iPhone as a ‘prophet’

From @semaphoria

insight into the new gig: building a small/nimble agency that will help clients bring useful, delightful and smart iphone apps to market.

This was ReTweeted by Raven Zachary who has defined his company as iPhone intelligence. Raven is the founder of iPhoneDevCamp and was the project director for Obama ’08 For iPhone and he provides a diverse set of services for clients relating to iPhone Strategy and Product Development.

There’s a groundswell of support for iPhone as a platform but critics of the platform have been many. It’s too restrictive for some, too cumbersome for others – but I feel they miss the point. This isn’t about taking Apple’s platform and promoting it to prominence, it’s about the promotion of mobile as a computing platform as well as a communications platform. It’s been said repeatedly that the iPhone itself is a great device but a rubbish phone – and yet it’s selling nearly 20 million (not including iPod touch devices) – this alone tells me that the market is demanding more than just communications from their mobile devices. They want internet services, location services, friend services and all sorts of other value adds.

To my mind this makes the iPhone a prophet rather than a messiah. It’s showing us that there’s an immense amount of interest in the iPhone as a mobile computing platform and this will extend to a halo effect where other smartphones will be brought to the same level – whether it’s Android Market, Blackberry Market, Microsoft Skymarket or other similar clones. The same services will likely need to run on these other platforms once they gain enough momentum and they need to be INTEROPERABLE.