At work, MG kept talking about how great this Path iPhone app is; so, I finally installed it. Do I really need another social network? I rarely ever use Facebook and I haven’t Tweeted in months – who has the time for that stuff? Anyway, I installed Path and started playing with it. Although I will probably never use it much again, I am amazed by it’s clean, beautiful design and fun user experience. Although I can’t find any huge technology or feature innovation (it’s probably in there somewhere, I just can’t find it), the fact that I’m so engaged with the design and I’m interacting with this app, is proof that design and user experience is a powerful differentiator. Is it enough to rise above the competition? In the case of Path, time will tell. But meanwhile, I will be stealing their ideas!

Apple’s WWDC is happening right up the street – I’m bummed that I could not attend this year; I’m worried I might have missed my change to see Steve speak LIVE (unless Steve wants to invite me over for tea??) Some of the biggest news was the “no news” on the iPhone front. Dang, I guess I need to wait even longer than I thought for the next iPhone.

iCloud is a game-changer, for sure. I’m not surprised to see this come from Apple – more surprised that MobileMe was never able to “turn into this” sooner. As a MobileMe subscriber, I guess I’ll be able to check it out myself soon. Personally, I think this is huge, and I plan to use it passionately! I wonder how this will impact people like Dropbox or Mozy, just to name a few.

Another interesting item is the tight, OS integration of Twitter and the complete ignoring of Facebook. Not surprising, Facebook is a buddy of Microsoft and could, perhaps also threaten other “social” plans for Apple. As well, the functionality of Twitter seems to jive better with the Apple world. Interesting stuff!

Found this bit of news the other day; surprised that it’s not getting more attention considering all the noise out around Flash and Apple these days. To be clear, this app, Cloud Browse, is not actually installing the Flash runtime on the iPhone; so it’s not really Flash on the iPhone. It sounds like it works like VNC by allowing an iPhone to connect to another machine in order to see the content. Highlights from the USA Today post is below:“Here’s how it works: you download the free Cloud Browse App and install it. Then you direct the App to the website of your choice. Here’s where the interesting part comes in: the site is called up on another computer, which streams it back to your iPhone. The app, Cloud Browse, is free, has been out for a few weeks, and so far has picked up 150,000 downloads….it had already been approved by Apple by the time Apple CEO Steve Jobs penned his “Thoughts on Flash essay. Personally, I’d be concerned about the performance of this, but according to this report,  it’s apparently pretty darn good on the iPhone! I’m surprised Steve isn’t blocking it!http://content.usatoday.com/communities/technologylive/post/2010/05/flash-comes-to-iphone–sort-of/1

You probably haven’t heard about this yet, but that little device they call the “iPhone” is about to get a re-haul. I wasn’t able to get tickets to the WWDC to see Steve announce it today in person, but thanks to Engadget, I can feel like I was right there in the middle of it all.  I was already hip to many of the new features after Steve announced the updates for the OS, but he was holding one of the most exciting features for today: video calling (FaceTime). I’m also impressed with the announcement of Retina Display, increasing pixel density by four times! The picture quality is unbelievable!

R/GA was invited to attend a special event on the future of the iPhone OS; presented by none other than Mr. Steve Jobs himself! My colleague, and our resident iPhone developer guru, Bill, was the lucky man who made the trip (I’m so jealous). After the presentation, Apple posted a video of the event on their website.  As I watched the video, I felt compelled to jot down the key points about what to expect from the new OS. For the most part, it ounds very exciting indeed.

Summary: over 100 user features and over 1500 new developer APIs

The 7 New Functionality 7 “tent-poles”:

1.       Multitasking APIs:

7 New multitasking services

• Background Audio – eg. Pandora can continue to play music even as you switch apps.
• VOIP- eg. Skype can run a phone call and a user can still switch around between apps.
• Location – Continue to track location with GPS in background – eg. Loopt listens to user location, can detect when you’ve moved, update friends. OS4 adding fine-grained settings to check/set which apps are asking for your location.
• Push Notifications (i.e. server-based).
• Local Notifications (don’t need server, app-to-app).
• Task Completion – eg. Flickr can continue to upload photos in the background, even after you switch apps.
• Fast App Switching – as you switch, application(s) status is preserved.

2.       Folders

• Drag apps ontop of eachother to create folders. The folder name is set, by default, to the category name of apps as set in app store. Eg “games.”

3.       Enhanced Mail

• One inbox: all mail accounts dump into unified inbox.
• Fast inpbox switching.
• Threaded messages.
• Open attachments with iPhone apps (by clicking on attachment).

4.       iBooks

• Just like iPad. Buy once read anywhere; sync page and bookmarks between devices.

5.       Enterprise

• better data protection (better encryption).
• providing APIs to developers to control encryption.
• Mobile Device Management.
• Wireless app distribution.
• Multiple Exchange accounts.
• Exchange Server- SSL VPN support.

6.       Game Center

• More than 50,000 games on app store (more than 10x competitors: sony psp, Nintendo DS)
• Social Gaming network.
• Challenge your friends to games.
• Automatic matchmaking. If you’re playing a game, if it requires other people to play, it will find “similar players”
• Leader boards.
• Achievements (what I’ve won).

7.       iAd

• Steve: ”Mobile users do not use Search, they use Apps.”
• Steve: ”Average iPhone user spends over 30 min everyday.”
• 1 billion ad impressions per day.
• Steve: “Emotion + Interactivity”
• Keeps you within your app
• Built into the iPhone OS, developers can add ads via API
• Apple sells and hosts the ads
• Apple will give developers 60% to developers

And then it was all Webkit! RIM just announced that it will be using Webkit-based browsers for the new BlackBerry devices. This was a smart move; seems obvious and will certainly excite the competition with the iPhone. Thinking about this from my POV, this makes web-based mobile development twice as simple as now, there is almost just one browser to support: Webkit. However there are very distinct user experience and interface elements for iPhone-based applications (in all Apple products for that matter!) I’m not a BlackBerry user, so I’m not sure how those UX elements would translate, but I suspect they will not. Therefore, in many instances, we may still be up against two separate codebases for the app interface.

I remember way back when I first heard about the GPS functionality coming to the iPhone, and other devices. “Oh man, if we can detect a user’s location, we can use it to send him/her all sorts of targeted messages.” For example, if we know he is near a Starbucks, maybe we send him a coupon for a cup of coffee. Genius! It seemed like we were on the verge of an amazing opportunity for marketers. However, when I began to think about within the context of pushing “ads” to a person’s mobile device, it quickly became clear that this would become a mess. Imagine walking down the street and getting bombarded with ads for every other store on the block – not cool. There are many useful ways of using this technology, but pushing location-based ads to people, without their consent, is not one of them.

During my recent speaking event at OMMA, I actually brought this up. I’ve also been discussing it with others in the industry. Great to hear that Apple is right on board with this thinking. They just released a warning to iPhone developers:

“If you build your application with features based on a user’s location, make sure these features provide beneficial information. If your app uses location-based information primarily to enable mobile advertisers to deliver targeted ads based on a user’s location, your app will be returned to you by the App Store Review Team for modification before it can be posted to the App Store.” 

Good stuff!

Yet another big project that I can’t talk much about yet as it’s in the early stages of product design. At R/GA SF we are helping to craft a new product (and a new business) from the ground up: user experience, user interface, branding, as well as the technology and development. For the tech details, I can say, it’s going to be a desktop app, a web app, iPhone app, and more, all talking together in real time…I know that doesn’t say much…but it’s going to be cool, I promise.  I’m excited about the entire thing – it’s great to be part of a new product from the very start and can’t wait until we’ve got a beta release (and I can talk about it more!)

New iPhone app from Best Western hotels features a good use of GPS. This app creates an opportunity for the company to be the preferred hotel for loyal customers; business travelers especially: If I can always quickly search and book a Best Western hotel, why go anywhere else? Read more from BRANDING UNBOUND.Posted using ShareThis

Being the major iPhone geek that I am, I am extra excited about the launch of AKQA SF’s first iPhone Web Application to support the Nike Olympics website (nikelab.com) that we launched back in August.  Meant to bring the Nikelab website to mobile, we designed and built a custom experience specifically for the iPhone. When it was first launched, it became the #1 Web App on Apple.com!Features:

• Custom user interface for easy mobile viewing – modeled for iPhone web apps
• Pulls product/athlete content from same place as website – keeping both experiences in-sync as we update
• Animation and high-quality video content (dynamically loads correct video based on the user’s connection)
• Ability to view different colors for the products (e.g. Hyperdunk) by clicking on color swatches
• A Nike Store Locator leveraging Google Maps (re-usable for future Nike iPhone web apps)
• Launched in Korean, Japanese, US English (more languages coming soon)

Technical details

• Pulls the same set of XML and translation content as the website (repurposing all previously created content)
• Auto-resize of layout when viewed in horizontal/vertical mode
• Serves both 3gp and m4v videos depending on user’s bandwidth
• Custom, re-usable AJAX-based framework (powered by Jquery, inspired by iUI), uses JSON for storing config data
• Uses a templating approach for all pages: we feed in XML content for each page, use html/css to create the page layout.
• This framework can be re-used for future iPhone web apps

To see it in action, if you’re on your iPhone, navigate to http://www.nike.com/nikelab.