From iPhoneFAQ

Bay Partners turned many a head in the financial and software development worlds when it drummed up $10 million dollars last year to fund application development for Facebook. On Friday, San Francisco venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers trumped that offer ten times over, by establishing a $100 million dollar fund to back software development for the Apple iPhone.

Apple, recently released their official iPhone SDK (Software Development Kit), to much anticipation and fanfare. Though software development for the iPhone has been underway in an unofficial form via an unofficial SDK for months now, this move by Apple opens up “legitimate” development to any and all.

The grandeur of the iFund, as it is being called, may drive heavy development of applications geared specifically for the Apple iPhone. The result, in turn, could be delivery of customers to Apple. As the availability of software products for the iPhone increases relative to other devices, customers may be likely to opt for a device with more possibilities. At least, so hopes Kleiner Perkins.

Read more at iPhoneFAQ

From Financial Times

Steve Jobs and two of his top lieutenants spent just over an hour last week outlining their plans to allow software makers to create programs custom-built to run on the iPhone, Apple’s innovative mobile handset.

The move could mark the beginning of a new phase in the development of mobile software, as programmers build programs that are not limited by the physical constraints – such as fixed buttons and small screens – that plague many other mobile handsets.

The iPhone’s break-through touch screen means that Apple’s mobile handset is a virtual blank slate, and the ability to write mobile software free from the usual constraints is likely to have software geeks salivating.

“You’ve got the ultimate in flexibility in user interface,” says Van Baker, an analyst at Gartner.

“That, combined with a big, high resolution screen, makes it an intriguing platform in the mobile space.”

John Doerr, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, underscored the excitement around the iPhone’s potential to emerge as a powerful new software platform on Thursday.

Read more at Financial Times

From Macworld

Apple said Thursday that it will control the sale and distribution of all iPhone software created by independent developers. The software will be distributed via a new program on the iPhone called App Store, as well as on Macs and PCs via a new section of the iTunes Store.

Unveiling App Store during Thursday’s iPhone briefing at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters, CEO Steve Jobs described App Store as “an application we’ve written to deliver apps to the iPhone. And we’re going to put it on every single iPhone with the next release of the software.”

That software—the iPhone 2.0 release—is slated for June and will also include the Software Development Kit announced Thursday. A beta of the SDK is available now from Apple.

The iPhone 2.0 release will be a free update for iPhone users. Jobs said the same software update will also be available to iPod touch owners, though they’ll be charged a fee, just as they were in January when Apple charged $19.95 for the 1.1.3 software update.

“The way we account for the iPhone is with subscription accounting, so we take the revenue over two years,” Jobs explained at Thursday’s briefing. “The way that we account for iPods is more normal accounting. And so, because of that, we have to charge a nominal fee… But we don’t look at this as a profit opportunity.”
The App Store

When it debuts, the App Store will borrow its look-and-feel from the iTunes Wi-Fi Store, the online retail outlet that allows iPhone and iPod touch users to buy music directly from their handheld devices. The App Store will break out items, categories, and top downloads into lists. A search function will help iPhone users find the applications they want.

Users tap the price of an application to download the software. A second tap will install it on the iPhone, either over a cell network or via Wi-Fi. Alternately, users can buy iPhone applications through iTunes running on a computer, installing them by synchronizing the iPhone.

Read the rest of the store at Macworld

From Forbes.com

Steve Jobs just couldn’t resist. The secretive Apple chief executive, who is known to have spent some of his early days hacking the phone system, took a jab at rival smart-phone maker Research In Motion as Apple unveiled new business-friendly features for the iPhone on Thursday. The biggest news: Apple has licensed Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync for the iPhone, allowing iPhone users to pour e-mail and calendar information living on their company’s Microsoft Exchange systems directly into the iPhone.

By contrast, Jobs said, BlackBerry users rely on servers run by Research In Motion (nasdaq: RIMM - news - people ) to shuttle information between corporate servers and BlackBerry users. “Every e-mail goes through a NOC [Network Operations Center] up in Canada,” Jobs said during a question and answer session with reporters. “That provides a single point of failure, but it also provides a very interesting security situation, where someone working up at that NOC could be potentially having a little look at your e-mail. Nobody seems to be focused on that. We certainly are. We think that a direct connection could be a little more secure.”

The jab comes as Apple (nasdaq: AAPL - news - people ) announced it will build a slew of business-friendly features for the iPhone and iPod Touch, including support for push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, virtual private networks and support for certificates and identities into the next version of its iPhone operating system. The neatest trick, however, could be the ability to get e-mail and calendar information directly from Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) Exchange servers. And Jobs had no complaints about Microsoft’s Exchange ActiveSync, which Apple has licensed, to provide these functions for the iPhone.

Read the rest of the story at Forbes.com

From Infoworld

Apple’s iPhone SDK offers far more than many developers expected, according to developers that InfoWorld spoke with after the long-awaited SDK unveiled today. “It looks like this is what everybody wanted,” said Tony Meadow, principal at Bear River Associates, a mobile application development vendor. “Apple is doing it the right way.”

Forrester Research analyst Simon Yates, concurred, saying that the Apple SDK should please three core constituencies: Developers, enterprise IT and consumers.

“This is direct competition for RIM BlackBerry, and it gives Apple access to millions of Exchange and Outlook users, said Yates.

“This is a giant step toward the business market,” concurred Rado Kotorov, technical director of strategic product management at business intelligence vendor Information Builders.

Developers get a solid database and a familiar API tool set
What pleased Meadow and other developers was a set of functionality that will let them write native iPhone applications through access to the iPhone APIs.

In addition, Meadow thought Apple hit the right note by offering SQL Lite as the built-in database layer. SQL Lite, an open-source database, is widely used by the mobile developer community and runs well on small devices. “It will make it easy to store data,” he said.

Cocoa Touch, the built-in set of APIs that re-creates the Cocoa tool set used to handle the user-interface-generated events in Mac OS X is targeted at the iPhone’s and iPod Touch’s unique touchscreen as well as their gesture-based UI. “It’s an elegant way to deal with the interface paradigm,” said Meadow.

Read the rest of the article here

From Market Watch:

Speaking at a Morgan Stanley technology conference, Oppenheimer said Apple wasn’t able to reliably establish the number on unlocked iPhones on the market during the last quarter of 2007. When Apple reported its results for that quarter, it said it had sold about 4 million iPhones, but the number of activated phones from its wireless carrier partners such as AT&T Inc. in the U.S. was far below Apple’s sales figures.

However, Oppenheimer said the unlocked phones, which do not generate recurring revenue for Apple, were a sign of “unprecedented demand,” and weren’t necessarily a bad thing for the company.

“We view it as a positive indicator of future demand,” Oppenheimer said.

This is good news, possibly stating that they won’t go after unlocked phones, meaning researching ways to disable the unlockability (is that a word?). At least I hope that is what this means!

This is just a rumor found over at computerworld, but it does sound exciting and very fitting for the announcement by Apple last week saying there were some exciting new enterprise features coming our way.  What could be bigger for the corporate world that having Exchange on their iPhones?  I think this would increase the adoption of the iPhone by big business.

Apple has released a new iPhone model which now comes in 16GB for $499, joining the 8GB model for $399. iPod touch now comes in a 32GB model for $499, joining the 16GB model for $399 and the 8GB model for $299.  You can never have too much space with all the possible uses of the iPhone, photos, music, movies and more!

I guess the rumor post from before wasn’t so true after all unless this was a security update.

Apple has released iPhone software version 1.1.4. It’s now available for download and installation through iTunes.

Apple isn’t offering any specific details on what’s changed in this new release, except to say that the 1.1.4 release “includes bug fixes and supersedes all previous versions.”

UPDATE: The Ziphone unlocking software that we recommend to unlock your iPhone for free has not been confirmed to work with version 1.1.4 but is said to have it available on the 29th of this month after testing.  I will post when it becomes available.

It appears that the iPhone and iPod touch will be getting a $100 price reduction as early as March but no later than mid April of this year.  This would make the 16GB iPhone and the 32GB iPod touch have a price tag of $399 and the 16GB iPod touch down to $299.  Most likely all other models would be eliminated.  Once again, Apple reducing prices after a new product release, which should make for some not so happy 32GB iPod Touch owners.  If you haven’t bought one yet, maybe hold off till they do the price drop.  We did see a price drop in the iPod shuffle today, so maybe the trend has already started!