Like most of you, I am a tech guru. I am very into new devices and technology. Today, Apple had a conference in which they discussed software on the iPhone. What changed today though? How will all of this effect the customers? How will my iPhone be different? I try to answer these questions now.
iPhone Software Develper Kit released - This is your toolbox that will allow developers as small as you and I and as large of EA to develop for the iPhone.
What does this mean for the iPhone customers? TONS of new applications. Apple called a couple of companies 2 weeks ago and asked them to develop iPhone software and present them at the conference today. All of these were developed using two programmers in 2 weeks. Some of the programmers had never programmed on a Mac before.
What Apple developed in a day: A photo modification software. This is essentially allows you to warp photos, pinch photos and then shake the iPhone to restore it back to the original photo.
What Apple developed in 2 weeks: Touch Fighter is a 3D game where you fly around space shooting enemy ships. Tap the screen to shoot, steer with the accelerometer (physically tilt your iphone in all directions).
What EA developed in 2 weeks: Spore on the iPhone. Tilt the iPhone to move your spore around. Customize your spore. The first 18 levels of Spore look great on the iPhone.
What Salesforce.com developed in 2 weeks: Sales Force Automation application. This is used for sales gurus. How many sales did you make? Where did you make them? Totally integrated with graphs and maps.
What AOL developed in 2 weeks: AIM for the iPhone. This is a fully functional AIM application. Swipe the screen to move from one active chat to another. Change your profile, icon, away message all from your iPhone.
What Epocrates developed in 2 weeks: Epocrates develops software for doctors. This will allow doctors to have a full drug database in their pocket. Search for a drug by name, color, size, shape, etc. Drug information page shows a detailed image of the pill along with all the information you would ever need to know. See what kind of adverse effects multiple drugs will have on a patient.
What SEGA developed in 2 weeks: Super Monkey Ball for the iPhone. This game uses the accelerometer (tilting the iPhone) to navigate your monkey through mazes. This is not a mobile phone game. This is a console game on a phone.
This is what 3rd party companies made in TWO WEEKS. How will customers get these applications? With every iPhone, another icon called "App Store" will be added. Wirelessly download new applications. If an updated version of an application gets released, you will be notified via the App Store. App Store works just like iTunes. Search by Name, Top Sellers, Staff Favorites, etc.
This will all be available to consumers by June. What is missing? Money. Developers need money to develop applications. Google was built with $24 million. Amazon built with $8 million. KPCB is funding iPhone developers with $100,000,000 .
Possibilities taken from today: Developers will now be able to develop tons of business, educational and entertainment applications. One of the most interesting ideas I have seen is VoIP on the iPhone. With VoIP being developed on the iPhone, long distance calls, calls around the world will be free. (VoIP allows you to make calls over the internet).
I've added this to the bottom because I'm guessing this is less important to most of you. This was also introduced at the presentation today. If you are in a big business, this will most likely make you very very happy. The iPhone will now support all of these new features with the upcoming FREE software update in June:
- Push email - utilizes a mail delivery system with real-time capability to "push" email through to the client as soon as it arrives, rather than requiring the client to poll and collect or pull mail manually. With a push email smartphone, for example, the client's mailbox is constantly updated with arriving email without user intervention.
- Push calendar - a way to synchronize calendars. Have a single calendar source that the community can edit. Then have streams that your calendar application can subscribe to (for example an ical stream). That way changes show up immediately on your pda or whatever you use to keep track of engagements.
- Push contacts - A way to add and modify contact information on a massive scale to numerous different phones at once.
- Global address list - a directory service within the Microsoft Exchange email system
- Cisco IPsec VPN - A form of computer security
- Certificates and Identities - an electronic document which incorporates a digital signature to bind together a public key with an identity - information such as the name of a person or an organization, their address, and so forth. The certificate can be used to verify that a public key belongs to an individual.
- WPA2/802.1x - Wireless security
- Enforced security policies - As stated
- Device configuration - As stated
- Remote wipe - If you lose your iPhone, your company can automatically erase all important data on it without actually having the iPhone on hand. This way all important information is never seen by the wrong eyes.
Apple is doing most of this using Microsoft Exchange integration using ActiveSync.
If you are still unsure what some of this stuff is, Google it =]
That about wraps up what happened today. Hope you enjoyed it.
By LoadedStatement
Brian ZuckerGeneral PR Manager, VGChartzbzucker@vgchartz.com
