Watch the IPhone Reading experience

But there's no soundtrack.


Iceberg for iPhone 3.0

Why Adopt? A VC speaks...

...and hundreds respond.

Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):

iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
Facebook - a social net with real utility
Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
Blogger - a printing press for everyone
Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before.

From Fred Wilson's VC blog. The responses are great too.

New Business Models: iPhone newspapers

The Apple iPhone 3GS, premiered yesterday at Apple Inc's Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, boasts an array of important new features for the newspaper industry and journalism at large. Perhaps most pertinent is the development that content can now be purchased from within iPhone applications. This new functionality presents newspapers with the opportunity to employ subscription and micro-payment structures to monetize the delivery of their content to their mobile phone readership.

Given the recent developments in the newspaper industry, such as the 'secret' meeting held in Chicago organised by the Newspaper Association of America to discuss how to monetise online content, it seems the question is no longer whether papers will begin charging online, but when, and how. And with regards to the iPhone 3GS, will they allow readers to continue to access their content for free, maybe making it harder to shift them to a pay structure in the future, or will newspapers seize this opportunity and begin charging readers as soon as the new OS is released?

From EditorsWeblog.
And if it works, what about every other kind of content? Interesting.

Like it's 1977

After following the demonstrations yesterday on a palette of applications someone said to me: "I think I'm going to be an anarchist...again." Hard not in this Red Riding, Labour isn't Working, time not to juggle youth and middle age. Rory Cellan-Jones seems to be thinking the same, only with a hard news hat on.

I particularly liked this message from one frustrated Twitterer trying to get the word out from the Bank of England:

"Mobile coverage v bad prob due to number of anarchists also using iPhones".

Just a minute - anarchists using iPhones? Or Twitter? Does that really compute? One is a mobile phone that you might think was more of a yuppie toy than a revolutionary tool - the other is a social network used principally by an older, more establishment crowd than, say, Facebook. Or maybe those are just my preconceptions?

As I find myself London (re) Calling courtesy of the ripped CDs, it's not hard to also remember what punk begat for 18 years.

Dot Life, & Rory Cellan-Jones.

What will the book P2P torrent be called? Treasure Island?

Of course.

Amazon.com Inc. plans to release a program Wednesday for reading electronic books on Apple Inc.'s iPhone, extending Amazon's sales of digital books to devices beyond its Kindle e-book reader.

Amazon's software application, which can be downloaded free of charge, allows iPhone and iPod Touch users to read books or periodicals purchased on the Web or through their dedicated Kindle device, usually for $9.99. Using a service that Amazon calls whispersync, the program keeps track of a readers' latest page in any given book across both a Kindle and iPhone.

"There are times when you're going to be in a place where you happen to have your iPhone but not your Kindle," said Ian Freed, an Amazon vice president. "If I get stuck in line at the grocery store, I can pick up where I was reading with my iPhone."

From the WSJ.

Now I feel Old - introducing the drug dealer IPhone game

DrugLords is a location-based massively multiplayer online game about drug trafficking. Using GPS inside your iPhone, you become a drug dealer in the criminal underworld, which exists parallel to your everyday life.

From a-steroids. I'm assuming this is a joke.


But then here's Mashable:

Unfortunately, the game is currently in early, closed beta stage, but, according to the developers, a free beta version will be launched in the next couple of weeks and distributed through the iTunes App Store. I’ve no doubt that we’ll see more and more games which use the iPhone’s location and networking capabilities to create massive multiplayer worlds in which you can immerse on the go.

Is October 29 some kind of online April Fool's Day?

Wozniak in the Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph launches the IPod is Dead group.

"The iPod has sort of lived a long life at number one," he says. "Things like, that if you look back to transistor radios and Walkmans, they kind of die out after a while.

"It's kind of like everyone has got one or two or three. You get to a point when they are on display everywhere, they get real cheap and they are not selling as much."

Mr Wozniak even speaks out against the iPhone 3G, Apple's latest cult product which caused pandemonium in the West End when it was launched in Apple's Regent Street store this summer.

"Consumers aren't getting all they want when companies are very proprietary and lock their products down," he says when comparing the iPhone's closed operating system to the new Google phone's open source system which allows anyone to modify and adapt the way the phone works. "I would like to write some more powerful apps than what you're allowed," he laments.

Steve Wozniak: Apple co-founder, on the iPod, iPhone, and future for Apple