Category: Tech news

This adapter connects an iPhone to spotting scopes or binoculars, turning your smartphone camera into a mega-zoom.

It looks like Twitter #Music has gotten a couple of improvements on the web — specifically to its individual artist profiles.

Previously, the artist page just pointed to the other artists that they were following. So the profile page for Fun., for example, pointed to the other musicians followed by Fun. on Twitter. (Clearly I’m writing this post to include as much #random punctuation. as possible.) Now it also includes a list of Fun.’s most tweeted tracks and links to artists who are similar.

These aren’t huge changes, but they do make the profile page more useful, both for discovering music by a given artist (if you click on a “most tweeted” track in a profile, an iTunes preview of the song will start playing) and for finding other artists you might like. I’m guessing that the various charts of trending music are still going to be the site’s main discovery mechanism, but now, at least, when you go from a chart to an artist page, it’s a little more interesting.

It looks like the changes are only live on the website currently, not on the mobile app. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed that the new features are live on the web for everyone, but she declined to say if and when they would be added to the app. (This suggests that we may want to keep an eye on the website for new Twitter #Music features before they hit mobile.)

By the way, Twitter #Music was in the news earlier this week because it’s going to have its own station within Apple’s just-announced iTunes Radio service.

Google says it’s seeing a massive increase in email-based phishing campaigns that originate within Iran and target Iranian users. These attacks, Google says, started about three weeks ago and the company believes that they are politically motivated. Iran’s next election is scheduled for Friday and this “significant jump” in phishing activity in the region started about three weeks ago.

Google says the campaign targets the accounts of “tens of thousands” of Iranian users and the group behind it appears to be the same that also targeted Iranian users in September 2011. Back in 2011, the company told all of its users in Iran to ensure that their accounts weren’t compromised after hackers compromised the Dutch SSL certificate authority DigiNotar.

As Google notes, though, this time the attack is far simpler and just sends users to a fake Google sign-in page in order to steal usernames and passwords. What exactly the attackers planned to do with this information remains unclear.

There have been some reports that access to Gmail is currently disrupted from Iran, though it’s not clear that this is indeed the case. Iran does, however, have a history of blocking Google services like Gmail and YouTube, so it wouldn’t come as a major surprise if the country shut down access to Google’s services ahead of this election.

Obviously MySpace has very few friends left to alienate – Tom has long since moved on – but that hasn’t stopped it annoying the hell out of its few remaining fans by forcing through an update to its shiny new music discovery platform that’s swallowed their old blog content, with no guarantee it’s ever going to be retrievable. Oh but users are being told to vote on the idea of getting their deleted stuff back. I mean WTF?

We’ve asked MySpace exactly WTF is going on and will update this post when/if they reply.

The Justin Timberlake-backed former Prom Queen of social has been dangling the ‘new MySpace‘ since last September, opening it up as a beta in January but offering a parallel sign-in option where users could still click through to ‘classic MySpace’ if they preferred. And let’s face it most of MySpace’s few remaining hangers on were very likely to have preferred the old world order, since that’s where they could peruse the personal content they had posted on the site.

Well MySpace has now shut the door on the past and accelerated ahead into its shiny — or rather space-y — social music discovery future. But in its rush to fulfil JT’s vision of tech brand rebirth it’s managed to miss the fact that all the old clutter lying around the place was the only thing giving it any character. You know, those blog entries that angsty teens wrote back in anger in 2005. Where are they now? Gone is where. Vanished. Disappeared*. Replaced by Pinterest-esque notice board spaces urging users to DISCOVER MORE and CONNECT TO MORE… (Subtext: Srsly, won’t SOMEONE please just start CLICKING. Someone? Anyone?)

In case you’re wondering whether anyone cares that MySpace ‘classic’ has been erased from existence. Or rather whether MySpace still has any users left to notice/care about this departure, well yes actually. More because people care about their own pasts, than about a past-it social network of course. But regardless of the reason, MySpace has committed the cardinal sin of burning the folk who cared the most. Not classy, not clever. And entirely avoidable: just warn existing users about what you plan to demolish in advance, and give them the time and tools to transfer their stuff. It’s not exactly tough to get right, yet MySpace has got it wrong wrong wrong.

Instead of warning the users now crying a river over their lost blog entries of its frankly dastardly plan to despatch blogs to the social scrap heap, MySpace appears to have assumed no one would care and just steamed ahead and flicked the switch. Assuming no one gives a damn about your old services doesn’t augur well for the future of your new services. What goes around… comes around, JT.

Not giving old users a grace period to retrieve their data before it was replaced with empty spaces containing Pinterest-esque urgings to start building multimedia collections is the sort of crime I can last recall Microsoft committing way back in 2007. When it took over Hotmail and decided to delete a decade’s worth of my emails just because I hadn’t logged into the account for a few months. Not cool doesn’t even begin to describe it. As with the MySpace classic blog holocaust these type of situations are entirely avoidable. And should be avoided — if you ever want users to trust you again.

At least in MySpace’s case it sounds as if they might not have actually deleted any blog data yet but rather just cut off access to it — perhaps so they can gauge how much people care and therefore whether it’s worth their while helping them migrate their stuff. Well, JT, on PR grounds alone, it’s worth it. And if you want any new MySpace users to consider trusting any stuff to your servers in future, it’s also worth it. Assuming you think new MySpace has a future. Rather than being, y’know, dead and gone.

MySpace’s explainer about its new world order notes that old MySpace friends (now rebranded as anodyne ‘Connections’ to fit with its new sanitised style) have been transferred over to new MySpace. Users can also transfer their photos and playlists manually using an import tool. (Shucks, you’re really spoiling them there!) But the list of what’s not been transferred is far longer — and includes the most sentimental stuff. The stuff clearly jangling up JT’s vibe…

What will not be available from my old profile?

We’re focused on building the best Myspace possible. And to us, that means helping you discover connect and share with others using the best tools available. Going forward we’re concentrating on building and maintaining the features that make those experience better. That means you won’t see a few products on the new site…

• Blogs
• Private Messages
• Videos
• Comments or Posts
• Custom background design
• Games

It’s a sign of the social times that text-based blogs, messages, posts and comments are being carted out and dumped on the scrap heap. If it’s not shiny, visual and multimedia it’s worthless, is what new MySpace says. Thing is, that characterful textual clutter it’s so keen to paper over may be the last remaining thing of value in the place.

Add to that, this is not the only time new MySpace has been trigger happy with the delete key. Its new groove was so keen to erase the past it also erased bands’ fan bases too. So really this is a reboot of a reboot of a reboot. So, yeah. Good luck with that.

*NB: MySpace users who had a public profile may be able to recover some data from the old site via Google’s cache — searching using: site:http://www.myspace.com/username/blog 

Microsoft is now offering multi-factor authentication for Windows Azure to allow enterprises to secure employee, partner and customer access to cloud applications.

According to the Azure blog, the capability will allow customers to enable the authentication capability for Windows Azure Active Directory (AD) that will identify and help secure access to Office 365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, Dynamics CRM Online and  other apps that are integrated with Windows Azure AD. According to the Azure blog, developers can also use the Active Authentication SDK to build multi-factor authentication into their custom applications and directories.

Here’s how it works. People sign in with their user names and passwords. They then open an app on their mobile device through an automated phone call or text message — the idea being that it will better identify the true user, prevent unauthorized access to data and applications in the cloud. That in turn will reduce the risk of a breach and enabling regulatory compliance.

Active Authentication is built on the Phone Factor service which Microsoft acquired last fall. There are different options for set up. A customer can add it their Windows Azure AD tenant and turn it on for users. They can also add the service to custom applications by adding a few lines of code. The service also offers automated enrollment.

Customers can choose to pay on a per user, per month basis or by the number of

• users enabled for multi-factor authentication each month.

Adding AD to Windows Azure has opened Microsoft customers up to a much deeper way for IT to manage the use of its cloud infrastructure. It centralizes permissions. With Active Authentication, an IT manager can have a bit more peace that the people logging in are actually the people who should be accessing the network.

Microsoft is by no means the first to offer multi-factor authentication for its IaaS. Amazon Web Services has multi-factor authentication. Google also offers two-factor authentication.

Airbnb has released the results of a new economic study in one of its major international markets. After a similar study conducted in San Francisco last year, Airbnb this time is profiling the effect that its peer-to-peer marketplace for housing accommodations has had on hosts and nearby businesses in Paris.

The study was put together through a combination of proprietary host and guest data, as well as survey results that it collected from users. It also takes into account economic impact data from French economic consulting firm Asterès.

As the company’s second-largest market, the study in Paris shows similar guest activity to San Francisco. In both cases, guests tended to stay in and spend money in neighborhoods that aren’t in the central hotel districts. Also, Airbnb guests tended to stay longer and spend more than hotel visitors.

Airbnb found that 93 percent of its users said they wanted to “live like a local” while visiting Paris, and 70 percent stayed in Airbnbs that were outside the main hotel districts of Paris. A significant number of Airbnb guests surveyed were visiting Paris for the first time — 34 percent. And nearly three-quarters of them said Airbnb made it more likely that they would return.

Just as in San Francisco, Airbnb’s visitors to Paris tend to stay longer and spend more over the course of their trip than hotel guests. Guests who stayed with Airbnb averaged more than five days per visit, compared to about 2.3 days spent by hotel guests.

While they save money on accommodations, however, those visitors end up spending significantly more during the day. The end result, according to the economic study, is that visitors spend about €865 per visit, compared to €439 for hotel guests. Visitors generally spent more at local businesses that aren’t in the typical tourist locations within the city. The Airbnb study estimates that 38 percent of guest dollars were spent in the neighborhood they were staying in.

In addition to data about guest behavior, Airbnb also released information about the economic impact the marketplace provides to hosts. It has more than 10,500 hosts in the city currently, with more than 80 percent renting out space in their primary residence. The average host there rents out his or her place for 3.8 nights and makes €297 per month, according to Airbnb.

While the company has seen tremendous growth in Paris over the last two years, the incumbent hotel industry has continued to go strong, with a nearly 80 percent occupancy and an average nightly rate of €164. That compares to the average €125 that Airbnb guests pay.

Photo Credit: Henry_Marion via Compfight cc

Google just launched Google App Engine 1.8.1 with a host of new features, most notable among them a long-awaited search API and push-to-deploy feature similar to pushing code to a Git repository.

The new features follow a busy Google I/O that witnessed the company showing its strongest push ever into the cloud services market. Until the announcements, Google had been quiet about Google Cloud Platform. But now with general availability, the team is pushing out new features weekly and  connecting different parts of the organization in a way it had not done before.

Today was similar with a number of new updates to Google App Engine:

Search API: About a year since the Search API release, Google has moved it to the preview stage — general availability. The Search API allows a developer to integrate Google-like searches over structured data such as plain text, HTML, atom, numbers, dates, and geographic locations. As we reported last week, Google will begin charging for operations and storage. Pricing details can be found here. Prices may change up to general availability.

Source Push-to-Deploy: App Engine now supports deployment of Python and PHP applications via the Git tool. The promise is that developers can deploy apps with the same ease as pushing to a git repository.

Google Cloud Storage Client Library: Google is improving access to Google Cloud Storage from App Engine through the preview release of the Cloud Storage Client Library. In its  blog post, Google says the client library contains much of the functionality available in the Files API but has stronger integrity guarantees and a better overall developer experience. There is some overlap so the Files API will be decommissioned in a future release. The Cloud Storage Client Library will be upgraded.

Task Queues: A popular request, developers can now quickly add tasks to any Task Queue without blocking, allowing a developer’s applications to process requests more efficiently.

Datastore: Google says there are two significant Google Cloud Datastore changes in this release. The team has changed the Datastore default auto ID policy to use scattered IDs. Also, the NDB library now supports ‘DISTINCT’ queries.

A fill list of features and bug fixes for 1.8.1 can be found in Google’s release notes.

First Amendment pioneer and current Republican U.S. Congressman Peter King thinks that journalists should be punished for publishing the leaked documents about the National Security Agency’s top-secret spying program. Unfazed by Anderson Coopers perfect jaw-line, Representative King said in a CNN interview:

“Actually, if they–if they knew that this was classified information–I think action should be taken, especially on something of this magnitude. I know that the whole issue of leaks has been gone into over the last month. I think something on this magnitude, there is an obligation, both moral but also legal, I believe, against a reporter disclosing something which would so severely compromise national security. As a practical matter, I–I guess it happened in the past several years, a number of reporters who have been prosecuted under us, so the answer is yes to your question.”

It should be noted that since the landmark 1971 case, The New York Times Co. vs. the United States, the Supreme Court has held that newspapers could not be punished for publishing leaks like the Pentagon Papers.

In fairness to King, he has been remarkably consistent with his outrage. In 2010, he thought prosecutors should go after both WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange and The Times for publishing the leaked cables.

The only person to likely be prosecuted is the whistleblower Edward Snowden, who was last seen in Hong Kong before disappearing.

Hublished is still in private beta, so details are sparse on what the new content distribution platform (which reportedly helps content producers market their work through a webinar, e-book, podcast marketplace/network) is up to. However, we do know that the company has received over $150k in funding before its forthcoming beta launch next month.

So where did this cash come from?

Well, interestingly enough, a solid chunk of the funding came from none other than Lawrence Lenihan. Many of you know him as a partner at FirstMark Capital, but to the Hublished founders, he was the NYU Professor in their entrepreneurial class entitled Ready, FIRE!, Aim.

We sat down with Lenihan, and Hublished co-founders Ben Borodach and Ryan Kahul to discuss the effect this class, and Lenihan, had on the trajectory of their as-yet-unlaunched startup.

The story goes like this: Part of the promise of Lenihan’s course was that the team who finished the Spring 2012 semester with an investible idea would walk away with the entirety of Lenihan’s NYU Professor’s salary, a cool $12,500. The rest of the $150k came along the way from undisclosed angels and family and friends.

Ryan Kahul, one of the Hublished co-founders, was in the class and participated in the competition with his co-founders from Rutgers.

Months passed, and it turns out that Hublished came in second. But Lenihan explains in his blog post that the first place team decided that they did not want to be irresponsible with the funding, and that they’re product wasn’t viable in the long term.

That said, Lenihan still made good on his promise and handed over the funding to Hublished, who has been raising since the idea’s inception in the summer of 2011.

Now, the company is revving up to a launch next month. Luckily, the co-founders sent us a little sneak peak screengrab of the platform in action.

Meanwhile, Lenihan has revealed that he won’t be teaching the same course next year, but that he does have some ideas floating around that still involve teaching and fostering entrepreneurial spirits, but that are more suited toward 2013 instead of 2008.

Google took swift action to ban Google Glass applications with facial recognition capabilities recently, following the launch of an API which would have allowed developers to build apps that could identify the faces of people who a Glass wearer encountered. Today, however, another company called Orbeus is launching its own face and scene detection API platform ReKognition for Glass, which sidesteps the privacy issues at hand, as it’s unable to detect someone’s identity.

Instead, ReKognition can tell if something is a face or not, or if it’s male or female, it can detect emotion, and to some extent, it can even tell how beautiful someone is. (On that latter point, the API has been trained somewhat subjectively by feeding it a series of celebrity photos to define the universal standard of beauty. Those who prefer a specific look may disagree.)

Though the company can’t reveal its customers by name due to privacy agreements, one is an Asia dating site which checks to verify that users’ profile photos are of men and women, as opposed to other things like a dog or flower, for example. The site also uses the beauty and gender identification capabilities to help it with its own matchmaking algorithms.

Another use case for ReKognition comes from the advertising industry, where a small handful of customers have been building prototype digital, interactive signage which adapts the ad displayed to the customer looking at it. Yes, it’s very “Minority Report” – by knowing the viewer’s gender and age range, these real-world ads can be more narrowly and granularly targeted, as they are online.

Now, with ReKognition for Glass (or ReKoGlass, as it’s being called), the company is making its computer vision capabilities available to those building apps for Google’s new wearable technology.

“Our API actually offers different face detection, face reading and scene understanding, so we’re not just a facial recognition company,” says Orbeus co-founder and CEO Ning Xu, explaining that ReKognition doesn’t violate Google’s updated Glass policies. “But even without facial recognition, we can do a lot of things with your face, without revealing your identity.”

The company’s website offers some ideas, like taking attendance in the classroom or determining how many in an audience are male or female, for example. Of course, for many of these use cases, it would be more practical if images could be processed and analyzed in real-time. This is not something that’s possible today with Glass, which doesn’t yet permit direct developer access to the camera, however.

But Xu thinks that will change in time. “I believe – and our team believes – this is a temporary issue, and they’re definitely going to improve that part on Google’s side,” he says. “That’s what we’re offering this API now.”

The Mountain View-based startup was founded by former Bostonians including Xu, as well as Meng Wang and Tianqiang Liu. The team took the company through Chicago’s Excelerate Labs (now TechStars Chicago) before relocating to Google’s backyard. Orbeus launched its API to the public last August, and has grown its customer base to over 1,000, a small percentage of which are now paying. Today, Orbeus sees over 3 million API calls for its freemium product, which is priced affordably in order to encourage sign-ups, with 40,000 free API calls (500 per day) available for free.

Xu explains that in addition to its tiered service, the company also sells to enterprise customers, and is now in the process of closing a deal with a photo album provider who will use ReKognition to group photos by faces to make the process of building a photo book easier for end users.

As for how many will sign up to try ReKognition for Glass, he’s less sure.

The startup is currently in the process of closing on $1.1 million in seed funding in a round led by Zhen Partners Fund (a super angel fund from China), and CRCM Opportunity Fund (Farallon Capital’s spin-off fund). The round should be closed by Friday.

Interested Glass developers can now download the new ReKoGlass SDK here for free.

Yahoo has just quietly announced that they’ve acquired GhostBird Software, the creators of advanced iOS photography apps, KitCam and PhotoForge2.

Though details of the deal are still under wraps, Yahoo is explicitly saying that they acquired GhostBird for the sake of improving Flickr. Could this suggest that a more advanced Flickr app is on the way?

Prior to today’s acquisition, GhostBird had released three iOS photo apps: KitCam, PhotoForge, and PhotoForge 2. KitCam allowed for mobile photographers to shoot with a bunch of different “lenses” and “films” (read: filters), and to manually adjust settings like white balance and exposure. The PhotoForge series, meanwhile, focused on modifying photos after the fact, with image resizing, cropping, metadata editing, and the adjustment of advanced settings like curves and levels.

In an announcement on their website, GhostBird has disclosed that no further development will be done on either app, and they don’t intend to support new versions of iOS. Furthermore, according to GhostBird, once either app is gone from your phone, it’s gone for good:

Users who have previously purchased the app but don’t have them on their devices today will not be able to re-download past purchases. As of today, KitCam and PhotoForge2 are no longer available for download from the App Store.

This is a bit strange, as most apps that have been removed (or even banned) from the App Store can continue to be re-downloaded through iCloud by anyone who purchased it prior to its removal.

Curiously, the studio had gone a bit quiet in the past few months, going almost totally silent as of mid-March. After tweeting at least a few times a week for months before, the team’s last tweet before today’s announcement was on March 17. Meanwhile, both PhotoForge2 and KitCam stopped seeing updates at the end of March.

(Fun Fact: Before turning their focus to photography apps, GhostBird dabbled in games. Their one published game, a zombie infection simulator called The Raging Dead, became something of a zombie itself when its final update shipped in February 2010.)

ZenPayroll launched in December with $6.1 million from a group of new enterprise kingpins. Following the launch of a service for accountants in April, the Y Combinator startup today announced the capability to pay contractors through its platform.

The new service automates the process of paying contractors and doing the required filings with the Internal Revenue Service. With the new capability, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) covers the entire workforce.

With ZenPayroll, independent contractors can be paid through direct deposit and payments with reported at the end of the year on IRS Form 1099. Once a contractor is added, an employer can also record historical payments made outside of the software.

Contractor payments are available immediately through ZenPayroll and pricing is the same for both employees and contractors — $25 per company, plus $4 per employee or contractor, per month. When a company grows past 10 employees or contractors, the rate drops to $2 for each additional person

ZenPayroll will do the proper filing for the contractor workers. Zen Payroll will also make sure the contractor gets a copy for income tax reporting purposes.

There are more than 43 million contractors in the United States. Can you believe that? That’s one-third of the workforce. Most of the work to pay those people is done manually, said Co-Founder and CEO Joshua Reeves. And people make mistakes. Then the IRS fines them. No fun.

The traditional services like Paychex and ADP are just not flexible enough to pay contractors in the manner that ZenPayroll does. But a service like ZenPayroll makes automation inevitable across the entire back-office. Once a part of a process gets automated, it’s often the other parts that follow. We see it across the market. The human touch is great but the humanity can be too often lacking in old systems that treat the individual in a coarse, industrial way. Automation may seem scary, like some robotic sci-fi nightmare. But automation can often make life seem a bit more bearable as we just try to keep up to date and out of the crosshairs of the IRS.

Apple has just posted a lengthy, nearly 10 minute video (via 9to5Mac) about how apps built for its platform are used around the world to make changes that significantly impact people’s lives. It’s a very different approach from the typical Apple commercial, which is generally a short affair focusing on what apps are doing to add a little bit of levity or convenience to the average consumer’s life.

This is much more about big-picture issues, and profound impacts on a select few people that are truly life-changing. It’s actually thematically pretty similar to the company’s new “Our Signature” ad for television, but with a strong focus on actual case studies, instead of just on Apple’s guiding principles in building its products. And of course, it also highlights third-party developers specifically, offering some much-deserved attention to those who are keeping pockets of human culture alive, or building dramatic advances in medical tech, not just the ones who are making it easier for people to create and share grocery lists.

Apple had a great big belly laugh at the expense of near field communications (NFC) at its WWDC keynote this year, but it also quietly adopted a tech that has received an equal amount of general scorn (if not more): the QR code. Apple actually built a QR code reader into iOS 7 – yes, right into the OS – but in a way that makes clear its presence is more of a mildly unpleasant but useful tool in promoting its own tech, rather than anything to be truly upheld and encouraged.

The QR code reader in iOS 7 is built into Passbook: there’s now a new Scan Code feature built into the Passbook card that’s used to explain the overall service. Accessible with a single tap from the launch screen of Passbook, it loads right into a QR code scanner that takes advantage of the iPhone’s rear camera to spot the cubic barcodes in print, on the web or wherever they may be, and recognizes them immediately. But it’s what happens next that tells you Apple isn’t a thorough QR code convert.

Building a reader that treats all QR codes equally and executes whatever information they’re meant to convey would have been simple enough, but Apple didn’t want a general-purpose tool. That’s why the QR code reader in the Passbook app provides a very clear message about its purpose when you try to scan a code that doesn’t link to a Passbook pass, as you can see in the screenshot below sent along by a helpful tipster.

The purpose of the integration is obvious – Apple thinks this is a way to make it possible for users to quickly and easily add Passbook content to their library, and clearly wants to put as few barriers as possible in the way of getting users to do so. But the QR codes themselves are just a means to an end; the ultimate goal is to make sure that users start adopting and using Passbook more, and QR codes are just a conduit. In fact, if anything, locking down the QR codes to apply strictly to Passbook passes does more to harm the case of using them as a generally applicable tech than anything, since a huge number of iOS users are likely going to associate QR strictly with Passbook and possibly even get frustrated at ones that don’t provide access to that specific kind of content.

Some might take this as a sign that Apple could build QR code support into the main iOS camera app, or let it stand alone, but don’t count on that. Apple is cherry-picking a tech that suits its purposes, and when there’s a better way or it’s no longer needed to help Passbook build momentum, expect it to be discarded. At best, this won’t make QR codes happen – it’ll render them permanently subservient to Passbook, as a kind of sub-brand tech.

Among his last advice he had for me, and for all of you, was to never ask what he would do. “Just do what’s right.”

That’s what Tim Cook told the audience of Apple employees at the memorial for Steve Jobs, following his passing in 2011. Now, nearly two years later, we’re starting to see that plan being executed.

This year’s WWDC keynote was fascinating. To me, it felt like the first true post-Jobs keynote. Sure, Jobs hasn’t been with us for the past few Apple events, including last year’s WWDC. But his legacy loomed large over each of those events. This week was different.

Tim Cook seemed different. Phil Schiller seemed different. Craig Federighi seemed different. Eddy Cue seemed different. They all seemed… Comfortable. Relaxed. Confident.

And that was probably the most surprising thing. Everyone seemed cool and collected even though you’d think they’d be scared shitless. After all, they were unveiling not just an updated iOS, but a completely revamped iOS. They were effectively performing a brain transplant on the company’s most important products, the iPhone and the iPad. And they were doing it live, on stage.

The reaction could have been anything. Apple had done such a good job of keeping the changes under wraps, that basically no one outside the company knew what was coming. There could have been a developer revolt. There could have been boos!

Instead, the reaction of the audience was overwhelmingly positive. And despite some design quibbles, the reaction on the social streams seemed to be a collective “finally”.

But I’m underselling how risky this was (and perhaps still is). Six months ago, Tim Cook made his biggest “just do what’s right” call when he relieved iOS chief Scott Forstall of his duties. He then handed the reigns of arguably the most important element of the company — remember that iOS is also likely the key to the company’s future with the presumed iWatch and future Apple Television products — to Federighi and Jony Ive.

They had six months to ship.

Somehow, they did it. That’s why you saw Cook beaming after the iOS 7 unveiling yesterday as he motioned towards and applauded Ive, while also praising Federighi and the entire iOS team. Cook did not do what Jobs would have done. He did what was right.

It was a huge gamble. Ive, arguably the most famous designer in the world, had no experience with software design. Federighi, who was elevated to the head of OS X after Bertrand Serlet’s retirement in 2011, had no experience with mobile software. Both were doubling their workloads.

And Cook, knowing the roadmap, knew in December that Apple was about to head into their longest drought of major product launches in recent memory. iOS 7 would be one of the first butterflies out of the cocoon. But what if it turned out to be a moth?

It sure looks like iOS 7 will be a beautiful butterfly when it officially launches to the public in the fall alongside the next iPhone. You have to laugh at some of the design quibbles. Again, they did this whole thing in six months! That’s remarkable. The next three months will be all about polish. It will get there.

What we saw yesterday was Apple saying goodbye to Steve Jobs in the way that he wanted — by not doing what he would have done, but by doing what they collectively thought was right. Cook is not Jobs. He is not going to rule over Apple with the same iron fist. He’s going to delegate. He’s going to allow his team to flourish.

Federighi got to inject his love of surfing. Cue got to inject his love of cars. Schiller got to get a great zinger in there. Ive got to get rid of that green felt and rich Corinthian leather. At the same time, Cook managed to find the single theme to unify them all: home.

OS X will now be named after California landmarks. The Mac Pro will now be assembled in the USA. “Design in California” is the heir apparent to “Think Different”.

“This is our signature. And it means everything.“

In October 2011, shortly after Jobs’ passing, I wrote that Apple would not face their first true post-Jobs test until the first truly new product was released. In a way, Apple tricked me. I didn’t expect iOS to be so overhauled before that new product line came. And I think this risky maneuver will allow the company to go into the next new product launch with far more confidence.

Mavericks, indeed.

[image via iRockstar]