How Steve Jobs helped Barack Obama’s re-election campaign get more social and go viral - by aby benedict

Barack Obama’s current Campaign Manager Jim Messina revealed recently that Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs encouraged him to capitalize on technology in ways that are boosting the president’s re-election efforts.

According to Businessweek, Messina quit his gig as the White House deputy chief of staff in January to become Obama’s 2012 campaign manager. He immediately met with executives at Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, DreamWorks, and more to commence a forward thinking stand for office.
“I went around the country for literally a month of my life interviewing these companies and just talking about organizational growth, emerging technologies, marketing,” said Messina to Businessweek.

He further described two conversations that he had with Jobs while still acting as deputy chief. The Apple co-founder told Messina last year that mobile technology—coupled with social—had to be the primary focus in the re-election effort.

“Last time you were programming to only a couple of channels,” said Jobs, while referring to the Web and email. “This time, you have to program content to a much wider variety of channels—Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube, Google—because people are segmented in a very different way than they were four years ago.”


“He knew exactly where everything was going,” Messina explained from Obama’s campaign headquarters in Chicago. “He explained viral content and how our stuff could break out, how it had to be interesting and clean.”

It is interesting that Jobs would give Messina advice on how to go social and viral, especially because Apple’s own fledging social network Ping is getting the axe in the company’s next software release.

iOS 6 Unveiling Confirmed For Next Monday [IMAGES] - by aby benedict

If ever confirmation was needed that iOS 6 will be showcased at this year’s WWDC event – set to kick off on Monday – then one Instagram member has removed any lingering doubt. Brought to our attention by Zac Altman, member of the popular social image-sharing app recently acquired by Facebook, has upped a photo showing a new banner being readied over at the Moscone West convention center, confirming beyond dispute that the sixth iteration of Apple’s mobile operating system will be a huge significant talking point from Monday.

The tech world does a pretty stellar job of casting assumptions, and as such, has already forecast that Tim Cook’s company would unveil iOS 6, but the banner outside the event’s venue as good as sets it in stone. Hitherto, the predictably tight-lipped company hasn’t gone much farther than to state it would discuss "the future of iOS", but with just three days to go, the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley is well and truly out.
When it comes to Apple rumors, we really have to take whatever we can get, and as such, we suspect the silver theme of the banner is indicative of the hotly-rumored theme set to replace the blueness of many stock iOS apps. There is, of course, the possibility Apple is simply playing into the tech community’s hands, but that would seem a little elaborate given how little the colors scheme matters in the grand scale of features predicted.

Apple’s very own Maps effort is expected to debut as the talisman to a plethora of other new implementations including deep Facebook integration, Baidu Search to replace Google’s offering in China, and a Siri API, which will allow developers to finally intertwine their apps with Apple’s new-ish voice-recognition feature.
Speaking of Siri, the iPad is also set to see Siri implementation, and although many have dispelled Siri for iPad as an unnecessary, novelty feature, it’s nevertheless good to see Apple sharing the love beyond the exclusivity of the iPhone 4S.

Facebook’s iOS App Center going live tonight? - by aby benedict

Update: Facebook confirmed to TechCrunch it has been “testing it with a small percentage of users” since it launched last month, but the social network has “no further details to announce at this time.”

The image above is a screenshot just posted by TechCrunch. A reader who claims to be seeing the Facebook App Center already live in the iOS app sent it. As noted in the report, Facebook has an “app-themed” event in San Francisco tonight where we could see more of the App Center. The company announced the new HTML5-based App Center last month and said the iOS and Android Facebook apps would have access to the app marketplace in the coming weeks.