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Five-year-old startup Aviary made headlines Monday after Twitter unleashed its new photo filters and effects. Aviary provides the mobile-software development kit that Twitter uses to add photo-editing tools to its Android and iPhone apps.

Just minutes before Aviary CEO Avi Muchnick left his New York City office Monday night to celebrate (see photo of him and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey below), he gave Mashable insight into the news, which coincidentally came on the heels of Instagram introducing new tools, and disabling support for Twitter cards.

“We’ve been working with Twitter for a few months,” says Muchnick, who wouldn’t elaborate on whether recent Instagram developments influenced the timing of Twitter‘s unveiling. “We’ve kept things moving as it was always supposed to be moving.”

When asked whether Instagram swayed Twitter’s timing, a Twitter spokesperson told us, “No, we’ve been working with Aviary for months to introduce ways to edit and refine your photos, right from Twitter.”

Aviary, whose staff has grown to 21 employees since 2007, prepared for Monday’s news by tweaking a statistic on its website, updating the number of photos edited in Aviary to 2 billion.

Aviary also has 25 million active monthly users, and partners with 2,500 applications such as Flickr, Yahoo Mail, Imgur, Twitpic, Shopify, RockMelt and MailChimp.

“Our mission is to democratize creativity, so everyone can make photos look great,” Muchnick says. “For Twitter, we enhance the photos people tweet.”

Aviary started as a web-based tool before launching its photo-effects API last May, and then its mobile-software development kit last September. Those developments have helped Aviary rope in thousands of partners, which now include Twitter.

Aviary also released a Facebook app in January; it allows users to edit Facebook photos.

Meanwhile on Monday night, this happened:

Mashable toured Aviary’s NYC office earlier this year. Here’s a look back at the startup’s home, where “tiny fake birds peek out from fake shrubbery and perch on top of pipes.”

Image via screenshot from Twitter’s video announcement

Topics: apps-and-software, Apps and Software, Aviary, Hot Story, instagram, mobile, photography, Social Media, Startups, Tech, Twitter

I woke up thinking about labels this morning. I thought about how strange they are, how limiting. And I realized yet again that despite some people’s disdain for the concept of personal branding, we need to be mindful of what others label us.

The early days and what sparked me

When I got into the online world way back in the 80s, it was for a simple reason: the people around me were into talking about the Red Sox and cars, and I was into Batman and Star Wars. Folks on those first bulletin board services and later on platforms like AOL and Prodigy could align by interest instead of geography, and that was cool to me. Before that point, we were mostly forced into geography-centric, work-centric, or family-centric social groups.

Years later, when I got into blogging in 1998, it was because the tools let me express my interests and gave me an audience (pitifully small for a long while) for my writing. I didn’t need permission to publish. I just put my work out there for people to see. Eventually, I got the hang of it, and connected with others who wrote work that I found personally interesting. Instead of having to stay slave to whatever the tastes of mainstream publishers were at the time, I could find someone writing something of interest via the web.

Listening to podcasts brought about a huge realization that knowledge was power. I often tell the story about hearing information from then-CTO of Sun Microsystems Jonathan Schwartz that led to a significant savings on a purchase my company was making. Getting immersed in that world the first time led me to cofound PodCamp, and it’s what led me back to podcasting most recently with my new show.

Six years ago, when I joined Twitter, it felt like a super fast personal news service. I remember the moment that I knew it was valuable. I was at the CES event in Las Vegas, and Apple was having a big event (Macworld, I think) in California. I was roaming the floor with Jeff Pulver and he asked if maybe we should hop a plane to see what Apple was doing. I said, “We don’t have to: I’ve got all the news right here in real time.”

I wasn’t all that fussy on Instagram when it game out. I used to tease people who used it, saying that it’s a tool to turn people’s lame life experiences into a bunch of fake album covers (for those of you under a certain age, albums are these weird square cardboard covers and vinyl discs that transferred music to our homes in the age before Spotify). I now think that if Facebook hadn’t bought it, Instagram would have proven a huge threat to Zuckerberg and company. Why? Because it allows people to share personal experiences in a very simple way. There’s not a lot to the product, and that’s why it’s exciting. Oh, and I use it all the time now.

I’m not a social media guy

Having a lot of domain knowledge about these social media tools has labeled me a social media guy. I understand that. I’ve been a cheerleader for this or that tool for quite a long time. But the truth is, the tools are just that. They’re interesting insofar as how they can deliver value or not. In and of themselves, I’m not all that interested in them.

When I am thinking about business, I’m rarely thinking, “How can I help a company better use Pinterest?” Instead, my thoughts are more tuned to, “This business wants more buyers. How do I facilitate that?” Quite often, I use the social tools to bring some kind of benefit to a company (or an individual), but they’re not a default.

My favorite social media right now? Email. I am in love with my newsletter experience, and how the interactions with people can be so personal and intimate and customized. Email’s been around for decades. See?

I’m a business designer

In reworking what Human Business Works does for the world, we decided to focus on publishing and educating around a set of core concepts that we feel will help professionals do the work they want, only better. Business design is holistic. I don’t help people with marketing. I help them with improving their business. Should marketing be the missing piece, I’ll work on that. Should people need more exposure, we talk about how to get it. Should they need sales (usually a “yes”), we walk through ways to improve that process. Customer service? My favorite.

But labels are used whether or not you want them

But the labels are for other people any how. One realization I had early in business is that if you don’t have clear and obvious interface points, people don’t know how to interact with you. If I say I help with marketing, sales, and service, then people understand where to slot me. But there’s always a slotting. It’s why I get to keynote the annual PRSA conference for PR professionals *and* an annual Coldwell Banker conference for real estate professionals *and* events for the marketers of the world. Because what I have to share relates to humans in all aspects of business, and not just one.

A Recipe for Labeling Yourself

Realize this before I give you the ingredients: no matter what you call yourself, what others perceive will be different. Just the same, you should do what you can. If you don’t help people understand what you represent, others will fill in their own blanks.

Ingredients

• Simple words (fewer syllables)
• Customer-facing explanation
• Ties back to “the real world”
• Repetition
• A body of work

Preparation

In working out what HBW and I do for people, I settled on the term “business design.” The words are easy enough, and people can grasp what I mean when I put them together. Choose simple words to explain what you do, even if it’s tricky. My former CTO, Bill Wessman, used to introduce himself at client meetings like this: “I’m Bill. Tech” He’d say almost nothing else. Those who needed to know who he was knew what he did, and those who just needed him in a bucket knew he wasn’t the finance guy, the CEO, or the sales guy.

Sometimes, people have incredibly flowery labels for what they do, but not such that people understand how they can interact with you. I’ve talked to “chief dreamers” and many “divas” and it’s hard to understand what they intended to do for me. “Professional declutterer” is understandable. “Interpreter” would be a swell name for a pastor, right? (Though they do a bit more than that.) Make the way you talk about yourself define the value others would get from working with you.

If you go too far afield, people won’t know how to engage your services. Tie your description back to a real world interface. Business design focuses on sales, marketing, and service elements of a business. I won’t be as helpful for the CIO (though I’ve worked with a few). Make sure this is clear in how you talk about yourself and how your website talks about you.

They say repetition is reputation. True that. And the phrase means “what you do is what people will know you for.” I agree. But I also mean to say that the more times I say “business designer,” the less people will call me social media guy.

At the end of it all, if you’re not doing what you say you do, no one cares. I called myself an author for decades before I had published a proper book, and years before I even wrote regularly. I loved the label more than I loved the work. Thankfully, that has changed. But what you do is what you are. I meet lots of people who are the “Dream Lifestyle” guy, and who live in a one-bedroom in Scranton. No matter what you say you are, you are what you do most.

Identity Matters More to Us Than to Them

At the end of it all, it doesn’t matter who you are to the person you serve. What matters is that they derive a benefit from their experience with you. That’s what they want. What attracts them to you in the beginning isn’t what will land the deal to keep you coming back. Results are what bring people back.

But don’t shrug off the work of being clear about who you are and what you stand for, because it matters. Those labels can limit others’ perspective of you, and that limits your opportunities. Be vigilant, and you’ll find your place.

A huge number of components that are allegedly part of Apple’s upcoming new iPhone have surfaced via Apple’s Asian supplier chain–seemingly many more than we’ve seen for an unreleased iPhone. With so many pieces available from different sources, and all of them connecting together so well, it’s pretty certain that they’re genuine.

So what can we learn? It’s pretty familiar–an evolution of the incredibly densely populated iPhone motherboard. There’s some chatter about Apple using the newly approved nano-SIM card, but since the card is technologically the same as every other SIM it’s not an interesting development.

Then there’s talk of modified antenna connections offering proof that the next iPhone will be 4G. Makes sense that 4G will be present–it’s not clear why the antenna changes are present since they may even point to the presence of NFC antennas.

The big take-away from these leaks is that Apple’s phone is definitely en route and that despite Tim Cook’s promise of even tighter Apple security, the information is still leaking out.

The date has been rumored since July, but now multiple sources (or possibly two different outlets relying on the same source) are pinning the launch date for the next iPhone, as well as the iPad mini, for September 12. Pre-orders would begin that day, with the U.S. release for later that month (September 21) and an international rollout in October.

We’ve heard for a while that the new iPhone will be the first to use a newly designed dock connector, finally ditching the clunky, large iPod socket. Now there are photos of what’s said to be the new connector, which sports eight parallel pins inside a very slender metal tine that itself acts as the ninth pin (probably the voltage ground point). There’s a mirror set of connections on the other side, which could indicate 17 pins in total–nearly tallying with early rumors about a 19-pin version.

But what’s really going on is that the plug can be inserted either way up, finally ending the awkward scrabble we all have to do to get the current plugs the right way up or even to get a micro USB socket inserted correctly–the new charger standard used on rival phones like the Galaxy S II. Apple’s basically putting good user-friendly design ahead of other considerations.

The new iPhone’s back shell seems to be milled out of a single piece of metal, including the short bosses that are dotted across it so that the motherboard, battery and other pieces can be screwed down. The shell’s design, strength and the thinner screen (as suggested by older rumors) means the phone may be up to a third thinner than the iPhone 4S.

It’s a relatively minor detail, but what Apple’s trying to do is make the phone feel thinner and smaller than earlier versions, though it’s actually taller to fit in the larger 4-inch screen.

We’ve been wondering when Apple will redesign its iMac, MacBook Pro, and Mac Pro computers, building in lessons from its MacBook Air line.

Now there’s evidence, from code fragments inside the new Mountain Lion OS X release, that updates for these machines are coming. They may even lack optical drives, as we’ve long expected. A 13-inch Retina Pro model is even on the cards.

Is Apple Going To Release Everything At Once?

Some murmuring among Apple suppliers suggests that Apple may be about to proceed with the largest launch in history. The theory is that Apple will reveal the new iPhone alongside a new iPad Mini and a refreshed iPad design that has the new dock connector and a few other improvements. A new iPod touch may arrive too, and perhaps even the updated Macs.

We’re not sure Apple would try this. It would leave the company’s unreleased product locker looking pretty bare–not good for keeping it in the limelight. Releasing a few of the products at once makes more sense–we’re guessing the new iPhone, iPod touch, and perhaps the iPad Mini (if it actually exists). The “refreshed” iPad will come early 2013 alongside the new version of the full-size tablet, and the new Macs could get a quiet release in the months at the end of this year.

Image: Flickr user twicepix

Virgin Galactic is already busily spearheading a whole new industry in space tourism with SpaceShipTwo. But today at the Farnborough airshow the British company revealed it’s also ready to disrupt a long-standing industry and take it in wholly new directions: It’s formally unveiled LauncherOne, a tiny cost-effective rocket system to put small satellites into low Earth orbit. It could change your life sooner than you think. Really.

LauncherOne leverages the expertise that Virgin Galactic has been building up with its space tourism business, and stands on the innovations made by Scaled Composites when it launched SpaceShipOne on its historic XPrize-winning flight. That’s because it uses exactly the same air-launched model for the rocket, with a carrier aircraft lifting the spacecraft high into the atmosphere before dropping it and letting its engines fire it into space. LauncherOne actually employs the same WhiteKnightTwo launch aircraft used for the space tourism flights–which is a proven, existing airframe that instantly reduces costs.

By flying like this, LauncherOne doesn’t need a big, expensive first stage rocket loaded with fuel to get it off the ground. Instead itr requires just two boost stages to take it from launch into space, and then into orbit. This simplifies the avionics and engineering needed to make the thing fly, lowering the cost and reducing the chances that things can go wrong. Ground-launched rockets have all sorts of complex range-safety matters to deal with, involving clearing airspace and, sometimes, the sea in the general launch trajectory because the rocket might fail during flight. Because LauncherOne is launched from an aircraft, it can avoid many of these logistical issues, and it also allows for payloads to be more easily put into unusual orbits–the aircraft simply has to point it in a different launch direction.

The upshot of all of this cost-saving is that according to Virgin, a LauncherOne vehicle can put 500 pounds of payload into orbit for “below $10 million.” That works out cheaper than its likely biggest competitor Orbital’s Pegasus XL–another air-launched vehicle–and Virgin intends it to be able to reach the “world’s lowest prices” for launches.

And that’s just for single-satellite launch scenarios. There’s no reason that LauncherOne couldn’t be configured to release a swarm of low Earth orbit microsatellites in a single launch, and this is one of the most promising areas of space science right now.

In fact when revealing the vehicle’s parameters, Virgin boss Richard Branson even remarked that with LauncherOne, “nations, states, cities and even universities and schools will be able to launch dedicated satellites that will answer their diverse needs.” Satellite launches have nearly always been massively expensive, risky and fall within the purview of government-backed operations, or via defense companies, and even recent commercial space systems have been very expensive–until Virgin’s effort.

Right there is the part where your life will be affected, although it’s difficult to predict how much things will change and how fast. But to see what this could mean, imagine if a news organization like CNN stumped up the millions necessary to fly its own small imaging satellite–or possibly even a small fleet of them. When a global disaster occurs, or a breaking news story hits, CNN may then be able to deliver live or near-time satellite imaging of the event. (And they may even get their facts right.) Because Virgin is a private entity, it’s even possible that other startups may leverage its potential to do their own climate change science, or space-based observations of almost everything on Earth from traffic congestion in cities to tracking ships, or selling very real-time imagery to companies like Apple or Google to drive the “satellite view” that we’re all getting used to using for navigating around with our smartphones.

And lest you think this is all just pop science mumbo-jumbo, VG has already signed up enough launch partners for “several dozen” launches and aims to be commercially operating by 2016.

Image: Virgin Galactic

Bot vid: Darpa’s Robbie

One of the more interesting robotics programs that DARPA funds is the Autonomous Robotic Manipulation project, designed to produce robots that can perform relatively complex tasks without too much supervision (obvious military implications here). As revealed over at the Automaton blog, robot maker RE2 has a robot in this program, cheerfully dubbed Robbie. The strength of the robot’s design is in its grippers that approximate human hands. They have sensors so the machine even feels “touch” a little like we do.

Bot vid: Smart Tripod

The winner of this year’s Microsoft Robotics @Home competition is interesting: It’s a tripod on a mobile base that can follow its subjects around, using a Kinect sensor to navigate and detect the movements of its human subjects for control purposes. The tech can be used for, say, creating a low-budget movie’s tracking shots. The winner was Arthur Wait, who earned a check for $10,000.

Bot vid: Fukushimabot

The Future Robotics Technology Center in Japan has just demonstrated its new robot destined to help assess and perhaps clean up the nuclear mess at Japan’s tsunami-ravaged Fukushima nuclear site. Rosemary, as the machine is called, is roughly the size of a lawnmower and has unusual feet that swivel to navigate obstacles or crawl up a slope of greater than 60 degrees. Best of all it’s strong enough to carry gear weighing up to 60 kilos (approx. 132 lbs.), making it ideal for ferrying sensors, imaging units, and perhaps clean-up equipment into radiation-damaged zones.

Bot News

Robofish. This week a large yellow robot fish could be seen swimming in the ocean off the Spanish port of Gijon, taking part in free water tests of its systems. The five-foot, $31,000 European machine is crammed with sensors designed to detect pollutants that have leaked from vessels or underwater facilities like pipelines, and the goal is to have many fish swimming in sensitive areas to give a very early warning of contamination. Its fish-like design is an attempt to avoid problems like propeller snarl on debris.

Ocean swimmers. On Monday the famous WaveGlider robots from Liquid Robotics were sent off from their stopover at Hawaii en route to their final destinations in Japan and Australia. The experiment is already a success, and the devices have proven useful in collecting data on sea and air environments to aid climate studies and weather forecasting. They swim autonomously, propelled by the motion of water waves.

Australian telepresence museum bot. By November this year the Australian National Museum, in concert with science body CSIRO, will have a robotic telepresence droid roaming its corridors. Equipped with sensors and clever camera units, the idea is to give remote students access to each of the museum’s exhibits in more detail than may be possible with a visit in person. It’s a six-month experiment that may become permanent.

Bot Futures: The First President of the Robot Era?

When the next President of the United States takes office in 2013, it’s unlikely he’ll have to get to work on a raft of robotics legislation. But as an intriguing NPR piece points out this week, he is likely to be the very first president who has to deal with robotics-related issues on a regular basis.

That’s simply because robots are everywhere, and their presence in places of work, military forces, police forces, emergency services, farms, factories, and homes is only increasing. Robotic technology is penetrating deeply into American lifestyles.

Robots are, for example, finding uses on farms where they can simplify many of the more mundane farming jobs like tilling, distributing pesticide, and even crop-harvesting–potentially driving up efficiency and thus lowering production costs. Robot technology is being used in schools to drive student interest in science and engineering…and even to teach some lessons or boost student writing skills. They’re going to take over the role of some military pilots soon enough, and the ever-expanding drone fleet means U.S. robots are killing enemy combatants, and, sadly, making mistakes overseas right now. Drone robots are even penetrating the skies of the U.S. And there are early examples of the use of robots as political agitators, as in the case of the ONE Street Tweeter, which prints political protest tweets on the streets like a giant mobile inkjet printer.

A few of the thorny issues facing the next president: Of course robots in the workforce improve efficiency and help drive costs down, but is it better for the population to have more folk employed and working slightly less efficiently? Will American citizens tolerate police forces using drones for surveillance, as they become ever more aware of their right to privacy? What happens when the first armed police drone kills a bystander?

By 2017, when the next Comander in Chief takes office, he or she may actually have to develop policies on robots in addition to economic, social, health care, and military matters. Such mechanical issues may even be part of the campaign.

Image: U.S. Navy

We chat with Chet Kanojia of Aereo, the new TV-where-and-when-you-want-it service that has a few legal troubles. Could Aereo finally disrupt the loathed cable bundle–and TV altogether?

Chet Kanojia is the CEO of Aereo, a Barry Diller-backed, TV-in-your-browser platform that launched in mid-March in a limited New York City release. For $12 a month, Aereo allows its users to watch live broadcast TV on any Apple device of their choosing (plus Roku), in high-definition. Users can also make DVR recordings that are stored in the cloud. I’ve sampled the beautifully-designed service, whose user interface offers just about the cleanest online TV experience imaginable. For now, Aereo is limited to basic over-the-air TV: no cable options yet.

At launch, Aereo was immediately beset by legal challenges from the New York media companies whose content Aereo redistributes. (How exactly Aereo does so is fascinating, and involves lots of dime-sized antennae stored somewhere in Brooklyn.) Earlier this week, a judge dismissed one of the claims of the lawsuit, but two claims of copyright infringement remain. On Wednesday, Public Knowledge and the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed friend-of-the-court briefs arguing in Aereo’s favor. We caught up with Kanojia to talk about his disruptive technology.

FAST COMPANY: In the age of Netflix and Hulu Plus, consumers seem to expect about a $9-a-month price point for online TV. Why should they pay you $12 a month for content they could potentially get for free?

CHET KANOJIA: Simplicity and convenience. When you get it free and over the air, you don’t get DVR, and you don’t get the ability to place-shift. You’d have to get a device like Tivo, plus a Slingbox, and it’s cumbersome and complicated. But I’d love people to do that more and more. The more people that understand that this highly compelling content is right there for free, the better it is for us. You’ve been trained by the cable companies to buy the whole thing at once, whether you watch it or not. Now it’s time to start trying to take a stand.

How did you choose the $12 price point?

Um, we made it up… That’s a half-true answer. These are early days, and we just put something out there that we would like to get some reactions to. From a value perspective, if you called a cable company today and said, “I just want over-the-air channels in HD and the ability to place-shift,” it’d be $75 or more per month. Just a DVR box is $18 a month with tax. My belief on this whole thing, and it’s a subtle but important point, is that what we are doing is the dislocation of the packaging of technology with content. We’re purely technology; we’re not making you buy a package. That dislocation has a really interesting side effect, because the cost curves of technology only come down. As we drive the cost curves down, you may see us do things that are very innovative in terms of pricing.

For example?

Instead of a monthly basis, it could be based on usage. Twelve-bucks-a-month is a starting point, while we understand what utilization patterns look like. We want to make sure people get what they pay for, rather than just some random-ass number that people make up.

You’ve been live about two months. Care to share user numbers?

We don’t release numbers, but we have a subscriber base that’s several thousand deep. And we haven’t even enabled all platforms yet. We want to come to Androids and PCs.

And geographically? Any plans to move beyond New York?

Expansion plans are a bit of a state secret around here. Mainly because they don’t really exist. Having said that, our technology is designed to be highly modular, and we could be in 50 markets if we chose to do that. But we have a diligent team, and our goal is to minimize foolishness. A lot of companies go hog wild with expansion, and they don’t understand who their customers are.

Let’s talk a bit about your legal troubles.

All I would probably say is this: Our technology is built with three fundamental principles in mind. First, there was a requirement that the broadcast license was granted in the consumers’ interest. Second, it’s established in the law that the consumer is allowed to create recordings for themselves. Third, the consumer is allowed to rent equipment for the purposes of creating these recordings. Those are the three principles that bind Aereo.

What’s a potential vision of the future for Aereo?

“A lot of companies go hog wild with expansion, and they don’t understand who their customers are.”

The dream-come-true would be to really create a parallel ecosystem in which buyers and sellers of content come together in a way that makes sense. If you get a sufficient mass of consumers on the platform, new content will emerge, programmed for them. Say I’m a new internet-based news channel: I might price my news channel at $1.99, and users wouldn’t have to take 55 other channels to get value out of mine. Even the CEO of Time Warner Cable yesterday went on the record saying that there are too many networks, and nobody watches them all.

I think if you got HBO GO on board with Aereo as it is now, that’s all I’d need.

You’re not unique in that. The purpose of Aereo is to create a platform, that once you get to a certain size, content owners can’t ignore it, and they’re forced to come and sell to you.

Would you ever want to finance new content yourself, like Netflix?

I want to be clear in this: the goal is to create just a technology platform. We’re not a content company. That’s somebody else’s business. We are trying to decouple technology and content.

Is the goal to go as a la carte as possible? So I could just subscribe to and pay for certain shows, even within certain channels?

I can’t say what the future’s gonna be like. The baby step is to enable a la carte channel access. The goal is to break towards enough granularity that you have sufficient value in it.

If Aereo’s only legacy was to light a fire under companies that should have already been providing services like Aereo, would you be happy?

The reason for me to start Aereo was a strong personal passion for creating an alternative to the options out there today. To the extent that that happened, Aereo would be a massive success. I would contend we’ve already started the debate in a meaningful way.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Do you know what augmented reality apps are really good at? Directing you to new things they don’t directly point at. It’s a whole new world of discovery.

Nokia’s just unleashed its City Lens app for Lumia smartphones. And while the new augmented reality app could easily be mistaken for a bloatware version of the many AR apps we’ve seen before, it’s really Nokia’s attempt to associate its Windows smartphones with an alluring sense of discovery.

While the app actually points you conveniently to a restaurant, a bar, a store or a tourist attraction, it’s actually likely to lead you to discover whole new areas of the city to investigate once you’ve finished your business with the first place you visit.

Look at it like this: Once you’ve used City Lens to take you to a post office to send a postcard home, wouldn’t you perhaps consider visiting a nearby cafe to grab a drink and a bite to eat–one you’d never otherwise have found? Or how about if you follow the app’s advice when you’re visiting Paris and instead of eating in your usual touristy haunts in the Left Bank it takes you to a place to eat in the Marais … where you discover a whole new nightlife you didn’t know about before.

It’s the same sort of magic that made Groupon such a hot commodity. Ad partners often use Groupon just once and don’t return to use it again. That’s because Groupon isn’t really a coupon service, it’s actually a discovery service. If the coupon helps many new clients “discover” a new place to get their fingernails painted, and some of them choose to stay with that business instead of using their habitual one then the “discovered” merchant wins … it’s an indirect benefit, just like the surprise discovery of nearby places offered by City Lens.

For now the emphasis with City Lens and it’s ilk is on the tech rather than the discovery. But as AR takes off into the mainstream (which may happen only after wearable AR systems like Google Glass become popular) it’s not going to be enough to sell gizmos on the strenght of a tech that’s becoming uqiquitous. Rather, the value lies in the discovery it helps enable–and monetize. Paid-for ads like “have you considered this nearby French restaurant?” may pop up after you’ve AR-navigated to a particular patisserie recommended to you somehow. And that’s just the very tip of the location-based AR iceberg–most of the delightul, freaky, clever ways this system will be used probably can’t be imagined yet, just as noone could’ve imagined Instagram’s existence at the dawn of the Net.

Image: Flickr user data_op

According to a leaked memo acquired by The Verge, retailer Target is instructing its staff to remove Amazon own-branded hardware from its shelves. That means the Kindle suite.

Target’s memo says simply that it’s reviewed its product lineup and decided not to carry any further Amazon hardware. Stock will be replenished through May 13th, Mother’s Day, and the memo notes that the Kindle Touch will be in an ad campaign for the week of May 6th. Staff are instructed to follow best practices to “remerchandise” remaining stock, and to explain to customers who ask that it’s all just part of the normal flow of business, continually evaluating products they stock and so on.

A swift and decisive halt, then, carried out even as the store tries to maximize customer interest and, of course, its revenues by popping the Touch on an ad promotion just before Mother’s Day. The Internet has a pretty clear idea of why Target is doing this, and it comes from Target’s own words: The move is due to a “conflict of interest.” That conflict is Apple.

Target and Apple got all chummy with each other recently to launch some of those in-store “mini” Apple stores–also seen in other U.S. retailers and big-box vendors elsewhere around the world. No matter that Amazon’s Kindle Fire has snapped up over 50% of the Android market in the U.S., Apple products are selling like crazy right now–and for higher price tags. They also have an identifiable cachet which will attract customers to Target stores where–whadya know?–they may spend a little extra cash on other items too. That is to say: any one of the hundreds of iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac accessories. Ironically, Target’s keeping Amazon-compatible accessories on its shelves for exactly this reason: They may be impulse purchases, ensuring stores like Target get a steady dribble of cash from low-value items sold in bulk.

Would Apple have insisted, though, that Target only sell Apple’s tablet devices (and other hardware) because Amazon is aiming squarely at Apple’s markets in tablets, music, video, and so on? It’s not beyond the pale. Apple does, after all, have a thing about controlling the market space.

As an interesting counterpoint, it’s common in Europe to see an in-store mini Apple store right alongside a shelf of rival tablet PCs from competitors, which could be a hole in this logic. But the Kindle isn’t really a presence among these devices because Amazon’s taking ages getting its international thinking straight, and while there are a ton of peer tablets, none is quite as much a “threat” as the Kindle (at least, right now).

And if it is an Apple dictate that Kindles don’t get sold alongside its precious tablets, then there’s one very good reason Target could be persuaded to go along with it. It’s because Apple isn’t a threat to Target’s business model in quite the same way that Amazon is. Amazon has oft been credited with the death of the physical bookstore, and nowadays sells all sorts of equipment and hardware that are typical Target stock. So much pressure on prices and convenience is exerted by Amazon that it may be one of the main factors behind Target rival Best Buy’s decision to close many big-box stores and totally alter its strategy. And while Amazon just needs efficient, low-staff distribution centers, Target needs a whole infrastructure, sales staff, and space. It can’t afford to “pile it high and sell it cheap” in the same digital way Amazon does.

Target’s just trying to avoid Best Buy’s fate. Or perhaps it also thinks e-readers aren’t the wave of the future.

Image: Flickr users Team Traveller, Tony Buser

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com

Everybody likes to be liked. And unless you’re the type of boss who revels in tyranny, it’s only natural to seek the favor of your underlings. But there’s a big difference between engaging with employees and fawning over them.

In an era when the virtues of a collegial and collaborative environment are widely espoused, there’s guilt associated with being a strong-handed boss. Managers are often afraid to pull rank for fear they’ll fall out of grace with their reports and spoil team camaraderie if they’re not nice. “So many leaders, supervisors, and bosses suffer from a nice-guy conflict,” says Bruce Tulgand, author of It’s Okay to Be the Boss: The Step-by-Step Guide to Becoming the Manager Your Employees Need. “Managers are afraid that people will think they’re a jerk.”

Quite frankly, being nice is overrated. In fact, a 2011 study, “Do Nice Guys–and Gals–Really Finish Last?” posits that disagreeable people are more successful. The study, which appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showed that disagreeable people (especially men) earn more money and are perceived as better leaders. The research has too often been used to draw the conclusion that being mean is a good thing, says study co-author Beth A. Livingston of Cornell University. Which isn’t necessarily the case. Rather, the lesson here is that some people could stand to be less nice.

“Disagreeableness is a multifaceted trait,” says Livingston. Less agreeable people are generally “people who don’t really care what you think.” Unconcerned with stepping on toes or being unpopular, they cut a clear path to the brass ring and make more decisive leaders–which is especially important because building consensus often doesn’t translate to success.

Let the performance be the arbiter—unless you’re running a commune.

One HR exec at a tech company tells the story of acquiring a startup with a culture that was so consensus-driven that they couldn’t decide on which features to cut in order to keep projects on schedule and budget. “Products were delayed, but according to them they had the ‘best culture’ in the world,” he says.

Less-agreeable people are also more likely to advocate for themselves and for others–a huge part of being a leader. A moderately disagreeable person might have the attitude, “I’m not going to step on people willy nilly, but I’m not going to let people step on me, either,” says Livingston.

Nice people tend to be too considerate and afraid to initiate structure, which can be trouble for a startup trying to establish itself as a legitimate business. Livingston cited Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg as a good example of someone who realized that if he wanted to continue as the creative, likable boss in flip flops, he needed to have a bad cop around to bust some heads. “He hired Sheryl Sandberg from Google, and she whipped everybody into shape. They were pretty chaotic before that.”

Even in these kindler, more collaborative times, someone has to set priorities, pull the plug on an unprofitable project, or fire someone who’s not pulling his weight. If the reins lay in your hands, here are some tips to help you tighten your hold without being labeled a meanie.

Don’t Be Weak
Many bosses are reluctant managers because they’re afraid to come off as jerks, says Tulgan. “Really, if employees think a boss is a jerk, it’s when they’re too weak.” Weakling managers don’t take the time to manage on a daily basis. They let small problems build up into big problems. They pretend to be friends, but when things go south they show their true colors. And the only time they own their authority is when they’re angry with someone. “Be brave enough to own your authority before things go wrong,” says Tulgan.

Work it Out
“Don’t fall for the myth of the natural leader,” says Tulgan. “If you want to be in good shape, you have to train every day.” Talk to people one-on-one, understand what their problems are, and remind them of how their role fits into the greater mission at hand. The big mistake that managers make, says Tulgan, is waiting until they have to give bad news or make a hard decision to start managing. They haven’t laid the groundwork. “If the only time you manage is when you have bad news, then every time they see you coming they’ll say ‘Oh no, here he comes.’”

Build Structure
Structure is not a dirty word to employees. In many cases, they crave it. Philadelphia-based knowledge network startup, Quewey, recently brought on a CEO and the organizational changes have been welcomed by the group. “We realized that we needed a pointed decision maker,” says Michael Magill, of Quewey’s business development and finance. “A lot of day-to-day decisions come up that don’t seem like big decisions, but they really mold your strategy. At a certain point, younger workers will begin to wonder who is responsible for managing the overall direction, message, and strategy of a business.” Magill says that having a defined leader has helped people understand their roles, set the founder’s vision in sight, streamline processes, and increase delegation. And projects that would have otherwise remained in the brainstorming stage actually see action.

Monitor Performance
Managers sometimes struggle with rewarding employees, fearing that others will feel passed over, like when giving out raises or offering a better office space. “Let the performance be the arbiter–unless you’re running a commune,” says Tulgan.  If you keep close track of each person’s performance and what’s going on with the team, decisions will be respected. Tulgan says that leaders need to also show employees that they will help them earn promotions and find success.

Separate Wheat From The Chaff
The same goes for firing someone who’s dragging down the team. If you’re talking with your team every day and making clear what takes priority and what should be back-burnered, reports will have a clear sense of what needs to be done and you’ll know who’s delivering and who’s not. And don’t assume chopping a few heads will be received poorly by the high-performers. Says Tulgan: “Usually what managers find is that employees say, ‘What took you so long?’” Low performers take up money that might otherwise be available for a raise, they undermine teamwork. Good workers recognize this.

Share Information
Some managers try to keep too much information too close to their chest. Then when the axe comes down, folks are shocked and angered–and you come off as mean and callous. By explaining the facts up front, you’ll save a lot of heartache. For example, “If we delay this project, none of us will see our annual bonus.” Employees will respond to your transparency and know what lays ahead.

Hold Yourself Responsible
Take ownership for bad news. If the news is a result of your own poor business decisions, take the blame, says Tulgan. “I’m gonna take a bullet, but we’re all gonna suffer.” If the news is based on a decision from above, don’t just blame it on the guys at corporate. “That undermines everybody’s confidence in the organization and the chain of command. Because that’s your source of authority, it weakens you.” Explain the business decisions that were made, and how it will affect the company.

Image: Flickr user Tambako The Jaguar

The UAE has just launched an effort to embed its National ID card system into smartphones. Yup, that could mean you have to carry your phone at all times. Scary. Could it happen here?

We write a lot about NFC technology and its power to change pretty much everything from the way you shop, to the way you exchange information with other phone owners to advertising and so on. Many interesting innovations involve smartphone NFC tech, but it’s not all for good. The United Arab Emirates plans to incorporate NFC into its newish National ID card scheme.

The government has just begun work with local cell phone operator Etisalat to get the project off the ground. Etisalat, remember, was caught in 2010 trying to force a “network upgrade” code patch to its BlackBerry users that was instantly identified as plain old officially sanctioned spyware. So right from the start, this partnership isn’t sounding like the best friend of human rights.

But it gets worse. The National ID card scheme, created in 2004 in its modern smart-card guise, means every citizen has an official ID number which is associated with their chip-enabed card. On its tiny sliver of silicon it also carries personal identification information, a photo, and digitzed versions of the owner’s fingerprints. Carrying your ID card is mandatory, all the time. To be fair, the various parts of the UAE have been a bit lenient with imposing the scheme, but its all-encompassing power is still a bit threatening.

In some ways, popping this information into a smartphone seems like a great idea. The card is a legal requirement, and losing it must be a pain in the ass for citizens–and we all know how easy it is to misplace a tiny credit-card sized slip of plastic. Embedding the data into a phone means it may be harder to lose, as you’ve got more of an incentive to keep hold of your smartphone nowadays because of the way it keeps you digitally connected to the world, and because of all the really personal data you hold inside like credit card numbers and passwords.

But the weird thing is that if you embed your ID into your phone, then you’re probably legally mandated to carry your phone with you. Everywhere, assuming you’re not carrying your old-fashioned card, that is. And it doesn’t even matter if the phone’s battery is dead because, depending on what NFC implementation the UAE authorities ultimately plump for, the NFC ID information could be read anyway–the antenna in the NFC loop can actually power the NFC chip to radiate its information out (which is how your train ticket systems work). You’d basically have to haul your phone around at all times, even if it were out of juice.

And, again dependant on what NFC tech the UAE chooses, there’s the possibility of remote-readable NFC systems. The kind you’re probably familiar with from ticketing or secure door entry systems need very close proximity between reader and card–partly due to the laws of physics. That’s why sometimes you have to wiggle your wallet on the sensor pad to get the card to “ping.” But there’s no reason that an NFC card can’t be activated by a remote sensor system, if it’s carefully designed.

That’s a bit worrying. Of course the ID information inside will be encrypted, and probably only government-approved people will carry the technology that can remotely read and decrypt the information. But hackers do exist, and weak encryption was probably one of the reasons a digital ID card scheme that was once proposed for the U.K. was eventually tossed out. And quite apart from hacking, there’s the issue of “feature creep” on behalf of the authorities. Because once you’ve got remote-readable NFC cards, then how tempting would it be–for the purposes of anti-terrorism–to install public reader systems in train stations or public spaces? No one’s saying the UAE authorities are actually going to do this, but the idea should give you pause. Especially when you remember the bizarre Mexican iris-scanner public-tracking scheme.

Now, skip to 2015 when more of us are carrying NFC-enabled smartphones, and some of the stickier problems around agreed-upon information-storage standards have been worked out. At this point we may be comfortable having our credit card info and Starbucks loyalty card info inside our phone, and we’re probably highly adapted to the tech. Wouldn’t it be a natural step to put your driving license and passport information in there too–in a highly encrypted form, of course? The authorites would probably love it, as faking ID would be a whole bunch trickier.

Then in situations where you’re supposed to carry ID with you at all times, you’d effectively have to have your smartphone with you at all times, just as seems likely in the UAE.

Image: Khomulo Anna via Shutterstock

Via Fast Company: http://www.fastcompany.com