Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4: Watch the Video

You can watch the entire speech and demonstration by Steve Jobs, introducing the iPhone 4, here.

Steve Jobs Speech Introducing iPhone 4

Will Apple Be First to Make the Video Calling Breakthrough?

Lots of people will point out that person-to-person video calling appliances and features have been available for a while. Most of us would point to Skype, while others would point to the capabiltiies Nokia has been offering on its high-end phones, or the specialized video telephony products now on the market.

Apple's new  iPhone 4 "FaceTime" video calling feature might be notable, though. People will have different opinions about the ease of use for Skype video telephony, but the big snag for most consumer video telephony appliances has been the need to buy them in pairs.

The iPhone 4 might be the first "appliance" supporting video telephony that does not actually have to be "bought in pairs," given the huge installed base the device is likely to have, globally. The other angle is that video telephony could become a "mere feature" of the most-widely-used communications appliance on the planet, though of course for the moment only on Apple iPhones from version 4 and forward.

Video calling might be a social function and therefore there is a network effect not possible when the units are deployed pair by pair.

Some significant sub-set of the mobile user population uses iPhones. In my own family, for example, all four of my children use iPhones, and it appears iPhone use among their peers is just about that high.

By confining FaceTime sessions to Wi-Fi connections, Apple avoids the almost-certain uneven quality of experience users would experience on AT&T's 3G network.

Innovations sometimes, perhaps ever, solely or primarily dependent on development of new technology. More commonly, it is a combination of ease of use, user installed base, price and the face that lots of other people seem to be doing it. Up to this point, almost no users had to worry about "everybody else doing it." That could change, beginning with the iPhone 4.

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What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon

Apple's new iPhone 4, announced yesterday and on sale June 24, has wide ranging implications for big Internet players like Google, Microsoft, Netflix, and Amazon, Barclays analyst Doug Anmuth believes. For starters, the "mobile Internet" will be more platform-based and less URL-driven than the traditional Internet.

What does that mean? Mobile platforms and app stores, as well as "apps," will be more important than platforms or app stores tend to be for the PC-based Internet use case. People are simply not going to "search" as intensively, or interact as much, as they do when using the Internet in a PC mode.

Google remains the default search engine on the iPhone, which helps Google. But Apple seems to be highly optimistic about its prospects in the mobile display ad market.

Anmuth does not believe Amazon Kindle sales will be hurt much. He expects the iPad to take some share, but not much, from Kindle.

What iPhone 4 Means For Google, Microsoft, Netflix, And Amazon:

Amazon CloudFront: HTTPS Access

Amazon CloudFront, the firm's content delivery network, has reduced pricing 25 percent. CloudFront HTTP requests now start at $0.0075 per 10,000 requests.

Amazon also now supports delivery of content over an HTTPS connection, by replacing the 'http:' with 'https:' in the links to CloudFront content.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is a combination of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol with theSSL/TLS protocol to provide encryption and secure (website security testing) identification of the server.

HTTPS connections are often used for payment transactions on the World Wide Web and for sensitive transactions in corporate information systems.

Amazon also has added a new edge location in New York City. This location will provide even better performance to users requesting content from New York and the northeastern United States.

Amazon Web Services Blog: Amazon CloudFront: HTTPS Access, Another Edge Location, Price Reduction:

Apple's Curse of Success

Oddly enough, time, it's own success, the inescapable logic of public company valuation and the firm's ability to churn out products it can convince people they have to own, are going to cause Apple problems, despite the launch of version four of its iPhone, the iAd network or the iPad.

Apple likely will execute well enough on all those fronts. Still, as it keeps getting bigger, friction is going to increase. The simple fact for any large company is that growth is hard to sustain because of the law of large numbers: Apple simply has to climb a bigger wall every quarter as its market capitalization and sales revenue grows, quarter over quarter.

Also, as every equity analyst has said, or thought, Steve Jobs, a singularly important executive in the technology business, will not live forever. No matter how capable his successors, he has proven to be an unusually effective chief executive, not for his management prowess but for his driving vision. Most companies produce products. Apple creates emotional needs.

So Apple will start to become the victim of its own success. No company can create an endless string of hit products quarter-after-quarter and year-after-year, though it is hard to argue with what Apple has achieved since 2001. The iPod began the streak.

But then Apple discovered iTunes was something more than a distribution system for music, leading to the App Store and the mobile apps trend. The iPhone arguably changed not only mobile phone design but the business ecosystem. The iPad might be the start of another wholly-new mass market. And Apple seems destined to be a player in mobile advertising as well.

Keep in mind that Apple shares were selling for about $8 in 2001. They are up around $250 or so today.

Nor will even these challenges prevent Apple from bidding to be among the dominant firms of the coming mobile computing era. It has a shot at such success. But success, for a firm that is getting to be as large as Apple, increasingly gets difficult, no matter how visionary it is.

The targets keep getting bigger. And, at some point, reversion to the mean will occur. Some future executive will start to worry about the numbers too much, become shy about destroying existing product lines in favor of new and untested product lines. Apple will lose that "magical" quality Jobs talks about so much.

Will Apple Get 48% of All U.S. Mobile Advertising by End of 2010?

Apple CEO Steve Jobs predicts the Apple iAd network will get 48 percent of spending on mobile advertising in the United States from July through December of 2010.

That's a stunning prediction, given that total U.S. mobile advertising for 2010 is estimated to be about $593 million. Apple has about six months to get that done, starting from zero. Well, not zero.

Apple says it already has gotten commitments for about $60 milliion from  Nissan, Citi, Unilever, AT&T, Chanel, GE, Liberty Mutual, State Farm, Geico, Campbells, Sears, JC Penny, Target, Best Buy, Direct TV, TBS, and Disney.

Apple iPhone 4: All that Metal Includes the Antenna

Which means signal reception is going to be affected by the way the user holds the device, though possibly less so than in the older design.

That's a lot of metal, with fairly good spatial dispersion for the antenna element. So in a weak signal area, reception might improve, for voice, when the speakerphone is activated and the user is "hands free."

Apple Demo Crashes: 570 Wi-Fi Networks Live in the Room

Sign of the times: Apple demo crashes. Attendees told to shut everything off. Why? "There are 570 Wi-Fi base stations operating in this room...That’s why our demo crashed.”

But the iPad updates are pretty amazing. About two million iPads were sold in the first 59 days (one every 3 seconds).

Some 35 million apps have been downloaded, about 17 per iPad.

Five of six biggest book publishers say the share of iPad e-books is 22 percent of all ebook sales in the first eight weeks.

There’s now more than 225,000 applications in the App Store and there have been five billion downloads.

About 15,000 apps are submitted every week, and 95 percent are approved in seven days.

AT&T Appears to Allow Some iPhone 3GS Users to Upgrade to iPhone 4 Without ETF

AT&T says it has adjusted eligibility requirements for at least some iPhone owners, allowing them to upgrade to the version 4 model without being slammed with an early termination penalty.

It is not clear to me that "every" iPhone customer will be able to do so. One of the iPhones on my account was replaced in November 2009 and it still appears that the upgrade date remains November 2011.

With some exceptions such as this, it appears AT&T wants to avoid negative reaction from most iPhone users who have gotten their 3GS devices and have had them a year or so.

Last year, AT&T likewise allowed some, perhaps most, iPhone 3G users to upgrade to the newer iPhone 3G S at the same discounted price as new subscribers. The move followed customer criticism about having to pay a $200 fee to upgrade to the iPhone 3G S before their two-year contract was over. Now AT&T is getting ahead of the crowd to make sure recent customers will see the same heavily-subsidized iPhone pricing as new and out-of-contract users.

iPad Gets 22% of E-Book Reader Market in Several Months on Market

Steve Jobs says Apple's iPad already has gotten 22 percent market share of e-book readers. Not too shabby for a product that allows users to read e-books as a feature, not as the primary device function.

Is Microsoft About to Fall Behind in Tablets AND Mobile Phones?

Goldman Sachs analysts caution that Microsoft is at risk of falling behind the iPad in the same way that the company fell behind the iPhone.

"Given iPad’s success, tablet PCs dominate many investor conversations, as it has created the potential of a fourth consumption device (PC, phone, TV and now tablet)," writes Goldman Sachs analyst Sarah Friar.

Microsoft seems to believe the tablet is simply another form factor for the PC. Apple perhaps doesn't agree, and maybe doesn't have to worry about which view is correct. If all Apple can do is make the absolute-best tablet PC, then it wins. If it uncovers the fourth media device, and executes, it also wins, and maybe wins even bigger.

But it is hard to see how Apple can lose, at this point. The bigger question is whether anybody else can win, and if they can, how big they can win.

As Ballmer shrugs off the iPad, Microsoft risks another late start:

Google TV: Still the Business of the Future?

There's no telling what Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, might bring up today at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. He might announce something that would make Apple TV more than a hobby, which is how Apple formally characterizes it.


But that hasn't stopped Google from launching Google TV, its own effort to meld "the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience." Google  TV builds on Google Chrome to allow users to access all of their favorite websites and easily move between television and the web.

Google TV will use an SDK and web APIs for TV so developers can build richer applications and distribute them through Android Market.

Google is working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale in the fall of 2010, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide.

"The TV industry is eventually going to be severely disrupted by the Internet, and eventually, I hope that I'll be able to get everything I want to watch online," says Dan Frommer, Business Insider deputy editor. "But it's going to take longer than it should, because TV companies are still fairly insulated -- especially as Comcast buys NBC -- and can protect their legacy business models for a while longer."

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Less Apple Hype Than is Typical

Apple is expected to unveil a new iPhone on June 7 that is thinner with a flat back, higher resolution display and a front-facing camera. Apple might have additional details about the iAd network and Game Center, the social networking feature, according to Wall Street Journal reports.

There might be less hype for this upgrade than typically is the case, because of the unauthorized leak of a prototype.

A new iPhone OS 4.0 operating system also will be debuted.

Analysts believe that the phone will be priced at a similar range as the current iPhone 3GS, which starts at $199 with a two-year contract, with the iPhone 3GS price cut to $99 with a similar contract.
The new lower price for the 3GS device, combined with AT&T Inc.'s new data prices, which lower the entry-level monthly service rate, could accelerate demand beyond the strong triple-digit growth the phone has been seeing, some believe.

"One of the impediments to smartphone adoption has been the service plan," says Shaw Wu, an analyst for Kaufman Brothers, adding that "when they make a form factor change, it's pretty powerful."

Apple is expected to sell about 36 million iPhones in its fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2010.

So Who'll Follow AT&T's Wireless Pricing Model?

Question: Which Internet access providers will follow AT&T and adopt some form of "bucket-based" access pricing? Answer: Everybody, eventually.

To be sure, Sprint says it has no immediate plans to change its "unlimited" pricing. Sprint Nextel currently has no plans to change its mobile data pricing structure in the wake of AT&T Mobility's decision to move to a usage-based model, according to CEO Dan Hesse, at least for its fourth-generation network and voice devices.

Sprint already has a 5-Gbyte monthly cap for users of its 3G data cards and dongles, though the 4G network has an unlimited plan for dongle and data card users.

Clearwire Corp, 55 percent owned by Sprint Nextel Corp, also plans to keep unlimited data plans. But pricing changes are inevitable.

The reason the WiMAX network can offer unlimited data access across the board is because there are so few users on the network at the moment. That will change.

So Who'll Follow AT&T's Wireless Pricing Model? - Comcast: 'gauging customer interest' in unlimited wireless broadband - dslreports.com

Sprint Says HTC Evo Set a Sales Record

Whatever else the HTC Evo might mean for Sprint, it seems already to have accomplished one thing: settting a single-day sales record for Sprint Nextel. On June 4, 2010, the Evo became the device that has sold the most units in a single day, ever, at Sprint Nextel.

Sprint says the total number of HTC EVO 4G devices sold on launch day was three times the number of Samsung Instinct and Palm Pre devices sold over their first three days on the market combined.

In many cases it appears the Evo, which works on both the 3G and 4G networks, was being bought by customers who actually cannot use the 4G network yet, as Clearwire, which is building the 4G network, strains to add markets in Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Denver, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, New York City, Pittsburgh, Salt Lake City, San Francisco, St. Louis and Washington, D.C.

"HTC EVO 4G has more than lived up to our expectations that it would be one of the most anticipated technology products of the year," said Kevin Packingham, Sprint SVP.