It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone

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I love my iPhone. But it has some deep flaws. OK, so cut-and-paste will be available with the 3.0 operating system – that’s good. The lack of a video camera is annoying and strange – rumors are that the next iPhone released in the northern summer will have video capabilities.

But the thing that really gets me is that you cannot use an external keyboard on the iPhone. Unlike the other issues, there is no way you can argue this is a technical problem. Apple has deliberately crippled the Bluetooth functionality so external keyboards can’t be used.

The whole point of a smartphone is that it can be your central hub when you’re on the move, increasingly obviating the need to carry a laptop around. If the iPhone had an external keyboard, I could use it for a large proportion of my needs when I’m on the move or travelling, including email, working on documents, blogging and more. For now I have a choice of carrying a laptop, or taking a Palm and external keyboard with me in addition to the iPhone, just so I can write.

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New speaker announcements: Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum – David Backley, Peta Hopkins, Annalie Killian, Peter Williams, Chris Yates and more…

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The Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is coming together extremely well. It is fantastic to see that while other sectors of the economy are struggling, organizations recognize that they must engage with the critical issue of transforming how they work using web and mobile technologies.

We have confirmed a number of fantastic speakers at the event over the last while. A quick update on some of the speakers you will be missing out on if you don’t come :-)

David Backley, General Manager – Applications Development, Westpac.

David is the senior IT executive with the longest tenure at Westpac, having driven many of the initiatives over the last years to create an over-arching technology architecture that supports business, and introducing many new technologies and approaches to create value. David’s keynote on Creating Business Value from Emerging Technologies will be a highlight of the forum, and provide vital insights from arguably the leading practitioner in Australia.

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Detailed insights from a successful iPhone app developer

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My brother Graham Dawson’s iPhone app OzWeather finally hit the #1 spot for paid apps in Australia in late January. After a couple of weeks at #1 it has been knocked off by Wobble Bikini Fun. However the fad apps quickly come and go – while they can generate a fair bit of revenue in a short period, their sales are rarely sustained, while the consistent sales of OzWeather over 3 months are starting to become significant.

Graham has regularly released full financial details – his latest blog post Apponomics Part 3 gives an analysis of his latest sales and what he thinks is driving them. The chart of his sales is below.

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What this amounts to is revenue of A$35,000 (US$22,500) over three months, with current sales generating revenue of approximately A$500 per day. While this does not compare to the $600,000 in one month that the #1 app globally has just made, it is still tidy revenue for a solo developer who now has time (after extensive development and refinements on the OzWeather app) to work on other things, including one of his next ventures, iTrafficApp.

One of the best things about the iPhone app store is that is providing a ready monetization mechanism for developers with good ideas. Certainly not all will get rich, or even make much at all, given there are now 20,000 apps on the store, but if you have the right idea(s) well executed, it can make you a living or more. A new economy is being created.

Podcast interview: The emergence of the Wide Open Web and social network strategy in the enterprise

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In the lead-up to the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum, a podcast interview with me has just been launched on Stan Relihan’s Connections Show, which is one of the top rated business podcasts in the world.

Next up on the show after me is Vint Cerf, the ‘father of the internet’, so that will definitely be worth looking out for. Stan Relihan is one of the top 50 most connected people in the world on LinkedIn.

You can access the podcast directly on the Connections Show.

Or you can download the mp3 file here.

Stan now also has a blog on The Australian website titled Wires and Lights in a Box where the podcast is also accessible, and which includes many more of Stan’s insights and perspectives.

A brief overview of what we covered in the podcast:

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Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum coming soon! New speakers and latest updates

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The Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum is coming up very soon now!

Click on the image below for our latest flyer on the Enterprise 2.0 event, giving full details on why this will be the premier Enterprise 2.0 event in Australia this year.

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As you can see from the speakers pictured above, who represent just some of the leading experts speaking at the event, pretty much all the people who matter in this space in Australia will be there to share their expertise.

I’ll post soon in more detail about the points below. For now a quick summary of some of the features that will make attending the event to be indispensable for anyone who is involved in assessing or implementing web or mobile technologies in the enterprise:

* International keynote by video from JP Rangaswami, the visionary who instigated the first major implementation globally of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, as featured in the landmark Harvard Business School case study and the Andrew McAfee MIT Sloan article that introduced the term Enterprise 2.0.

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StartupCamp Sydney: Review of six excellent Startups created in 24 hours

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This is actually extraordinary. Today it is possible to create an operating service that can have real market value within 24 hours. This is a fairly new phenomenon, enabled very significantly by the platforms such as widespread APIs, programming libraries, application stores, aggregated advertising, and other elements that can be combined and recombined in ways limited only by the imagination.

Last night I attended the presentations from the teams that worked at Startup Camp Sydney II to create viable start-ups in a touch over 24 hours.

VIDEO OF STARTUP PRESENTATIONS

Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

BACKGROUIND

StartupCamp started in Australia last September with StartupCamp Sydney, followed by Startup Camp Melbourne in October. This weekend StartupCamp Sydney II was held.

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Timewarp discovered: What daily life will be like in the year 2049

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Have you ever wondered what life will be like in the year 2049?

Amazingly I seem to have stumbled across a timewarp. The blog p40y is being written every day in the year 2049, and each blog post appears daily 40 years earlier. Since the blog began on New Years Day 2049 (and 2009 via the timewarp) some fantastic insights into the future 40 years from now.

Here are a few excerpts that give a flavor for what we can expect at the end of this half-century.

Claytronics

Today I sat in a meeting with some people and some Claytronic replicas of other people that were unable (couldn’t be bothered?) to make the meeting in person. Now I know this is a new technology but it’s total rubbish. In theory you just pmail or gfax over some instructions to a giant programmable lump of clay sitting in one of the spare chairs and it automatically morphs into a life size 3-D, walking, talking replica of the real person.

However, it didn’t. In this instance the millions of tiny microprocessors didn’t seem to be communicating with each other correctly – or the electrostatic forces weren’t working because someone left an AiPhone™ on – and what we got instead was a giant brown talking turd. “Different day, same old talking shit” as one wit observed.

This is particularly interesting. Kil’n People by David Brin, one of my favorite science fiction books, describes a world in which people create animated clay replicas of themselves. I have also blogged about a Japanese professor who has created a doppelganger of himself – though not in clay…

DNA Hacking

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The state of enterprise software: Andrew McAfee and Leo Apotheker of SAP with Charlie Rose

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Here Charlie Rose interviews Leo Apotheker, co-CEO of SAP, and Andrew McAfee from Harvard Business School (who spoke at our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum last year) about enterprise software. The interview begins at 33:00.

It’s interesting that enterprise software is seen as a topic of relevance to a broad audience. Of course it should be, for many reasons, though it is usually seen as an arcane topic. Also good to see that McAfee’s views are getting a broader airing.

A few particularly interesting comments in the interview:

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Internet car radio is here – internet radio may supplant broadcast

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At CES 2009 Blaupunkt is showing the world’s first in-dash internet car radio, powered by technology from Australian-based company miRoamer. The radio accesses the internet via Bluetooth to any mobile phone in the car which has 3G internet access.

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Two key issues:

Parthimos said a 2GB monthly data plan would be required to power the internet radio for a month on the average drive to and from work.

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Video excerpts of keynote speech for Sun Microsystems Partner Executive Forum: The Future of the Network Economy

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I recently gave the keynote speech for a Sun Microsystems Partner Executive Forum, where Sun brought together the top executives from its extensive partner network for an update and relationship building session.

Below is an 8 min video containing brief excerpts from my keynote, titled The Future of the Network Economy.

Topics covered in the video include:

* In the Depression of the 1930s there was little structural change in the economy; in the current downturn there will be massive change.

* In a connected world you can – and must – reposition yourself across boundaries.

* Scale-free networks provide a common structure across society, web, infrastructure and more.

* Collaborative filtering is where the web is going: it enables us to find what is most relevant to us from infinite content.

* Open innovation requires identifying and stimulating the social networks where relevant ideas are proliferating.

* Our individual and organizational reputations will precede us, giving us and others insights into our expertise, reliability, and credibility.

* Strategy in an economy based on the flow of information and ideas requires us to rethink alliances and identify opportunities in new domains.

* The law of requisite variety means we must be at least as flexible as our environment.

* Studying ants’ collective behavior can help organizations understand how to tap emergence to create value.