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The iPhone App Store has arrived.  It requires iTunes 7.7, and the interface, while a lot is left to be desired, is very simple and easy -- a breakthrough in mobile applications industry.  You buy apps just the way you buy songs.  People will get it.  One click, and it's downloaded to your iTunes.  Sync your phone, and you're set to go.

Currently there are 27 pages of applications currently available. A huge number of apps are games - not my forte so I can't really talk about their quality.  Also a lot of books are listed as applications, and a bunch of language tools (translations, phrasebook, etc).  And then there's a host of various types of Applications.  "135 of these apps are free, while the remaining 417 range in price from $0.99 to $69.99, with the vast majority ranging between $0.99 and $9.99."

Read more at TechCrunch's iPhone App Store Has Launched (Updated).

I browsed through the apps and aside from a couple of location-based applications such as Loopt and Whrrl which we already knew about I can't say I saw anything that would really catch my attention - but hey, this is the first day this thing is live.  Think of PCs before word processors.   There will be a storm coming.

Yahoo! has made a game changing move in the search space -- opening its core search technology as APIs to any developer who wants to use it:  "BOSS allows developers to submit queries (and their associated parameters) via an API to retrieve up to 50 web, image, news, or spelling results in XML or JSON format at a time."

The API is free with unlimited access.  Developers will agree to show Yahoo! ads along with the results.  Read the full article at Yahoo Radically Opens Web Search With BOSS.

"At a hardware BOM and manufacturing cost of $173, the new iPhone is significantly less expensive to produce than the first-generation product, despite major improvements in the product's functionality and unique usability, due to the addition of 3G communications... The original 8Gbyte iPhone carried a cost of $226 after component price reductions, giving the new product a 23 percent hardware cost reduction due to component price declines."

Read the full article at iSuppli's Preliminary Study.  The image shows the BOM from the iSuppli article. Click on the image for larger version.

The biggest news today is that Nokia is buying the rest of Symbian and releasing it as open source under Symbian Foundation.  Nokia is also planning on a big application ecosystem around symbian focusing on bringing web-based services to the handsets.  So things are getting interesting.  We now have:

• Google/Android/Open Handset Alliance with massive developer support and well, Google's weight behind it, but no handsets yet
• Apple/iPhone with impressive and proven "next generation" user experience, fully connected with 3G and GPS coming, a very fast growing user base but not "open"
• Nokia/Symbian, not as sexy as Android and certainly iPhone but with a huge huge user base, now going the open route
• And LIMO, promising a fully open Linux for mobile platform, but with pretty young anyway you look at it without the carisma of a Steve Jobs that would pull a zero-to-dominate-the-market-in-sixty-seconds.

So the market is interestingly shifting, and obviously regardless of what Android delivers in the end it looks like its existance has caused some really interesting changes in the mobile landscape.  Without Android I don't think Nokia would be doing this.

I'm planning to contemplate some more on how this new picture will change the market...  UPDATE:  Read Om Malik's commentary on the subject.  It's good.

"Early Facebook executive Matt Cohler announced his departure today to join top tier venture fund Benchmark Capital."

TechCrunch has interviewed him and they have talked on a number of topics, from Facebook to Benchmark.

Read the full article at The Matt Cohler Exit Interview.

Biggest news today was the new funding for LinkedIn, well, not the funding itself, but the valuation.  LinkedIn is now officially worth more than $1 Billion - yes, that's with a B.

Also the folks at Reddit released the reddit,com source code as open source.  Aside from some spam control code that they have kept proprietary the rest can be used by anybody to create a post-news-and-let-people-vote service.  Thanks guys!

Ok... The keynote is over. This picture (thanks to Engadget) summarizes the key announcements about iPhone:



The new iPhone - iPhone 3G - will be out on July 11. It has 3G and also GPS (A-GPS), so location based services have a nice platform with location tracking and data connectivity. A lot of enterprise features such as remote wipe, centralized addressbook, etc are built into the device. And the price is $199 for the 8G model - definitely more affordable.

iPhone 3G will be launched in some 70 countries.

Oh, and Apple is replaceing .mac with "me" - with a nice and tight integration of email, calendar, address book, and pictures between iPhone, web browsers, and desktop apps such as Outlook.

So far there has been only one really interesting "news" coming out of Apple WWDC keynote:

"Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone, where a 3rd party server can ping Apple's notification service to your device. It can push badges, sounds, and custom textual alerts (like how SMSs look)."

This is to avoid running background processes on the device listening for async notifications, which takes away CPU cycles and drains the battery faster.

So Apple is doing a radically different approach: They will maintain a "push" server infrastructure which stays connected to each cell phone. Applications send notification to this server infrastructure which will in turn push it to the device. The connection will stay on, both over wifi and cellular.

A number of blogs are covering the Steve Jobs keynote live. While I'm an avid TechCrunch reader, I have found Engadget's coverage more comprehensive than Michael Arrington's:

Steve Jobs keynote live from WWDC 2008 - Engadget

Also the Engadget page loads faster than TechCrunch's. It looks like the live video feeds are slowing TechCrunch.

I had brunch with a friend who works at Yahoo!, and as we talked I realized I had missed the significance of Y!OS.  Per Neal Sample "Yahoo! serves more than 500 million unique users every month. We serve 120 billion page views per month. Yahoo! users spend 235 billion minutes a month on our sites. More importantly, some 10 billion relationships exist on user buddy lists and in Yahoo! address books. All that represents a mind-boggling audience for developers."

The key here is that as a part of Y!OS Yahoo! will open up the "connections" created by the mail address book and messenger buddy lists (as well as their social networking services) to the developers.  That's huge.

In order to do that, Yahoo! has homework to do - they are rewiring their data internally.  Their CTO says: "We are not creating another social network. We will rewire the entire experience to make it social. We don't think of social as a destination but as a dimension."

This is a unique opportunity for the developers...