iPhone

On June 28th, 2012, just before I spoke at the marketforce future of cards and payments conference in London, I was lucky enough to attend Jacob de Geer’s presentation on iZettle. De Geer started his career by being the first employee of Tradedoubler as its MD in 1999. He was introduced by the moderator as a “serial entrepreneur” and his latest invention is an amazing device which turns your iPhone into a payments point-of-sale terminal; let’s delve into the details of this magical device.

Lots of us say we love our favorite products. We love our Droid. We love our iPad. We love our comfy sweater. We love our bank. (Well, banks and airlines might feel the love a little less these days.) Last week, Martin Lindstrom, author of Brandwashed and Buyology, wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times that described his use of fMRI brain scans of subjects exposed to iPhone sounds and video.

The first video is from the Ellen DeGeneres show. It is an amusing parody of the Apple's iPhone 4 ad. I have to say I think it contains a smidgen of truth.

The next video is Apple's response.

The fact that the thinking for the iPad came before the iPhone is interesting. What is much, much, much more interesting is what Mr Jobs says towards the end of this interview about the where goeth the PC. “PCs will be like trucks”. I think he is right. What do you think?

Android looks like it will be following in iPhone’s footsteps for sometime.

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz on the Internet about two similar events. What happened was basically this; The Masters of the Universe had proclaimed their decrees like dictators and the only thing the rest of the world could do was, for a lack of a better phrase, gnash their teeth in frustration.

With a carrier-agnostic iPhone coming to market later this summer, the conventional wisdom is that AT&T will lose customers (its phone coverage and iPhone service haven't been stellar) and a lot of profits (some say the iPhone has been not only its brightest but biggest single source of earnings).

Those of you who can remember the heady days of the dot.com era will know the name of Mary Meeker. She was guru, par excellence, about all things digital. Well she is still at it and has recently directed a study about the Mobile Internet for Morgan Stanley (Dec 15, 2009). She studied the rate of change spurred by the iPhone and all of the technologies and services it has spawned. Here is just one of her observations.

Here is the most up to date data I could find about the age profile of iPhone users

AdAge today: "Volkswagen of America is launching the newest-generation GTI exclusively on an iPhone app." The entire launch budget for the new model is estimated $500K instead of the customary $60M, since the game is the only thing VW is doing. Fail or win, this is bound to end up in everyone's PowerPoint decks, so I went in to take a few pictures as a matter of public service.