Apple’s iPhone, for all its allure, has never been a Black- Berry-like business tool for briefcase-toting corporate types.
That’s about to change. Apple recently announced upcoming improvements for the much-ballyhooed touchscreen music-and movie-playing cell phone to better integrate it into workplaces, big and small. It also unveiled long-anticipated development tools that, for the first time, will allow third parties to create software for the famously computerlike handset.
This is all sweet music for Marc Jensen, technology director at the Minneapolis-based Space150 advertising agency. Workers there have embraced the iPhone, he said, but have been unable to use it properly with the firm’s Microsoft- based e-mail, calendar and contact-management infrastructure. The iPhone just didn’t fit, he said, the way a BlackBerry or a Windows Mobile handset does.
An alliance between Apple and Microsoft changes that, he said. This gives the iPhone far greater compatibility with Exchange Server, the Microsoft software that enables communication and collaboration at Space150 and many other firms.
These and other iPhone improvements are due via a software update in June.
The Exchange announcement “was all I could have hoped for as far as corporate support,” Jensen said. “The push e-mail, the calendar and contact syncing,” it’s all there, he noted. And since most at Space150 would prefer to use the iPhone because of its slick Web-browsing and multimedia capabilities, he added, BlackBerrys at the firm soon could become an endangered species.
“The business market is a huge opportunity for Apple,” said telecommunications analyst Jeff Kagan. “This is the other shoe we were waiting to fall since the consumer iPhone was introduced last year.”
Apple’s new software-development kit was the other seismic shift in the iPhone universe, one that has been anticipated eagerly by Internet developers like Ken Martin, of Minnetonka-based Digital Cyclone.
That firm, a division of Garmin International, recently unveiled a flavor of its Web-based My-Cast weather-forecast service tailored to Apple’s Safari browser on the iPhone and its cousin, the iPod touch (see iphone.my-cast.com).
But Martin has been desperate to do more than display My- Cast weather updates within Apple’s mobile browser. He wants to put My-Cast software on the iPhone to augment the information users can get, and what they can do with it.
The iPhone “just gets a little sluggish when it’s sliding a complex page,” Martin said. “We really want to find a way to use the high-res screen, scrolling zooming, all the fun image stuff the iPhone brings.”
All of those capabilities and more were on display when Apple showed how the software-development kit allows anything from video games and picture-changing software to instant-messaging programs and corporate information- management applications.
What’s more, Apple announced an online “App Store” to distribute third-party software for iPhone and iPod touch users, much as the company now distributes tunes, movies and TV programs. Apple said it will take a 30 percent slice of any software sales but will allow distribution of free software at no cost.
Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers chimed in with $100 million it said it would use to bootstrap software development for Apple’s mobile gizmos. The iFund, it explained, will be invested in companies “with market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform.”
The Buffalo News
