Sold-out iPhone Developer roadshow

Last night, Apple sent me an e-mail advertising their “iPhone Tech Talk World Tour.” The tour appears to coincide with their decision to drop the NDA on iPhone software development.

Apple is presenting a series of free one-day workshops that provide an overview of the iPhone development process, with everything from Objective-C programming to getting your applications into the App Store. In parallel to the formal sessions, the North American workshops will also provide engineers and evangelists ready to answer code-level questions.

What is interesting is that all six of the US dates are fully booked: San Francisco, LA, Austin, Chicago, NYC and Seattle. This e-mail is the first notice Apple gave me of the workshops, so inviting me to something already sold out isn’t very useful. (I am an inactive “iPhone developer” so I’m probably not high on their mailing list.)

At the same time, it’s interesting that none of the foreign dates are sold out. Yes, the ones in Europe and Asia don’t include the tech support, but the Toronto date on Dec. 4 does; perhaps that’s because it’s in the belly of the RIM beast. (However, the session in Microsoft’s backyard is full).

The sessions were picked up by various Mac publications, including Macworld and AppleInsider. So it’s possible that there were spaces when my e-mail arrived at 12:03 am this morning, but not after the articles were posted to the whole world.

MySQL integration going badly

Sun bought MySQL earlier this year, providing a great exit strategy for the world’s largest dual-license open source software startup.

Surprise, surprise: one of the (suddenly richer) MySQL founders, David Axmark, has jumped ship:

I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal basis.

Official MySQL blogger remarks notes that this is a major loss for the MySQL product and division.

Of course, this problem happens with any acquisition of a little company rather than a big company. Still, the, 26-year-old Sun seems to be more hierarchical and bureaucratic than its younger and more nimble Silicon Valley rivals (like the Monster of Mountain View). And, unlike Cisco, Sun has either not mastered (or chosen not to implement) autonomy for its spinout acquisitions.

Finally, a worthy iPhone challenger

In response to T-Mobile’s gPhone and AT&T’s iPhone, Verizon Wireless is getting a bPhone — the new BlackBerry Storm, which was leaked last week and officially announced this morning.

The new BlackBerry 9530 appears to be the flagship smartphone of the world’s largest cellphone carrier, Vodafone, and is being first released by its partly-owned US subsidiary, Verizon Wireless. It melds the traditional BlackBerry features with an iPhone-inspired touch screen interface, showing that Research in Motion is interested in more than just CrackBerry keyboards.

The announcement is interesting on many levels.

First, reviewers are generally calling it the strongest iPhone challenger yet, certainly better than the gPhone (aka T-Mobile G1). As Wired wrote:

To put it mildly, we’ve seen a butt-load of handset makers jump on the iClone bandwagon since Apple’s device was announced in 2007. Without exception, every attempt has failed to come close to matching the iPhone’s nearly mythic combination of intuitive UI, responsive touchscreen, and gorgeous hardware. The Storm, though, gets closer than any device we’ve ever laid hands on.

And in one critical area — you might want to sit down for this — The Storm actually beats the iPhone.

The main improvement is ClickThrough, which provides the best tactile feedback yet of any touchscreen phone. The consensus is that this is the one area where it’s clearly better than the iPhone.

Not surprisingly, the Canadian systems innovator is also planning an application store to compete with the iPhone App Store. RIM has had a wide range of 3rd party Java-based applications for years, but is now making these available to users in a more convenient and integrated fashion. The key difference is that the content will be controlled not by RIM, but by the carriers. (No mention of the store is made in the official announcement).

This says some interesting things about competencies. In 2007, Apple releases its first mobile phone and an important new smartphone platform. Through a combination of software, industrial design and PR flair, Apple redefines the mobile phone experience for American cellphone buyers and, to a lesser extent, those in the rest of the world. How do firms respond?

• Motorola (#1 in the US, #3 in the world) continues to dabble in smartphones with halfhearted efforts using Windows Mobile and Symbian UIQ, but doesn’t aggressively promote any of them. Despite the smartphone challenge, the cellphone division is distracted by its much larger problems, including plummeting market share and a desire of Motorola corporate to jettison the division before it sinks the parent company.
• Samsung (#2 in the US and the world) and LG (#3 in the US, #5 in the world) — the major suppliers to Verizon Wireless in recent years — have a typical Japanese/Korean response: phones with great hardware, lots of features, and uninspiring software.
• Nokia (#4 in the US, #1 in the world) add an application (and everything else) store to strengthen its dominance of the European smartphone market, but fails to find a carrier that wants to push its phones in the US. It’s reportedly waiting until next year for a full-on iPhone challenger.
• RIM (#5 in the US) leverages its handset software, dominant back-office technology and loyal customer base to make the most effective iPhone challenger yet.
• Google enters the US smartphone market not with a branded cellphone maker, but with HTC, the #1 ODM: its G1 falls somewhat shy of the mark.

In other words, it’s not surprising that RIM has a strong product and Motorola, Samsung, LG and newcomer Google do not. The only surprise here is that Nokia has been unable (or uninterested) in making a compelling product for the US. Given its weak CDMA products — foreclosing a deal with the #2 or #3 carriers — perhaps the key obstacle is that it has no channel to US consumers other than iPhone dealer AT&T.

The “Storm” actually appears to refer to the BlackBerry 9500 family (cf. Nokia N95?), which includes Vodafone’s BlackBerry 9500 and Verizon’s BlackBerry 9530. I’m guessing that Vodafone will be selling different models. Vodafone was once interested in commoditizing handsets to avoid commoditizing its pipes. The announcement suggests Vodafone’s tacit admission that handsets are not going to be commodities any time soon.

Other things don’t change. While it has a brand new phone, Verizon Wireless continues its policy of tightly controlling subscriber access to 3rd party applications — either you’re “on deck” or not at all — a control ceded by AT&T to Apple (with the iPhone App Store) and abandoned by T-Mobile USA. The 9530 is also one of the few smartphones in years to come without Wi-Fi support, allowing bypass of the CDMA network at Starbucks or the office.

The 9530 is a fully dual-mode 3G phone that works on Verizon’s EV-DO network and in the W-CDMA technology used in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Is it that Verizon is tired of AT&T’s obnoxious ads about implausibly globe-trotting teens with no bars? Is it that the high-end BlackBerry users fit the actual profile of a globe-trotting executive? Or is it that BlackBerrry has a long relationship with Qualcomm (supplier of the chips for Verizon’s previous dual-mode BlackBerry)?

Silicon Valley pundit discovers mobile Internet

OK, so this is old hat to my European friends, but …

At last, the year of mobile computing is near
By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News

I can't tell you how many mobile trade shows I attended where the refrain was exactly the same: Next year is going to be the year when the mobile Internet becomes huge! Of course, that next year never seemed to come.

Until now. The mobile Web is here, and it's huge.

More important than its size, though, is the impact it is having and will have on our lives. While Web 2.0 companies get a lot of buzz in the valley's echo chamber, and green technology has been getting some much-deserved hype, I think the greatest area of innovation occurring right now in Silicon Valley involves mobile computing.

We have moved into an era of constant connectivity. And with that comes the expectation that all of our information needs and wants will be instantly gratified.

Because of where we live, we sometimes fail to notice when such trends finally grab hold of the mainstream. This region is thick with road warriors and early-adopter types. And for more than a decade, this crowd has been shelling out big bucks for first-generation devices and services that allowed them to remain hyper-connected at every moment.

But mobile computing has finally outgrown the niche crowd and crossed over into the lives of mainstream users. A survey released earlier this year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project revealed that 62 percent of Americans access mobile data either through a phone or laptop.

I don’t quite get the recent news hook for a March 5 release by Pew. I’d ask the Merc columnist personally — O’Brien and I have been trying to hold a get-acquainted meeting for several weeks — but our meeting today got postpone a second time.

Looking at the original Pew numbers, the 62% figure is a bit misleading, because it includes using a cellphone for just about anything (58% use it for texting or taking a picture), as well anyone who’s used a laptop (or PDA or cellphone) to access the Internet away from home or work (an airport, the library, Starbuck’s). So this is not 62% of America or even 62% of all celphone subscribers paying through the nose for a dataplan.

To illustrate his column, O’Brien talks about his dependence on his Blackberry, and in particular on the navigation services of Sunnyvale-based TeleNav. This highlights another important point: there are so many entries into mobile navigation — standalone, cellphone, car-based — at some point with growth slows down, we know there will be a brutal shakeout and consolidation phase with only a few left standing (and maybe a few others retreating to niches).

Wireless data revenues are still growing rapidly in the US, but the carriers are not reporting wireless data subscribers. Given that wireless is 19% of total — and wireless plans are as much or more than voice plans — that implies a penetration rate of around 15-20% so far. This means we’re entering the early majority, high growth phase. If I had to guess, I’d say we’re 2-4 years away from 50% of cellphone owners using the mobile Web, but falling consumer confidence may push that off by an additional 1-3 years.

Over the hill MBA students

Business Week has a story this week on MBA students over the age of 40. While no precise statistics are available, 40-49 year-olds only account for 4% of those who take the GMAT used for most MBA admissions.

I think — fueled by the efforts of the colleges profiled — too much emphasis is given to the supposed benefit of three little letters on the resume for career switching. Of course, any b-school prof will tell you this credentialing is the main goal of the typical under-30 full-time MBA student.

My first semester at SJSU, I had my first student that was over 40, but he’d been a CFO and was then CEO of a small company. (Now president of a larger company). His motive was not to punch his ticket, but to actually learn something, in particular, new ways of thinking about problems he’d already seen.

That seemed to me the most realistic plan: if two decades of work experience doesn’t get you a good job, the marginal benefits of the TLA will be small. However, it’s realistic that anyone without formal business education can learn to do his or her job better or smarter.