One thing I didn’t touch on in my earlier posts about the WWDC Keynote today was the App Store and the addition of the Enterprise features to the iPhone.
First the App Store.
This is something that’s been in the works for awhile and is shaping up to be a very important part of Apple’s strategy. The App Store will allow developers to offer software applications to iPhone/Touch users with installation as simple as buying a song from iTunes. Judging from the demos of a few games and apps today, there are some pretty polished products waiting in the wings to be unleashed. Games from companies like Sega, with Super Monkey Ball (watch the demo linked in the middle of this page) prove that the iPhone could be a worthy contender against other handheld devices like the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP.
Dedicated apps like the auction browsing one demoed from Ebay and the music making app, Band were impressive as well….although these kinds of apps have been available on Installer for jailbroken iPhones for months, albeit not necessarily from the source company as in the Ebay case. A location based social networking app, Loopt was also demoed but reminds me of Twinkle that I covered previously which is arguably better since it’s using Twitter as the base social network. I’ll reserve judgement until I play with it myself though.
It’ll be interesting to see how stable and reliable these will become when they are legitimately available via Apple although some will be at a cost, like Monkey Ball which will be $9.99. I guess that price is okay considering a DS game would be triple that but it makes impulse purchases less likely than if it was priced in the $5 range. It’s unknown if demos will be available to download before purchase which may clinch the sale.
A very welcome feature of the App Store, unlike the iTunes Wifi Store is that as long as the app is under 10mb, you’ll be able to download it over Edge (or 3G) instead of having to use the desktop iTunes/sync method or Wifi. So if you’re on the go and want to check out that new app that came out, most likely you’ll be able to do it no matter where you are. The update notification will be nice too.
Okay. On to the Enterprise stuff.
One of the biggest things that needs to be done in order to help the iPhone penetrate the corporate world is offering integration with Microsoft Exchange Activesync servers which Apple will soon be offering. Corporate (push!) email on the iPhone will be a dream for many Blackberry toting people although I can understand the reluctance to give up the tactile keyboard for some of the people. When I had my Treo I thought there is nothing that could replace a physical keyboard for me but I’ve adapted to the touch keyboard quite well so they shouldn’t fear it. I wouldn’t hold my breath either for a bluetooth keyboard add-on. Apple doesn’t roll that way and neither should you.
Another interesting item as part of the Enterprise rollout is that the supported email attachments has expanded to include Keynote presentations. This means you can email your presentation to the phone (would be nice if you could sync or retrieve via browser) and then plug in the av cable to the iPhone and then plug that into a projector to display your presentation. Will be interested to see how that functions and if you lose anything in the process like transitions or video playback if they are included in the presentation.
Good for the Enterprise but sad for the employee will also be the ability to lock down the apps on a company deployed iPhone. I understand that this is a necessary evil but still don’t like it. I guess a locked down iPhone is still better than a Blackberry. Custom application downloads will also be available to the Enterprise via their intranet.
I wonder how Rogers will try to entice companies away from their competition using the iPhone now that it can compete against the Blackberry.
While the 3G iPhone was the ‘big deal’ announced at the World Wide Developer’s Conference today, Apple also announced some other things. One of those things was ‘Mobile Me’ which is basically a rebranded and upgraded .Mac service offering using the cute me.com domain. This time it includes a lot more features for iPhone/Touch users.
Upon checking my .Mac email after the keynote, I got this:
Dear .Mac member:
Today Apple announced a new Internet service called MobileMe - taking the best of .Mac and adding a host of new features. As a current .Mac member, your account will be automatically upgraded to MobileMe in July. For a closer look, watch the MobileMe Guided Tour and read below for an overview of your new service.
Mac integration you know and love. With MobileMe, you’ll continue to enjoy features that take advantage of seamless integration with Mac OS X and iLife - Back to My Mac; access to your iDisk in the Finder; Mac-to-Mac syncing of Dock items, preferences, and more; iWeb site publishing; and photo and movie sharing directly from iPhoto ‘08 and iMovie ‘08.
New web applications for when you’re away from your Mac. MobileMe features a suite of web applications at www.me.com that have the familiar look and feel of the applications on your Mac. Because these web applications stay in sync with your Mac and other devices, you’ll have the same information wherever you go. Here’s what you’ll find at me.com:
Mail, the anchor of the new suite, is even better with a refined interface.
Contacts has a new three-pane interface, contact groups, maps integration, search, and photo support.
Calendar is a brand-new web application that feels just like iCal, featuring multiple calendars, click-and-drag event creation, and more.
Gallery lets you manage your collection of shared photos and movies from anywhere. You can now upload photos, rearrange their order, and set sharing preferences, all from a browser.
iDisk now has the familiar look of the Mac OS X Finder. It features drag-and-drop filing and an easy new way to share large documents, by sending an email with a link for downloading the file.
Account lets you manage settings such as storage allocation.
To use the new web applications, make sure you have one of these browsers: Safari 3, Internet Explorer 7, or Firefox 2 or later.
Push email. Push contacts. Push calendar. In addition to Mac-to-Mac syncing, MobileMe now keeps your iPhone, your iPod touch, and even a PC in sync. MobileMe pushes new contacts, calendar items, and bookmarks to your Mac or PC, and over the air to your iPhone or iPod touch. For example, if you add a calendar event on the web, the change will automatically be pushed to your Mac and iPhone. New email will be pushed to your iPhone in seconds, eliminating the need to check for messages manually.
As a MobileMe subscriber, you can continue to use your mac.com address for email. You will also be issued a me.com address with the same user name that you can use if you prefer. The choice is yours.
Double the online storage. To give you plenty of space for your email, photos, and other files, MobileMe doubles your storage from 10GB to 20GB for an individual subscription.
We’ll be sure to update you when the new service goes live. In the meantime, if you have any questions about the upcoming transition from .Mac to MobileMe, please visit the MobileMe FAQ.
Sincerely,
The MobileMe Team
I only have a .Mac account because I got it dirt cheap…otherwise, I wouldn’t have it because it’s very overpriced for what you (currently) get. I have been using it to sync my MacBook Air and my iMac address book and calendars which then update my iPhone when I dock it.
One big thing that Mobile Me is offering me is the ability to sync this wirelessly. I’m still not sure it’s worth the $99US price tag as that feature should have shipped with the 1.0 iPhone. It remains to be seen if you can ‘roll your own’ server setup and do this yourself as many people have with the .Mac type services.
The other parts of Mobile Me look nice but I’ll have to wait and see once I’m upgraded in July to see how compelling they are to my normal usage. The fact that they are integrated into almost everything Apple makes might make it harder to not renew next year. Push email adoption will also depend on the data plan pricing for the iPhone in Canada as well.
The countdown has begun to Thursday morning when many Vancouver locals will crawl out of bed much eariler than normal and head down to YVR to board their flights to Austin, Texas for the 2008 edition of South by Southwest. Many of us will be on the same flight which should make the trip that much more fun.
There is still a lot to do to prepare for the trip. I still have to go through the schedule of events while at SXSWi but may take it day by day instead of spending too much time planning every hour of the conference. There are many ways to see what’s going on from the official site, Upcoming, Facebook and the SXSW Insider on Ning to name few. If you’re planning on attending any events or parties, it’s probably a good idea to scope things out in advance and rsvp. While many events are open to all Interactive attendees with a badge, demand usually far exceeds capacity so get on a list if there is one and show up early.
While down in Texas, I’ll probably not be doing a lot of blogging around here until after the conference but will be dropping dispatches from Austin on Miss604, Flickr, Utterz and Twitter…and possibly other places depending on what I find and have time for.
As more of a backup plan in case Twitter implodes under heavy use during SXSW, I decided to setup my own pseudo version of it using the recently released Prologue theme for Wordpress. If you’re going to be down in Austin and want to try it out, drop me an email or direct message and I’ll add you to the list. Using this theme and a standard Wordpress install, we’ll be able to micro-blog what we’re doing without relying on other services to be available as well as not bombarding the non-attendees with tweets.
It’s pretty plain and simple at the moment (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since it loads fast) and that could change if I get time between packing and getting ready. A nice feature of the theme is that you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everyone’s posts or just a specific person so I’ll probably plug my feed into a few services.
That’s it for now….gotta go find my giant suitcase.
I finally received my Moo cards that I had ordered at the beginning of February. This was my third batch and it was strangely the only one to take a really long time to arrive. I wonder if it had anything to do with an influx of orders from people getting them for SXSW which is also the place I was first exposed to them in the first place.
What are they? I tend to call them my ‘personal cards’ as opposed to my somewhat boring ‘business card’ that I have for my corporate day job.
Moo cards are small (about half as tall as a business card) but are very personal. You order them in batches of 100 and are comprised of text on the back and photos on the front. You can customize the text that appears on the back and the cool part is that you also get to choose what appears on the front. Since they partner with a lot of photo sharing sites (I use Flickr), you can easily pull your own photos into Moo and create the card front with these photos. Unlike getting cards from a traditional printer, you can choose how many of your 100 cards has which photos on them. You can get 100 of the same or 100 different photos on the front of the cards or mix and match as much as you want. Pretty cool for only $19.99 plus shipping - just try to get card stock photo cards from a local printer for that little.
My third batch has turned out the best…I decided to order a lot of different photos this time around instead of just a couple of my favs. I also got a few geekier photos in there since I’ll probably be giving a lot out at SXSW soon enough. I expect to come back from Austin with a ton of other people’s cards and look forward to the Moo party down there as well.
You can use an Altoids Chewing Gum tin as the perfect case for them too.
Now that Northern Voice is over, everyone is gearing up for SXSWi which starts in just over a week. My damn Moo cards better get here soon!
One of the great things about attending a conference for a bunch of geeks, is that if there is anything missing or lacking from the conference organizers themselves, the attendees will fix/build/make it. Case in point, there isn’t currently an easy way to see all the panels and sessions in one place.
Previously, I had a Palm device and there was actually a surprisingly good schedule app available. This year of course, just about everyone there will have iPhones or an iPod Touch. There are web optimized versions of the schedule but since I’m not planning on relying on the sketchy wifi, I’d rather have something a little more stable.
Enter Stuart Colville’s iCal version of all the daytime sessions as well as the evening parties. Just download the .ICS files, add them to your iCal and then sync with your device (iPod or iPhone) and you’re done. The added benefit is that you also have it on your Mac laptop if you’re taking one. Awesome job Stuart!
Check out the SXSW Tools page for other things that will help make things more fun.
Photo by kk+ on Flickr
Another cool thing about SXSW is that it’s also a music festival…well actually it was that first and then the geeks came along. A music festival has bands which play music. They want people to hear that music so what do they do? They post a huge pile of MP3’s online of all the bands coming. Then someone makes a giant torrent of all those MP3’s.
Yup, a big pile of free music to listen to on that long flight to Austin. Thanks to Laughing Squid for the torrent link - lots of other great SXSW resources in Scott’s post too.
Finally, check out Phillip’s round up of all the locals making the trek to Texas.
A few of us have been noticing that there hasn’t been as much chatter on the internet about Northern Voice during or immediately following the event. As well, the page views on Flickr seemed to be a lot lower than last year. Personally, I think it’s just that everyone hasn’t fully had a chance for it all to sink in yet. As I’m finding by new followers on Twitter, new contacts on Flickr and a bunch of new feeds I’ve been reading, it’s slowly gaining some momentum after the fact.
Let’s face it, a weekend of conferencing takes it’s toll on people and especially since most of the attendees have normal day jobs that they returned to almost immediately. It takes awhile to get your head around what you participated in and find a way to record or publish those thoughts. Not to mention taking care of all the things you didn’t tend to during the conference.
So in that vein, I thought I’d followup my somewhat brief recap with a few more cool things I’ve found since the weekend:
- my pal, Duane Storey, pulled some awesome out of his hat with his amazing photo mosaic of all the tagged photos in Flickr he could hoover down. He called it 1600 reasons to love Northern Voice and I’m sure he’ll have to rename it as that photo number keeps growing as attendees get out their card readers and upload more shots to the Flickr stream. As Gene said in his post, if you can’t find yourself in those photos, you weren’t there.
- I twittered about it a bit and mentioned it in my first recap but I keep coming across blog posts and photos of people that I wish I had a chance to either spend more time talking to or even just meeting at the conference. I guess one of the cons of going to a conference in your own town, with a lot of friends in attendance, is that you don’t get outside your circle as much as you would if you were somewhere you didn’t know many people. That and there is never enough time.
- I wish I had an opportunity to chat with Stewart Mader whose presentation about Wiki’s I really enjoyed at last years NV and missed his this year. He’s been rounding up some great links and comments from other people as well as doing a great job liveblogging a lot of sessions
- Another missed meet/chat was with Alan Levine who gave a great presentation on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” in which he outlines some of the amazing web tools out there you can use to tell a story. Something he did with all 50 tools and the same story. Alan also managed to capture one of my favorite open mic sessions at the Opening Night party by Scott Leslie called Trackback Love.
- Bobby Dassler took an awesome set of polaroids that turned out really cool…and I’m even in there
- DaveO’s amazing “F*ck Stats, Make Art” session is now available via Audio (MP3) thanks to Cosmo and Matt’s keynote audio is here although he says that it may not be a great experience without the slides. Stewart has a transcript as well.
There is a ton more stuff that I missed that I hope makes its way online eventually. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to next year already.
Check out the Northern Voice wiki for other things you (or I) may have missed.
Update: Looks like videos of Miranda’s natural light talk and Reilly’s modified light talk have been posted. Both are great parts of PhotoCamp. Great video capture job too!
During the Northern Voice Opening Party, Chris Heur asked if he could do a quick interview with me. Chris was doing this to capture the event by talking to as many people as possible and asking them a couple of questions. He simply used his cellphone and a service called Utterz to record the interview and it automagically posted it to his blog, twitter and to his Utterz page (and possibly other places). He also managed to take a decent photo of me which is pretty much a miracle.
Hopefully I sound as cool as everyone else he interviewed during his trip to Vancouver. Thanks Chris…it was a fun thing to participate in and a cool way to capture the people attending the conference.
Just like last year, I had a great time at Northern Voice. Like many (good) conferences, there is always too many people you want to talk to or meet and simply not enough time. Maybe next year there should be a scheduled block of ‘hanging in main hall’ just so you have a little more quality time between sessions to chat.
This year I convinced a few friends that might not ordinarily go to a conference like this to come out and I think they had a great time like I did. My favorite session easily was Kris Krug’s PhotoCamp and still think (like I did during BarCamp) that it could be it’s own stand alone conference. Dave Olson also had an outstanding session about making art instead of worrying about “fucking stats”. Looking forward to hanging more with these guys in Austin real soon.
I enjoyed all the sessions I attended (check out Rebecca’s always awesome liveblog posts of many sessions) but if there was one negative about the conference (which happens to all of them) is that there were a couple of sessions happening concurrently I would have liked to attend but had to make a choice. Judging from the results, Rachael Ashe’s session on light painting looked fantastic and I really should have went to it. I really like the mix of art that has worked its way into some of these tech(ish) events and it’s inspiring to see people doing really cool stuff right in front of you.
Using a cool trick Derek Miller shared at PhotoCamp, here is my Northern Voice wrap up in pictures:
I’ll try to tag as many of the photos as I can but feel free to tag yourself if I didn’t.
Special shout out to Jennie (who flew in from Pittsburgh!) and Dan (from Toronto) for coming out west for a few days. I wish we had more time to spend together.
I completely forgot to pick up a “Bloggable” T-shirt during the conference….maybe Boris can help me buy one. Maybe next year Basco5 can do some t-shirts too.
I’m at UBC this weekend attending the Northern Voice conference. Last night was the opening party/dinner at the Waldorf Hotel:
I’ll be taking photos all weekend and I’ll be posting intermittently. As usual, Rebecca’s got the live blog going on.
You can watch my flickr stream or all the photos tagged by the other attendees.
One of the cool side benefits of going to the Interactive portion of SXSW is that you get exposed to the Film and Music festivals. Unless you purchase a gold passport, your Interactive badge won’t get you into those events, panels and parties…well, maybe the parties but they have armed guards preventing the film geeks from mingling with the web geeks (and vice versa) inside the convention center.
In previous years that I’ve attended, and hopefully this time around, there has been downloads of music from all the bands playing during SXSW and a huge torrent of trailers for all the movies showing during the film portion. This amounts to exposure to a ton of new music and cool new films you might not otherwise be exposed to. So even if you’re not going to Austin, you can still benefit since the downloads are free and open to anyone. Looks like this year, they have a trailer site with a videoplayer to browse through all the films. They still haven’t posted (or at least I couldn’t find) the music downloads but they do have a list of all the bands performing. I’m going to have to see about getting into the Moby session.
This year, the first trailer that I’ve come across, for a documentary about online gaming/virtual worlds called Second Skin, looks very interesting and just happens to be free for Interactive attendees:
Speaking of games, another nice benefit of going to Interactive is the Screenburn Festival which happens at the same time. They also have their own arcade tradeshow with game companies showing their wares with demos and giveaways. It’s free and open for the public as well.
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