How long will it last….

Without a cord.

The iPhone4 smokes all other smartphones in battery life. It’s the only phone you can really travel with.

Stop innovation on everything else and make all devices work without electrical outlet jacking every 7 hours.

I am not an apple fan boy…. I’m typing this on an evo and my main CPU is Windows 7. But if I don’t get better disconnectivity from the wall…..

the new iOS and iPhone doesn’t change everything.  the first iPhone didn’t change everything.  It shifted who made money in Silicon Valley and in media, but it didn’t change everything.

and it isn’t doing it again.

The oil spill.  That changed everything.  The iphone, it made Apple money.  9/11, that changed everything.  the new iPhone made Techcrunch write some blog posts.  Barack Obama’s election changed everything.  iPhone 4 is just another release.

This marketing has to get real.  at some point.

Then again, Apple will probably sell 10 million of these with this ridiculous message.

Here are highlights from my launch video.

Wolfram|Alpha iPhone App

[full disclosure: I've been working with the Wolfram|Alpha team... so I'll leave out a review or discussion on price justification]

The Wolfram|Alpha iPhone App is live in the App Store.  The blogosphere has its own impressions.  Argue price, features, business models, and whatever else that seems relevant in those lively communities.  On this blog and post I’ll give you my impressions and use cases.

Features that are unique and handy to the iPhone App:

• History – it keeps a running history of your queries.  As a utility for doing many queries within the same domain, this is extremely helpful and time saving
• Favorites – As with the history, it’s nice to set up your own list of queries you’ll do over and over again.  This becomes a sort of “homepage” for me.
• better GeoLocation – because the Apps can get at lat/long the overall geolocating is stronger than via the geoIP on the website.
• Refined Keyboard input – when doing a lot of math or long calculations it’s much easier to input queries with a fine-tuned keyboard.  Though not a limitation on the full website, the constraints of the default mobile keyboards made using the website challenging on a smart phone.  Not so in the app.
• Direct Links to Source Information – this will go unnoticed by many… but having a hyper linked bibliography with this depth is extremely useful if you need to research deeply or go beyond the calculation.

Features that make this a killer mobile app for me:

• Instant access to real time information about the most important daily data points in my life all in one app: weather, stocks, earthquakes (i live in la!) …
• An easy to use calculator that saves me tons of keystrokes via unit conversions and cleaning up my sloppy input
• deep data in many of my own hobbies, pursuits and professional domains.  Getting an individual app for each hobby is quite expensive, time consuming and frustrating to learn how apps work

Things that can be improved:

• I wish I could set the Favorites tab to be my default opening screen with a search box on top.  This would speed up activation of the service
• Offline use for very basic calculations when no compute data is accessed.
• Ability to Add Notes – I’d like to be able to keep private comments and ideas right inside the app (and export later with links to the inputs/outputs)
• Mashing with Wikipedia and/or other essay style knowledge sources – would be convenient to have backgrounders on some topics and be able to use the Wolfram|Alpha assumption/categorization to do some of the knowledge mining for me.

Post your impressions/use cases once you get the app.

Smokin!

iPhones be free!

My friends iPhone needed a restore after txting, address book and half the OS went AWOL.

He started restoring it.  It has now txted me 165 times in 9 minutes.

Of the 13 pals of mine with iphone, 11 of them have needed restores or a trip to Apple.  Yikes!

This is why I use blackberry.

i’ve owned 5 blackberry’s in 6 years.  No failures.  No restores.

IPhone Attacks My Storm

This is the friend.  He had to go to the GENIUS BAR.

Genius Bar Txts me 165 times

This is the REAL GENIUS BAR.

Real Genius Bar ... see the sign!

Omniture is extending its SiteCatalyst measurement tool to native iPhone applications, enabling developers and marketers to gain insight on how users are interacting with their iPhone apps, based on real-time information. This should allow them not only to improve the user experience based on analytics, but also make adjustement necessary to generate more revenue by enhancing ad clicks, purchasing and increasing page views.

Having implemented Omniture some 50 or 60 times (against my judgement, and sometimes will (not that I have any)!), I can tell you definitively nothing omniture provides is unique nor worth the cash.

You’ve always been able to track native iPhone apps. Here are the many ways

• For mostly non-networked apps, simply write a tracker function that dumps data to the app data storage and occassionally send that data back to a remote server
• Using google Analytics, create a URL scheme and “ping” those URLS on various events in the app that then fire off the google analytics
• Create your own tracking system using URLs
• Create your own tracking using custom “pixel” calls
• ….

The reason I always steer clear of Omniture is that once you’re into a naming convention and particular set up, it’s damn near impossible to change it.  Generally you’re trapped with legacy data, reports and business rules unless you want to redo the whole damn thing.

Tis far better to generalize the data warehouse and create a reporting layer that works for what you need at that time.  Even Google Analytics is easier to abstract that omniture.

Omniture is the big dog and people will continue to get sucked into it for lack of knowing anything else.   Most business intelligence folks who work primarily on the web will have the most experience with Omniture, thus assuring it always gets the nod.  It’s basically the same contigencies that kept Microsoft Office in the lead for so long.  You can teach an old dog new tricks (software), it just takes a really long time (or a really big disruptor).

Who will be the big disruptor in analytics?  Will anyone come up with something substantially better than Omniture and Google Analytics (you can’t compete on price, cause one of them is free!)?