This Tuesday I am scheduled to give a presentation at Ignite San Diego about iPhone Development. A presentation at Ignite is accompanied by a 20-slide deck (Keynote or PowerPoint) that advances automatically. Each slide is shown for 15 seconds, so the complete presentation takes five minutes.
Ignite was inspired by Pecha Kucha Nights, where speakers are given 20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds, giving each speaker six minutes and 40 seconds of fame. ‘Pecha Kucha’ is the Japanese term for ‘chit chat’. The first Ignite was sponsored by O’Reilly Media and took place in Seattle in 2006. Since then the event spread over the world. O’Reilly has continued to support Ignite.
David Pogue, the well-known columnist for the New York Times on everything gadget, no, everything technology, did something interesting: David asked his Twitter followers which apps were still missing in the iTunes App Store. In other words, which apps do they want for their iPhone (or iPad, or iPod touch) but are not available?
It is an interesting article which you can read here; one paragraph particularly struck me:
Gammage Auditorium, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Tempe, Arizona.
With the release of iOS 4, which brings us, among other features, iAd, Apple has updated the iTunes end-user license agreement and privacy policy. With this Apple enables itself to collect even more user information as the company already did, now also allowing to constantly collect the user’s location based on the iPhone’s GPS. Apple wants to use this information to tailor an ad to the users interests. Apple says the location data will be collected anonymously.
The above prompted two members of the Dutch parliament to ask formal questions to the Minister of Economic Affairs, Maria van der Hoeven. They want to know if the Minister is aware of what Apple is doing, if she agrees with Apple’s statement that location data can be stored anonymously and what she plans to do about it. The Minster has not answered yet but I did.
For the Dutch website One More Thing I did a quick review of the new iPhone 4. The new phone went on sale today in the US, but not in every country. My Dutch and Belgian readers at One More Thing can not just go to an Apple Store and check out the phone. So I went and below are my first impressions:
Children and Chickens at Play.
Picture taken in San Juan Capistrano, California, just west of the Amtrak station.
I hear they are a lot of folks at WWDC (Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference) this year that have never been at a WWDC before. I’m not there this year (due to fun ‘family circumstances’) but I have been to a WWDC about 15 times before. What to do at a WWDC? Here is my take:
It seems that this years WWDC will be about iPhone/iPad development mostly. Recently more and more people are saying the Google’s Android is the only big competitor to Apple’s iPhone OS. Some people are even saying Android market share is already bigger than Apple’s. What will Steve Jobs say about that in his keynote that starts the WWDC on June 7? How will Apple keep ahead of Google?
This is a summary of a blog post I wrote for One More Thing. If you can read Dutch, check out the extended version of this post at:
http://www.onemorething.nl/2010/06/keynote-vooruitblik-steve-vs-google/
Here is what Steve will do:
- He will say that Apple has created the best platform ever. The platform that is the most technically advanced, has the best App Store, etc.
- Steve will show some pretty interesting statistics about sales, market share and browser market share. He usually has some of this stuff at the beginning of a keynote. Sure these stats will show Apple’s superiority.
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Steve will say something about iAd, Apple’s new advertising platform. This is what Steve had to say about Google and Android:
We did not enter the search business. They entered the phone business. Make no mistake: Google wants to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.
Well, Google’s business is actually selling ads. Apple is now officially moving into Google’s business. As a developer I it would be nice to be able to make a little extra money.
Here is what Apple may do:
- They may start allowing more mobile operators, particularly Verizon, to carry the iPhone.
- They may lower the price of the iPhone.
We will see. If Apple does not lower the price of the iPhone and/or does not expand its market share by starting to sell an iPhone that will work on Verizon’s network there is one simple conclusion: Apple is doing way better than some people want us to believe they do. That would be nice.
I was born in Holland. It is a flat country.
Picture taken in Tiengemeten, Netherlands.
