As many of you will know, I was in California in March, talking to Apple, talking to some VC folk and eating some really nice breakfasts. Some of this was as a result of the XCake group that John Kennedy and I started last year and some of it was due to serendipity – meeting some of the most excellent people along the way who were more than glad to open doors for others. To be honest, I’d never encountered such a can-do attitude before so a quick shout out to the “band of brothers” who blazed a trail in Cupertino. Here’s a pic of us outside Apple in Infinite Loop.
Following on from this, we have the two iPhone developer days and now, as part of my work with the Digital Circle, we’re planning to take some companies out to WWDC in June to learn about the iPhone. If you’re working for a Northern Ireland company and are interested in spending a week at a developer conference, then get in touch. At the moment we have 35 names of folk who are interested in attending the event which will bring over 1000 Apple engineers into a big hall to talk to many more thousands of developers about web standards, the Mac, IT and, most importantly, the iPhone.
In 2008, there were 5,200 developers there in addition to Apple staff – the conference sold out. I can only imagine that this year they will have vastly increased the amount of space or it’s going to sell out even quicker. To give a comparison, have a read on the Google Mac Blog about the report from 2008.
And when I accidentally opened my laptop with the WiFi still on, it found three computer-to-computer wireless networks on my flight to SFO. I didn’t think much of all this until I looked up the aisle of the plane. Three rows up on the other side of the aisle, some guy had his laptop open. At a glance, I could see he was using Interface Builder, one of the tools developers use to build software for both Mac and iPhone. Then he picked up a book on introductory Cocoa programming, and it hit me: the conference was going to be big this year.
I’d like to point out that this was before the AppStore was open. This was before the first of the “59p millionaires“. People just knew that the iPhone was going to be massive.
I’ve posted this image before. It was taken at 0930 on the day before we were due to go to Apple. The iconic nature of this simple window display really struck me.
I asked which was more important, Apps or iPhone. Apps. Which takes up more room in the picture – the app icons almost obscure the iPhone itself. This should help ram it home to anyone running a business today that is grey panels with embedded text boxes that needs to run on a desktop PC. Mobile is here. It’s getting bigger. And if you don’t do something now, you’ll be eaten.
So, get your act together. Get in touch. Talk to me and book your place on the WWDC rollercoaster. We’ve got 35 names already registered – folk willing to take a punt. At this rate, we’ll take over an entire hotel.