot water, put the lid on and wait a bit for the oils and such to extract. Then hit the button on top and let it do its thing.

A pump extracts air from the carafe, drawing the coffee down through the metal filter. In a minute or so the process is done, leaving what Umaña says is the bitter crema up in the grounds. The result is a sweet and clear cup of coffee. Its taste (I haven’t tried) is likely closest to Aeropress, as opposed to drip, due to the active force pushing (pulling, actually) the water through the grounds.

The device will accept various grinds and amounts of coffee, producing a different cup — not a possibility with French Press and not advised with pourover or espresso. And it’s definitely a lot smaller than an Aeropress.

It does run on a battery, but with 150 cups per charge, you probably won’t have to worry much about it. And there’s no bait and switch with custom filters or something — you just wash the thing and it’s ready to go again.

Incidentally, I had to double check with Umaña that no one from Colombia had gone on to create a coffee maker. The industry is so old and so important there that it seemed impossible.

“Unbelievable, right?” he wrote. “It was also very meaningful to me as Colombian to work on the first Colombian designed coffee brewer. Perhaps through this project we can bring some much needed economic development to the country by innovating in coffee; it grows right in our backyard and we can do so much more than we are currently doing!”

Umaña and his company, Frank de Paula (after the second president of Colombia, who started the coffee export business there in the 19th century), are looking for $120,000 to finance the device. At $50 for the early birds it’s likely a steal, at least if you’re a coffee brewing fiend like me — I collect stuff like this. Everyone needs a hobby, right? It’ll cost a bill when it comes out in retail, so if you like the idea, save yourself a couple bucks and support good design with a pledge.

PayPal, now with 19.5 million businesses and 250 million customers using its payment rails to sell and buy goods and services, is today taking the wraps off a new feature that it hopes will bring more transactions to its platform. The company is launching Funds Now, instant payouts to businesses using PayPal for their transactions.

The feature will come as standard to all companies in good standing with PayPal — that is, with no complaints or fraud flags on their accounts. It’s eventually going to be rolled out globally, although at first it will go live in the US, UK and Australia, where PayPal has already rolled out a pilot of the service to 1 million customers. There is no upper or lower limit on FundsNow payouts, and they will apply to any payments made via PayPal, mobile or otherwise.

FundsNow and its instant fund availability is a big step ahead for PayPal and the businesses that use it to power their payments. Bill Ready, EVP and COO of PayPal, said that typically funds from a payment to a seller could days or weeks to come into a businesses’ account, in line with how things typically work in the payments industry. “That means several days or weeks of sales held up that you can’t reinvest back into the business,” he said.

But PayPal isn’t the first to turn on instant payout features. Stripe, one of its rivals, started to implement instant payout features back in 2016.

Typically, the reason why there have been delays in paying out the funds in the past is because payment providers like PayPal would have used the time to mitigate fraud and risk, using the period to run checks. Over time, it has amassed a large trove of data to start predicting patterns of behavior on the platform and it’s using more of that to speed up the process of assessing transactions.

Notably, PayPal also backed and eventually acquired a startup in June, Simility, which is a specialist in AI-based fraud and risk management. The two companies did not specify at the time how PayPal would be using Simility’s technology, but today’s launch of FundsNow could be one hint of where that tech has ended up.

Marketplaces — which will be one of the primary places where FundsNow will come into its own on the platform — account for some of the highest volumes of transactions for PayPal. Once a part of eBay, but more recently spun off into an independent company, Ready said that PayPal still is the biggest payment processor on eBay, although eBay only accounts for about 12 percent of all of PayPal’s transactions globally.

U.S. tech companies continue to be the most active acquirers in the world, says a new report from Crunchbase and Mind the Bridge. 

The pair crunched data on 22,000 startup exits since 2010, recording about 4,200 so far this year. U.S. companies, though less active this year than last, have acquired approximately 2x more startups than their European counterparts.

Overall, 2018 is a flat year for M&A activity, despite a record-setting 2017. 

Here are a few key takeaways from the report, which you can read in full here.

• There was a slight decrease in activity in the U.S., but Europe has really pulled back. European companies have completed 11 percent fewer M&A deals YoY. 
• U.S. and European companies continue to make up the bulk of M&A deals. More than three-quarters of the transactions and the money spent involved startups from North America and Europe.
• Twenty-two of the top 30 world acquirers are from the U.S., which remains the most active acquirer of European startups, though Europe is closing the gap.
• Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are the world’s most active acquirers.
• The most active European acquirer is Paris-based Publicis Groupe, which is 20th on the list of top global acquirers. That’s a step up from last year, when the most active European acquirer was Germany’s SAP — 33rd on the list.
• European companies are increasingly buying more of their European counterparts. This year, 81 percent of European acquisitions were domestic versus 75 percent last year.
• Of the startups that exited, 55 percent were between five and 15 years old and had raised between $10 million and $100 million.

 

Anaxi‘s mission is to bring more transparency to the software development process. The tool, which is now live for iOS, with web and Android versions planned for the near future, connects to GitHub to give you actionable insights about the state of your projects and manage your projects and issues. Support for Atlassian’s Jira is also in the works.

The new company was founded by former Apple engineering manager and Docker EVP of product development Marc Verstaen and former CodinGame CEO John Lafleur. Unsurprisingly, this new tool is all about fixing the issues these two have seen in their daily lives as developers.

“I’ve been doing software for 40 years,” Verstaen told me.” And every time is the same. You start with a small team and it’s fine. Then you grow and you don’t know what’s going on. It’s a black box.” While the rest of the business world now focuses on data and analytics, software development never quite reached that point. Verstaen argues that this was acceptable until 10 or 15 years ago because only software companies were doing software. But now that every company is becoming a software company, that’s not acceptable anymore.

Using Anaxi, you can easily see all issue reports and pull requests from your GitHub repositories, both public and private. But you also get visual status indicators that tell you when a project has too many blockers, for example, as well as the ability to define your own labels. You also can define due dates for issues.

One interesting aspect of Anaxi is that it doesn’t store all of this information on your phone or on a proprietary server. Instead, it only caches as little information as necessary (including your handles) and then pulls the rest of the information from GitHub as needed. That cache is encrypted on the phone, but for the most part, Anaxi simply relies on the GitHub API to pull in data when needed. There’s a bit of a trade-off here in terms of speed, but Verstaen noted that this also means you always get the most recent data and that GitHub’s API is quite fast and easy to work with.

The service is currently available for free. The company plans to introduce pricing plans in the future, with prices based on the number of developers that use the product inside a company.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has granted AliveCor the designation of “breakthrough device” for its ability to detect a rare but dangerous blood condition called hyperkalemia without taking any blood from the patient.

Hyperkalemia is a medical term describing elevated potassium levels in the blood and is usually found in those with kidney disease. The correct amount of potassium is critical for the function of nerve and muscles in the body, including your heart muscle. A blood potassium level higher than 6.0 mmol/L can be dangerous and usually requires immediate treatment, according to the Mayo Clinic.

A surprising 31 million people in the U.S. suffer from chronic kidney conditions leading to potentially elevated levels of potassium. Nearly 500,000 of those with the condition are on dialysis as their kidneys are no longer able to function.

AliveCor is able to detect elevated levels of potassium in the blood using the company’s specifically trained deep neural network and data from its electrocardiograms (ECG) technology, similar to those captured by AliveCor’s KardiaMobile and KardiaBand devices.

The new designation means the FDA will begin to fast-track the technology, enabling patients with kidney disease to use AliveCor for home-based detection of elevated potassium levels.

AliveCor was cleared late last year by the FDA to use its KardiaBand technology as a medical device for the Apple Watch to detect abnormal hearth rhythm. Allowing kidney and heart patients to use this technology at home would potentially save lives by detecting and warning them that something is wrong before heading into the doctor’s office to get checked.

“We are gratified that the artificial intelligence work we’re doing at AliveCor has been deemed so meaningful that it has achieved FDA ‘Breakthrough Device’ status,” AliveCor CEO Vic Gundotra said in a statement. “We view it as a key milestone in our corporate history and look forward to the further development of our non-invasive Hyperkalemia detection tools.”