Monday, April 27, 2009

THE APP-LE OF EVERYONE'S EYE!

Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan, April 27, 2009
The Economic Times

Thirteen-year-old Connor Mulcahey from Connecticut in the US is a very happy boy. Heck, I would be dancing on the streets, if Apple sent me a $10,000

iTunes gift card, an iPod touch, a Time Capsule and a MacBook Pro. All, because I nonchalantly downloaded an application (app) called ‘Bump’ from the iTunes Appstore and it so happened that exactly 999,999,999 apps had been downloaded till then.

That’s a very big number and it’s a symbolic salute to ailing Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who’s changed the course of consumer technology yet again. Remember, Apple is not celebrating the number of iPhones sold, but the fact that a billion applications have now been downloaded.

As all the initial hype about the iPhone and its features was about the ‘cool stuff’ that one could do with the ‘multi-touch’ feature, no one really paid much attention to the fact that you could download software applications from an online store.

Apple’s real success with the iPhone is not the fact that it made a superb mobile phone, or pocket Internet device, there were a hundred rip-offs that followed and many of them possibly had more features than the iPhone.

Their success was in getting people excited enough to do more with their phones. Not just to surf, but to keep exploring new things everyday and shockingly in the internet era, to pay for them! Of course, the fact that the most downloaded paid app till date is a game involving bandicoots racing souped up nitrous go-karts and slamming into each other, is disturbing as far as the future of humanity is concerned, but that’s another debate altogether.

The point is that iPhone + iTunes = magic and it’s the formula that the entire consumer tech industry wants to replicate. Whether its the Amazon Kindle ebook reader that plugs into the world’s largest online bookstore or the fact that the Blackberry is now not just a ‘phone that does email’ but a ‘platform’ with an app store of its own, everyone is onto the bandwagon.

So even as Apple pops the champagne, Nokia is putting the finishing touches on it’s very own Ovi Store, expected to be launched next month. When the world’s largest maker of cell phones decides to transform itself from just a telecom device manufacturer to an ‘Internet services company’, it’s a big deal.

Sure, the cynics could say that they’re late to the party that Apple started, but with entrenched positions in most of the world’s fastest growing markets, Nokia can’t be ignored, even though I personally think they should take a cue from Apple and call the upcoming N97, the ‘OviPhone’ to give the store some mileage.

And then, of course, there is Google, whose Android operating system, will soon find itself on phones and even laptops around you. Hey, if my phone is wirelessly synced with my Gmail, including contacts, the moment I turn it on, its a winner immediately.

There’s a big collision around the corner and considering the Large Hadron Collider is still ‘offline’, we’re not talking particle physics!

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