Here are my notes from the Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference:

• Apple is cutting the price of the iPhone to $199 for the 8GB version and $299 for the 16GB version.
  This price tags now puts the iPhone in direct competition with Nokia on the consumers market and with Blackberry on the enterprise market.
  The iPhone is now targeting mainstream consumers and not only the high-end market…
• 35% of Fortune 500 companies participated in Apple’s enterprise iPhone experiment – including the US Army, Disney, etc. That’s quite an impressive market engagement.
  The new iPhone enterprise features, coupled with the new competitive price tag can make Apple a significant player in the enterprise market. Look out RIM…
• Seems like $9.99 is going to be the pricing standard for iPhone apps. Cheap…
• MobileMe was dubbed “Exchange for the rest of us” – a new service from Apple to synchronize personal data across devices and platforms.
  Basically it does what Plaxo does but its not free :S
  • Microsoft’s Live MeshSkyDriveFoldershare services now have a new serious competition…
  • In “Don’t Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You” Joel Spolsky claims that data portability is just a theoretical problem invented by architecture astronauts (Ray Ozzie in this case).
    Joel picked a bad example to prove his point as I guess having all the major players trying to data portability is a sign that its a real need.
    Personally, I don’t know what I would have done without Plaxo and Foldershare but that’s a topic for another post I guess…
• The seventh release of the iPhone SDK is out.
• The next version of Max OS X is called Snow Leopard and is set to be released within a year.
  • Apple plans to support new hardware architectures (like multiple CPUs) and fix Leopard issues as well as add native support for Microsoft Exchange.
  • Sounds more like a Leopard Service Pack than a new major version…
• The “Apple Push Notification Service” – finally a decent solution for notifications for background applications on a mobile platform.
  Instead of draining battery life and degrading performance by running a background process, applications can use the service to update remotely.
  Here’s how Dan Moran from MacWorld describes it: > as you run an app like an IM client, it’s connected to the server. When the user quits the app, the iPhone will maintain a connection to the server, which will let them push notifications. It can push three types of notification: badges, custom alert sounds, and you can push custom textual alerts, appearing kind of like SMS messages and you can provide buttons that will automatically launch application. Great thing about this design: it scales, but only requires one persistent connection. This is sweet, sweet news for all developers and those who wants to use IM clients especially.

Any other thoughts regarding Apple’s announcements and plans?

Twitter is down again. Just ask https://www.istwitterdown.com/ …

It’s funny that we’re starting to take this for granted…

There’s a new video testimonial at www.duet.com about Duet implementation in Auckland Regional Council.
Check it out at https://www.duet.com/MediaLibrary/Videos/ARCCustomerTestimonialFlash/tabid/257/Default.aspx

I put some pictures from the Microsoft Israel R&D Labs launch event yesterday on Flickr…

I joined SAP more than 3 years ago (on the same day as my 23rd birthday) for a new internal startup (an Emerging Solution as SAP dubs it) – Duet.

The New York Times features an article entitled “The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits” two days ago, discussing the tech industry’s Single-Era Conjecture:

When I bought the LG L226WTQ Widescreen LCD a while back, I wrote that its fixed height monitor base was a major pitfall.
Well, it turned out to be worse than I thought. The screen’s height was too low which made it really uncomfortable to work with.
Placing the base on top of some books just made my desk look ugly. Alas! I set out to find a decent LCD basearm to replace the original LG base…

When asked about Microsoft last week at the GarageGeeks event, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, answered that “Microsoft has a monopoly on being the bad guy”.
Well, I guess Evil is subjective as we’re seeing more and more news items like this from Google:

It seems like Microsoft and Yahoo! are talking again to such an extent that is was either required, or in Microsoft’s interest to release the following statement:

From Plaxo’s Personal Card:

Today is a big day for us at Plaxo, as our partnership with Comcast was just announced. Plaxo will be part of Comcast’s Smartzone„¢, which aims to provide Comcast Triple Play customers with one central location to send and receive email and instant messages, check voicemail online, etc.