The Media Equation: Tech Wealth and Ideas Are Heading Into News

But just when it looked as if all were lost, an unlikely cavalry has come roaring over the hill with serious money, fresh ideas and no small amount of enthusiasm. Silicon Valley and its various power brokers — some who had roles in putting the news business in harm’s way to begin with — are suddenly investing significant sums of money in preserving news capacity and quality.

Pierre M. Omidyar, the founder of eBay, revealed last week that he would back the journalist Glenn Greenwald and his colleagues in a newly conceived news site to the tune of $250 million. Just over two months ago, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, spent the same amount to personally buy The Washington Post. That’s half a billion dollars dropped into serious news production, a sector that investors in distressed assets have been fleeing.

It doesn’t stop there. In July, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Steve Jobs, invested in Ozy Media, a news start-up, joining a group that includes the angel investor Ron Conway; Larry Sonsini, a lawyer from an eminent Silicon Valley law firm; Dan Rosensweig of Chegg.com; and David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer.

Chris Hughes used his Facebook money to buy The New Republic and provide financial support to Upworthy, an aggregator of quality material. Next-generation news companies including Vice, Vox Media, BuzzFeed and Business Insider have all recently received significant investment. (In addition, Jeff Skoll, another eBay alum, backed Participant Media and now the TV channel Pivot, to make “socially relevant” films and television.)

The list goes on, but the trend is clear: quality news has become, if not sexy, suddenly attractive to smart digital money. It makes sense once you step back. For all its excesses, Silicon Valley has not been a place where ostentation creates social capital. While any tech reporter will tell you that the valley is far from media-friendly, the people in leadership there are close, ferocious consumers of news and have strong opinions about its current shortcomings. And it would be a mistake to view the recent moves by some of the most important people in technology as a lark.

“Technologists have a view, perhaps inflated, that they can make the world better,” Mr. Omidyar said in an interview over the weekend. “There may be limits to doing it only through technology, or perhaps you get tired of doing it only through technology. So getting into content and broad communication is appealing.”

It would also be a mistake to believe that the only thing digitally enriched players bring is money. The investment of intellectual capital will be just as important. If ever an industry was in need of innovation — of big ideas from uncommon thinkers — it is the news business.

“I think that technology could help find a way to actually do important journalism for our democracy that can impact many more people and help serve it to a general-interest audience in a way that can be commercially sustainable,” Mr. Omidyar said. (A separate article has more excerpts from the interview with Mr. Omidyar.)

Smaller companies have created news sites that point a way forward but cannot begin to fill the loss of journalistic capacity that accompanied the great shakeout in the industry. For a time, it seemed as if newspapers, where much of journalism’s horsepower is stored, would either be strip-mined or become a plaything.

“People have been speculating that newspapers would become nothing more than trophies for rich businesspeople at the end of their careers,” said Michael Zimbalist, vice president for research and development at The New York Times. “But now successful midcareer entrepreneurs are investing and willing to play the long game. They have been disrupters themselves and won’t be bringing the same assumptions to the table.”

A profound reset is under way. In more than a decade of covering the news end of the media business, I cannot think of a time of greater optimism or potential. Nontraditional operators like Mr. Bezos can afford to adopt a long-term strategy, something he has done rather effectively at Amazon. And the barriers to entry for ventures like Mr. Omidyar’s start-up have evaporated: cheap digital tools enable production and collaboration, while social media like Twitter and Facebook enable the spread of content through sharing.

Technology and journalism, former antagonists, are about to give bromance a try, with Mr. Bezos and Mr. Omidyar leading the way.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Corner Office: Paul English of Kayak, on Nurturing New Ideas

Q. Did you have the entrepreneurial itch early on?

A. I always wanted to just try new things, and I think it was probably in my DNA or something. As a kid, I would see something I didn’t like, and I wanted to make it better. So, for example, we had a phone in my house that was a one-line dial phone, and I had to get a second phone line for my computer. So I rewired the phone to handle two lines. I was really proud of that phone.

Q. And what about your high school years?

A. I had lots of side interests, but I wasn’t very interested in studying in high school. My grades were pretty much all D’s, and I didn’t apply to college. The only reason I went to college was that my parents found out I could go to state school for free because of my SAT scores. I had a day job and I went to school at night. But I had a different job every 12 to 18 months because I’d get bored and I’d want to learn something new.

Q. Once you launched your career, what were some leadership lessons you learned?

A. The most important thing I learned is something I’m still actually working on, which is how to be really blunt with feedback. It’s the most difficult thing for a manager to do. But I worked hard at it, because when managers were blunt with me, it hurt a little bit, but I’m very grateful to those few managers who helped me.

I developed this technique over the years. When I gave people their performance reviews, I would literally take a crinkled envelope, and I’d write five words on it. I would take them out to lunch, and I’d say to them, “Let’s say I left this company, and five years from now I was sitting in a bar and someone said, ‘Hey, what’s that guy like?’ What I would tell them is what I’m going to tell you. And there are two or three words that are positive, and there are two or three words that are really negative.” I would give examples and I would give them the piece of paper, so I had no written record of what we had talked about. One guy in particular e-mailed me 10 years later, and claimed that he still carries that piece of paper around. That really reinforced for me the idea that the best way you can help someone is to be on their side and to be honest with them.

Q. You were a co-founder of Kayak nine years ago. What’s unusual about the culture?

A. We’re a little bit reckless in our decision-making — not with the business, but the point is that we try things. We give even junior people scary amounts of power to come up with ideas and implement them. We had an intern last summer who, on his very first day at Kayak, came up with an idea, wrote the code and released it. It may or may not have been successful, but it almost doesn’t matter, because it showed that we value speed, and we value testing ideas, not talking about them.

It’s all about fast iteration. When you push down decisions, and you don’t require people to write up plans and do designs by consensus, enormous amounts of work just disappear. We cut out all the middle layers and you let the designers talk to the customers. Otherwise, something gets lost in translation with a lot of layers.

Q. What else?

A. We’re known for having very small meetings, usually three people. There’s a little clicker for counting people that hangs on the main conference room door. The reason it’s there is to send a message to people that I care about this issue. If there’s a bunch of people in the room, I’ll stick my head in and say, “It takes 10 of you to decide this? There aren’t three of you smart enough to do this?”

I just hate design by consensus. No innovation happens with 10 people in a room. It’s very easy to be a critic and say why something won’t work. I don’t want that because new ideas are like these little precious things that can die very easily. Two or three people will nurture it, and make it stronger, give it a chance to see life.

Q. How do you hire?

A. You always have to be recruiting. When I meet somebody who’s amazing, I’ll often say to them, “Who’s the smartest person you’ve ever met?” My team might be sick of me asking the question, because I’ll keep asking. Finally, after the third or fourth time, they’ll say, “You know, there was this person.”

Then the two criteria I really look for are productivity — which is about speed and judgment and drive — and the second one is fun. A lot of companies have the no-jerks rule. But I have the “no neutrals” rule.

Q. Can you explain that?

A. We want to be a hyperproductive company and we want to make it fun, and I make a commitment to people that in 20 years they’ll look back and say this was the most fun job they had. If you surround them with people who are annoying or just kind of neutral, it’s going to make the job a drag. And you don’t ever want to hurt someone’s creative energy.

Certainly, annoying people will hurt them, and so will people who are just kind of boring. They’re nice, but they don’t ever provoke the creative person in a fun way. That diminishes their productivity. If I have a commitment to improving people’s productivity and fun, then I have to surround them with people who are fun and who will challenge them.

Q. So how do you get at that in an interview?

A. I know how to assess people about their speed and their product sense and their technical skills. The area that’s much harder to assess is culture. So I’ll look at the résumé, and find something that’s interesting. Then I’ll have them describe to me the team they worked with, and I’ll ask them about each person on the team — “Tell me something they did that blew you away and tell me something they did that annoyed you.” I make them talk about real people and the real product. From that, I can figure out their values and how they see other people. That gives me a really good sense about whether they will fit on my team.

Pogue's Posts Blog: Don’t Forget the Small Ideas That Make a Difference

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A Web Site Where Latvians’ Ideas Can Become Law

Janis Pipars for The New York TimesKristofs Blaus, 24, one of the founders of a Latvian Web site where citizens can start petitions.

CESIS, Latvia — Pulling up to a snow-covered front yard in this pretty little town last month, Alexander Grunte pointed to the chain-link fence, where a sad-eyed yellow mutt was tied up. “They’re so happy to get attention,” he said of the dog, which had jumped up and started barking. “Sometimes, it’s almost like they’re crying.”

The plight of local dogs left tied up alone outdoors has long bothered Mr. Grunte, a soft-spoken father of two and a translator of technical documents. So in January he went online and, usingManaBalss.lv, a Latvian Web site whose name translates to"My Voice,"created a parliamentary bill to make the practice illegal in Latvia. “I’ve never done anything political before,” he said. “But this was very easy.”

With the help of ManaBalss, he has a chance to see his proposal enacted into law by the Latvian Parliament. Thanks to a parliamentary rule passed shortly after the opening of the ManaBalss site in 2011, initiatives that gather 10,000 signatures from citizens 16 or older must be taken up by Parliament. Signatures can be gathered online, where they are verified using the same transaction codes that Latvians use for online banking.

With fewer than 2,000 signatures so far, Mr. Grunte’s proposal faces some headwinds, but he is still optimistic. “Even if it is declined by the Parliament, or even if it does not gain 10,000 signatures, it can already be considered as successful because of the wide publicity of the idea,” he said.

Latvia consistently has one of the lowest levels of political engagement and trust in government institutions in the European Union. Until recently, its national politics were largely controlled by a handful of business tycoons who amassed fortunes during the privatization of the 1990s and who are said to have chosen Latvia’s last president in a secret meeting in a zoo.

But ManaBalss now puts Latvia at the forefront of European efforts to shift some forms of political participation to the Internet. Last year, both Finland and the European Commission started official online platforms for citizens’ initiatives, and Iceland recently crowd-sourced some of the changes to a new constitution over the Internet.

At ManaBalss, anyone with an idea can suggest a change to the way things are done in Latvia, be it reducing the value-added tax on food or requiring that all employees of state institutions practice Bikram yoga. If the proposal meets several basic requirements — it must be legal, provide a solution and include a plan of action — volunteer experts offer advice on how to restate the suggestion as a more formal proposal. Then, if 100 people agree that the issue is important, and the site’s volunteer lawyers think it is feasible, the idea goes public.

According to ManaBalss, about 600,000 people, a number roughly equivalent to a fourth of the Latvian population, have visited the site, where 500 initiatives have been listed. So far, those initiatives have received a total of just over 174,000 signatures; seven have reached the 10,000 threshold.

Two popular ManaBalss ideas — that Parliament should be obliged to consider ManaBalss-type citizens’ initiatives supported by online signatures and that the state should know the names of the beneficiaries of offshore holdings — have been enacted into law by Parliament. Two more ManaBalss initiatives, one about traffic law and another about who should pay for hepatitis C treatment, are under consideration in Parliament.

Of course, some suggestions, like “I just want to lead a good life” and “Let’s sack the president,” never make it past ManaBalss’s initial hurdles. “Latvia should petition the U.S. to become the 51st state,” on the other hand, would probably meet the requirements to go public, according to Kristofs Blaus, one of the site’s founders. “Then we see what the people say,” he said, with a shrug.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 11, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the given name of the lawmaker who disagreed with a colleague, Boriss Cilevics, who had scoffed at ManaBalss. She is Lolita Cigane, not Lola.  

Companies See High-Tech Factories as Fonts of Ideas

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This Life: Maria Popova Has Some Big Ideas

At precisely 9:30 on a chilly Saturday morning, Maria Popova slips out of her apartment in Brooklyn, scurries down a few stairs and enters a small basement gym. A former recreational bodybuilder from Bulgaria, Ms. Popova is the unlikely founder of the exploding online emporium of ideas known as Brain Pickings.

Her exhaustively assembled grab bag of scientific curiosities, forgotten photographs, snippets of old love letters and mash notes to creativity — imagine the high-mindedness of a TED talk mixed with the pop sensibility of P. T. Barnum — spans a blog (500,000 visitors a month), a newsletter (150,000 subscribers) and a Twitter feed (263,000 followers). Her output, which she calls a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness,” has attracted an eclectic group of devotees including the novelist William Gibson, the singer Josh Groban, the comedian Drew Carey, the neuroscientist David Eagleman, the actress Mia Farrow and the Twitter founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams.

“She’s a celebrator,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, a Princeton professor and former State Department official. “You feel the tremendous amount of pleasure she takes in finding these things and sharing them. It’s like walking into the Museum of Modern Art and having somebody give you a customized, guided tour.”

Unlike most blogger celebrities, however, Ms. Popova revels in remaining anonymous, which means her followers know almost nothing about her. In an age when many tweet what they put in their morning coffee, she rarely uses the word “I.” Her personal history is almost completely absent. Her photograph is not on the site. “I don’t feel the necessity to be in the public eye that way,” she said after reluctantly agreeing to sit for an interview. “There’s a certain safety in making people feel like you’re an organization and not a person. ”

A fierce creature of habit, she begins every day by working out. On this morning, she alternates 20 chin-ups with 50 push-ups, then performs a series of planks and stretches. Once on the elliptical, she frantically highlights an obscure 1976 book, “The Creativity Question” (Amazon sales ranking: one million-plus), and checks her RSS feed on her iPad.

Exactly 70 minutes later, she returns to her modest one-bedroom apartment to write a brief essay about Freud and daydreaming, file her thrice-daily blog entries and schedule her regimen of 50 Twitter messages a day. She does this while balancing on a wobble board.

“I try to sit still when I work, but my mind goes spiraling elsewhere,” she said in a mild Slavic accent reminiscent of Bond girls in the 1970s. “When my body is moving, it’s almost like it takes the wind out of this mental spinning, and I’m able to focus.” Recently, she came upon a 1942 book on inspiration chronicling others with the same habit. “Mark Twain paced while he dictated,” she said. “Beethoven walked along the river. Maybe there’s a psycho-biological element.”

Ms. Popova traces her discipline to her upbringing behind the Iron Curtain. Her parents met as teenage exchange students in Russia and had her almost immediately. Her father was an engineering student who later became an Apple salesman; her mother was studying library science. “We’re not very much in touch,” she said of her parents today, “but recently we were on Skype, and this whole library science thing came up. I realized a lot of what I do is organizational, almost like a Dewey Decimal System for the Web. My mother got so emotional. It was very funny, and kind of moving.”

Her paternal grandmother was a rabid biblio and had a collection of encyclopedias, Ms. Popova said, and she credits the act of randomly opening volumes and happening upon entries for her passion to discover old knowledge. “The Web has such a presentism bias,” she said, with Facebook updates, tweets and blog entries always appearing with the latest first. By contrast, flipping through the encyclopedia was “an interesting model of learning about the world serendipitously and also guidedely.”

After graduating from an American high school in Bulgaria, she enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, where she quickly grew bored with what she calls the “industrial model” of education, involving large-scale lectures. While still a student, she was working part time at an advertising firm in 2005, when a colleague sent around an e-mail with clippings of rivals’ work to inspire the team.

Bruce Feiler’s latest book,“The Secrets of Happy Families,” will be published in February. “This Life” appears monthly.

H.P.’s Misstep Shows Risk in the Push for Big Ideas

The ill-fated marriage of the companies is a lesson for H.P. and other older technology giants as they throw billions at supposedly game-changing acquisitions, trying to gain a foothold in the future.

In that future, smartphones and tablets, connected to cloud-computing data centers, are the essential tools of work and play. Companies rent software over the air, rather than buying it with expensive maintenance contracts.

And vast streams of data are continually analyzed to find new patterns and make predictions about consumer behavior and product design. Autonomy, for instance, makes software that can analyze marketing patterns and advise a company on matters like where it should increase marketing resources.

These forces threaten older businesses, like H.P.’s traditional personal computer and data storage products. Other companies, like Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, also face pressure. They are all trying to buy the future — and have the cash to do it.

In July, Microsoft decided to pay $1.2 billion for Yammer, which makes a Facebook-like social media product for the office. Oracle recently paid over $3.4 billion for two small cloud computing companies that provide software for human resources and sales management. Last Sunday, the computer networking giant Cisco agreed to pay $1.2 billion in cash for Meraki, a company that manages the free wireless service at Starbucks and other businesses.

There are lots more such deals, from these companies as well as I.B.M., SAP and others.

The pace of change is so fast that Google, so recently seen as an upstart and a giant killer, in 2011 paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility to supercharge its Android smartphone business, which competes with Apple. Earlier this year, Facebook spent $750 million on Instagram so it wouldn’t miss the next thing in social media.

But identifying the next big thing can be difficult, said Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, a professor of management at Yale University. Likely as not, he said, deals like the one for Autonomy have “maybe a 40 percent success, 60 percent failure rate.”

He added, “The odds are against you succeeding, but the odds are also worth taking.”

The real hazard, he said, is in the way companies describe these acquisitions as “natural, inevitable victories.” They should be seen, he said, as “an investment, like in research and development.”

The pace of acquisitions hardly matches the level seen during the late ’90s Internet bubble, when Cisco paid $9.6 billion for three networking companies that former officials said yielded almost no benefit. In 2002, AOL Time Warner wrote down $54 billion in good will related to its troubled merger. Several telecommunications equipment makers and service providers also had multibillion-dollar write-downs.

But there are also notable successes.

EMC, a maker of data storage equipment, paid $625 million in 2003 for VMWare, which makes some of the critical technology in cloud computing. Today, after taking some of the company public, EMC’s stake is worth about $30 billion. VMWare recently took a gamble of its own, buying a next-generation networking company, Nicira, that had virtually no revenue, for $1.26 billion.

Microsoft, which also paid $8.5 billion for Skype in 2011, said Yammer was being integrated into SharePoint, Microsoft’s successful collaboration software, and will be included in its premium version of Office communications and productivity software at no cost. It did not say whether, or how, Yammer would be profitable on its own, however.

The real issue with Autonomy may be less its questionable sales than its core technology, said Leslie Owens, who follows data analysis software at Forrester Research.

“H.P. thought it was an entirely new platform, but Autonomy’s clients said it wasn’t as good as Google’s corporate search product,” she said.

Autonomy, which was founded 16 years ago, “was based on using powerful algorithms,” she said, but the software was not attuned “to new kinds of search signals, like what your friends are doing, what people like you are doing, what other data you might draw off on.” Over time those new methods attracted customers.

In a demonstration of the Autonomy product last month, H.P. appeared to have addressed some of those issues, but others remained. An application to help figure out what to pay for Web ads initially failed to work, then delivered results that appeared similar to those of several other search products.

“We remain 100 percent committed to Autonomy and its industry-leading technology,” H.P. said in a statement. “The company’s products are cutting-edge and provide many customers with unique solutions.”

In an interview Tuesday, Meg Whitman, the chief executive of H.P., indicated that the company also had strong hopes for its security software, most of which it got from other acquisitions.

H.P. has accused Autonomy of improperly accounting for much of its sales in the years before H.P. bought the company last year. It took a $5 billion noncash charge related to the purchase price.

Ms. Whitman gave Autonomy tepid support.

“It’s very disappointing,” she said of the write-down. “We’ve integrated the technology into a couple of places; we will integrate it into more.”

Gadgetwise Blog: Pogue: One of Apple's Best Ideas Ever, Made Worse

5:04 p.m. | Updated Clarifying information on future MacPro computers.

Well, Steve Jobs may be gone. But to the extent that Apple can keep alive the format and excitement of his onstage new-feature presentations, Apple is doing it.

On Monday morning in San Francisco, I watched the new Apple C.E.O., Tim Cook, give brief remarks at the beginning and the end of the keynote presentation at the Worldwide Developers Conference, which will apparently become what the old Macworld Expo used to be: a place for Apple to take the wraps off its latest inventions. He handed off the actual announcements to his lieutenants.

First, laptops: starting today, the new MacBook Airs are faster, they store more, they have combination USB 2/USB 3 jacks, and they cost $100 less than before.

There’s also a new, top-of-the-line super laptop, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display ($2,200 and up). It’s very thin and light (0.7 inch, 4.5 pounds), has two microphones for better speech recognition — and, yes, it has a Retina display.

In other words, it has a screen composed of many more, much tinier dots than conventional laptops; at 2,880 by 1,800 pixels, it’s the highest-resolution screen ever to appear on a laptop. Apple notes that when videos are edited in Final Cut, you can see every single dot of a 1080p hi-def video you’re editing — and still have three million pixels of screen left over for your toolbars and timelines.

The next realm of news was Mountain Lion, the next version of Mac OS X. Apple had already demonstrated most of the new features, but there were some surprises. To me, the big one was dictation. After all of these years — after text-to-speech came to the iPhone and the iPad, after Windows has had dictation for years — you can now type by speaking to your Mac, in any program. (To make the Dictation button appear, you tap the Fn key twice.)

It’s the same technology that’s on the iPhone: behind the scenes, your utterances are sent to Nuance for processing and conversion to text, which is sent back to your Mac in seconds. In other words, no training is required — but an Internet connection is. No Internet, no dictation. I can’t wait to try it.

Apple also revealed Power Nap, a Mountain Lion feature for the new laptops announced Monday. It lets the Mac keep updating Internet data even while it’s closed and asleep. It keeps getting mail, calendar updates, Photo Stream updates, software updates and so on. The worry here, of course, is battery life, but Apple says it’s a minimal penalty.

On Monday, Apple also announced the timing for Mountain Lion — “next month” — and the price: $20. You can install that one copy on as many Macs as you own, without serial numbers or copy protection. You can upgrade from previous Mac OS X versions as old as Snow Leopard.

Finally, Apple showed what’s new in iOS 6 — the software for iPhones and iPads — which is coming this fall. (It will run on the iPhone 3GS and later, iPad 2 and 3, and iPod Touch fourth generation.)

The juiciest, best features were all saved for this software.

Siri, the voice-controlled virtual assistant that everybody loves or hates, has sprouted a lot more capability. Now you can ask about restaurants, and the results screen lists, for each restaurant, the average price, type of food, and so on. It’s integrated with the OpenTable app so you can make a reservation on the spot, and with the Yelp app so you can read reviews of each place.

You can also ask about movies ( “What movies are playing at the Metreon?” or “Show me movies starring Tom Cruise”) or sports (“What was the score of last night’s Yankees game?” “What is Buster Posey’s batting average?” “What are the National League standings?” “Who is taller: LeBron or Kobe?”).

And Siri will open apps. Yay! (“Open Angry Birds.”)

Apple also mentioned that a dozen carmakers (including General Motors, BMW, Toyota, Audi, Mercedes, Honda, Jaguar) have all agreed to add a Siri button to their steering wheels. This feature, called Eyes Free, lets you get information and operate Siri by voice as you drive — and the iPhone’s screen doesn’t even light up.

Finally, you can now speak to Siri in new languages like Spanish, Italian, French, German, Korean, Mandarin. Oh — and Siri’s voice-command feature is finally coming to the latest iPad.

You know how you’re in a meeting or a movie, and someone calls? Now, the Answer screen offers an icon that offers two new options: “Reply with Message” (sends the caller a canned text message like, “In a meeting — I’ll get back to you”) or “Remind Me Later.” That feature makes the phone use its GPS to remind you to return the call “When I get home,” for example, or “When I get back.”

Similarly, the new Do Not Disturb switch, in Settings, lets you tell the phone not to bother you with texts or calls or push notifications. They’ll still arrive, but won’t make the phone ring or buzz — unless they’re from certain special people you’ve designated.

Yes, some of these features have been available on Treo phones and others, but it’s great to have them on the iPhone.

Maps may be the gem of iOS 6. Apple felt that it was time to stop depending on its licensing deal with Google and other mapping companies. It therefore wrote its own Maps app from the ground up. It covers the whole world, and knows about 100 million businesses.

It has real-time traffic information — and where does it come from? Other iPhone owners. Crowdsourced traffic data is sent by them, in real time and anonymously, to Apple, so that it knows exactly where the traffic jams are. (You even get to see icons that indicate what is causing the traffic: construction, accident or whatever.)

For the first time, Maps now gives you spoken turn-by-turn directions, just like a windshield GPS unit, but smarter and better-looking. Siri is built right in; you can say, for example, “Take me to the Empire State Building” or “Where can I get gas?” or “Are we there yet?” (In that case, Siri responds: “Relax. You’ll be there in 14 minutes.”)

If you zoom into the map enough, you see the outlines of individual buildings. If you tilt the map, it goes into an amazing 3-D view — and in Satellite view, that even includes aerial videos of prominent landmarks. (Apple says that it’s spent the last couple of years filming Flyover scenes in helicopters.)

What else is on iOS 6?

• Facetime over cellular. Now you won’t be stuck in Wi-Fi hot spots when you want to make a video call from one iPhone/iPad/Touch/Mac to another.

• Shared Photo Stream. Now you can choose certain photos and share them with certain friends. Those photos appear in the friends’ Shared Photo Stream albums — in the Photos app (iPhone/iPad), iPhoto, Aperture, Apple TV or (on Windows machines) on a special Web page. You can even comment on them.

• Mail. As in Mountain Lion, you can now designate special contacts as V.I.P.’s. Their messages alone appear on the iPhone’s lock screen, and they collect in a special Inbox folder; basically, they cut through the clutter of messages. And at last, you can attach a photo or a video right from the Compose Message screen. (Until now, you had to start in the Photos app to send a picture to someone by e-mail.)

• Passbook. This new app keeps all of your electronic tickets/barcodes in one place: airplane boarding passes, movie tickets, store cards and so on. (These apps have to be rewritten to exploit Passbook.) When you get to the movie theater or the airport, you no longer have to find the app and then find the barcode within the app; the iPhone’s GPS figures out that you’ve arrived, and displays the correct pass automatically. (The best part may be the shredder-machine animation that appears when you delete a used pass.)

• Guided access. This new mode is something like kiosk mode. It prevents you from leaving the app you’re in — you can’t go back to the Home screen, for example. Apple points out that it’s great for children with autism, teachers who want to administer a test but block the ability to search Google for answers, or museums that want to create walking tours.

By the way, Apple made two other changes that didn’t make the cut for the keynote. First, new versions of Apple’s two photo programs, Aperture and iPhoto, will use the same database. That is, the same photos show up in both programs, with the same categories, tags, ratings, edits and so on, so you can flip back and forth as needed.

Second, there’s a new Airport Express (a pocket-size Wi-Fi base station). This one looks like a white Apple TV — a tiny square — that doubles the network speed and permits more simultaneous connections.

It’s clear that Apple intends to take certain new directions — that the rest of the industry, most likely, will follow:

• Discs are gone. Apple has killed off iDVD, its DVD-design program, and now it’s phasing CD/DVD drives out of its laptops, including the new 15-incher. (An external DVD drive is available, though.) The future, Apple thinks, is all online.

• Ethernet is gone. The new laptop doesn’t have an Ethernet jack for networking (although an adapter is available). It’s all Wi-Fi now, baby.

• Hard drives are gone. Hard drives may become last moving part on a computer. (There is also the fan.) The solid-state ones in the Airs and Apple’s new laptop are faster, bump-proof, quieter, stingier with power — and more expensive. But that, surely, will change.

• Speech is in. Siri is slowly growing in power and in compatibility with Apple’s products, and built-in dictation is just arriving on the Mac. Clearly, Apple isn’t finished with it yet.

Many Apple observers also wonder if Apple thinks that desktop computers are dead, since not a word was said about the iMac and Mac Pro. An executive did assure me, however, that new MacPro designs are under way, probably for release in 2013.

Over all, the presentation Monday morning was dizzying. There were many, many truly ingenious features revealed, some that played catch-up, and a lot to look forward to. None of it proves whether or not Tim Cook and his team can dream up entirely new product categories, the way Steve Jobs did. But for now, they’re doing an excellent job of keeping excitement alive in Apple’s current suite of machines.