Open up your mind and say, ahh...

In September, Aviary launched a free suite of photo-editing tools that could be embedded in any iPhone or Android app, enabling developers to transform their apps essentially into mini-mobile-Photoshops. Today, the New York-based startup unveiled the second version of its software development kit, or SDK, complete with new auto-enhance tools, filters, stickers, a fresh redesign–not to mention plans for monetization.

When Aviary first took off years ago, however, it looked nothing like the democratized photo-editing service of today. Aviary originally launched as a Flash-based web editor, but after a prescient pivot, the changes have paid off: Aviary is now growing unique users by more than 50% each month, and its tools are helping to edit more than 10 million photos per month across 300 mobile and web partners. “Probably the most difficult thing in the world was pivoting,” says CEO Avi Muchnick. “We had growth, and we had a rabid, loyal audience. If you switch your direction, you might lose the value you’ve already created.”

Aviary’s new SDK is beneficial for both users and developers. For consumers, Aviary’s embeddable tools will allow them to add myriad upgrades to their photos: effects, cropping, rotating, sharpening and blurring, redeye reduction, teeth whitening and blemish removal, adjustment of color, saturation, and contrast, as well as the ability to add stickers and draw on top of images. For developers, it takes only minutes to bake this functionality into their apps, with a fully customizable UI. Aviary partners now include startups ranging from Pixable to Picplz to Pic Stitch.

Last year, “pivoting” became one of the biggest buzzwords in Silicon Valley. It seemed every startup was performing near overnight (miracle) product pivots to find success. But it wasn’t until many of these entrepreneurs smacked into a dead end that they changed direction–Instagram, for example, started as a very different app called Burbn, which dealt with game mechanics and the concept of future check-ins, before cofounder Kevin Systrom realized the power of one-click filters.

But for Muchnick and team, the original Aviary Flash-based web editor was seeing strong growth, and boasted more than a million users. “The faster you fail at something, the easier it is to just pick up and do something new,” Muchnick says. “But the fact that we had this huge amount of traffic forced us not to pivot as quickly. When you are in this limbo zone, where you actually have some traction, and you’re waiting to see if it’s going to get better and better, you are really screwing yourself over.”

It’s a longstanding problem for startups and large corporate giants–an issue covered in depth in books such as The Innovator’s Dilemma and Only the Paranoid Survive. When is the right time to pivot before it’s too late? For Foursquare-competitor Gowalla, which, like Aviary, was seeing jumps in its user base, the pivot was almost an instance of too little, too late, despite the fact it had millions of users. “It wasn’t enough–we were never seeing this hockey stick-like growth you need in a startup,” Muchnick says of Aviary’s original user base. “We went into the photo-editing business with the assumption our target audience was millions of people because Photoshop had tremendous usage and everyone likes to edit their own photos. But we realized we weren’t hitting that consumer market, and we never would with our existing tools.”

The next step, he says, is figuring out the proper time to implement that pivot. For a company like Netflix, which smartly saw the trend that its future was in digital and not with DVDs, the prescient pivot perhaps came too soon (or was poorly communicated to consumers), with subscriber complaints creating a PR nightmare for the company after it decided to split the DVD-by-mail business into Qwikster. (“Facebook is probably the only company I’ve ever seen get away with drastic changes and people have to go along with it because they have no choice,” Muchnick says. “That’s also one of the benefits of being a free product–Netflix doesn’t have that luxury.”)

But for Aviary, its decision to pivot was not only a result of its user base but of technology: After the iPhone came out, the team realized the days of Flash were numbered. By creating a free SDK that developers could add to their own smartphone apps, Muchnick realized it was a better way to bring “the service to the masses.” Soon, it plans to sell premium effects packs and themes, as well as offer brands the chance to create premium content.

The pivot, Muchnick says, couldn’t have come soon enough.

“I probably could’ve done it in the course of a day if I was a better CEO, but when you have a loyal user base and investors that have invested in your product, you can get scared to pivot,” he says. “We took things slower than we probably should have. If we’re growing like crazy now, where would we have been if we started a year earlier?”

Many of us have had the experience–often, just as we were about to give up on humanity–of having a lost wallet or cell phone returned to us by a perfect stranger. It’s the hypothesis of Found in Town, a new Chicago startup, that these moments of unexpected human goodness would be much more frequent if only technology were to lend a helping hand. Found in Town essentially brings the lost-and-found box and puts it on the web.

“I think enough people have been through the pain of losing something valuable, like their keys or their phone, and acutely remember how frustrating and inconvenient it is recovering from the loss,” FiT’s founder and CEO Zach Haller tells Fast Company. (Haller says that a staggering 120,000 cell phones are lost, just in taxi cabs, just in Chicago, each year.) Often, someone finds that valuable thing, and simply doesn’t know how to get it back to you. As Haller likes to put it, “We make it easy and hassle-free to be a good Samaritan.”

The idea is ludicrously simple. Do you have a belonging so precious you can’t stand to lose it, but are you so absentminded that you almost certainly will? Register with Found in Town, and they’ll assign you your own serial number. They’ll send you a keychain and a bunch of stickers with this number, which you then affix to your wallet, your phone, your camera, and so on (actually, there is already a website devoted specifically to “orphan cameras“).

Then you lose your precious thing, of course. But then something beautiful happens. A stranger finds your precious thing, follows the instructions on the sticker by logging on to Found in Town and plugging in your “FiT code.” Further streamlining things, the person who finds the lost item doesn’t have to take it home; he can leave instructions through the site, saying, for instance, that he found it at such-and-such bar and left it for safekeeping with the bartender. Voilà! An act of digital good Samaritanism has been effected.

And along the way, hopefully, Zach Haller and some other people have made a bit of money. (Though Haller doesn’t need to make a killing off this yet; for now this is more a hobby, on the side of his already more than full-time work as a paralegal and aerobics instructor.) Haller has opted for a series of partnerships with local businesses, to monetize his own. When you sign up, for instance, you get a key chain bearing the logo of a local bar or restaurant you’d like to affiliate with. Businesses “also have the option of emailing registered FiT users to invite them to participate in exclusive deals, discounts and incentives on site, creating a unique digital loyalty program,” claims Found in Town. Though FiT is decidedly Chicago-centric for now–it has four participating businesses there currently–it has plans to expand to what Haller calls “other social media-forward restaurants and bars” throughout the country. FiT doesn’t have outside investment yet; Haller says he’s finalizing an investor presentation.

The idea for the business came, as so many do, because the founder had a need for it himself: “I had lost my keys one day,” Haller tells Fast Company, “and in my frustrated panic of trying to find them, I felt a bit indignant that even if someone found them on the sidewalk and wanted to return them, they’d have no idea they were mine. At first I chose to just write my cell phone number on a plastic keychain on my keys, and that act evolved into what would become Found in Town.”

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Image: Flickr user MSVG

The Japanese airline All Nippon Airways has been flying the first passenger carrying Boeing 787s for about two and a half months now. But so far all of the flights have been short, domestic routes (with the exception of the ceremonial first passenger flight to Hong Kong). That should change later this month as ANA plans to begin flying to Frankfurt, Germany, giving the 787 a chance to stretch its long range legs for the first time with paying passengers.

In the first few months, a pair of 787s did most of the work on the Japanese routes between Tokyo and Hiroshima or Okayama. A third 787 was delivered just before the end of 2011 and in the new year two more have been added to the ANA 787 fleet.

With the limited data from just a few planes and short routes, the new composite airliner has not encountered any major setbacks in service. According to Flightglobal, the ANA 787s dispatch reliability rate stands at 96.3 percent. This is close to the airlines overall dispatch reliability rate of 96.5 percent. According to Boeing, the dispatch reliability rate for some of its other aircraft such as the 777 is over 99 percent.

These early figures might not be indicative of the overall reliability of the 787 so far as the dispatch reliability rate is highly variable between airlines and aircraft. Some airlines may consider a flight delayed for maintenance reasons if a seat cushion has to be replaced, and the flight leaves a few minutes late. Another airline may only count more serious mechanical issues that temporarily takes an airplane out of service.

The early reliability rate of the 787 will of course change as more enter service and different routes are flown.

All Nippon Airways recently began service to Beijing, and is scheduled to begin service to Germany on January 20. The first routes to the United States are expected to begin later in the spring with flights to Seattle and San Jose.

Photo: All Nippon Airways