Amazing news from John Doerr, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB), the Venture Capital company which invested into start-ups like Amazon, Sun or Google: KPCB starts a $100M investment initiative called iFund, to fund “market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform”.
2750 Sand Hill Road, Melon Park CA is the place to be for all developers with great ideas for the iPhone and iPod touch mobile internet

It’s gonna be an exiting event on March 6th: Apple is inviting for a “iPhone Software Roadmap” event on March 6th 2008 in Cupertino. Releasing the long awaited release of the software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone is one thing. But it looks like there is one more thing – at least The invitation Apple is sending out points out a very interesting new focus of iPhone applications: The enterprise market. When you think back to the times of Apple Newton Message pad, enterprise applications where the unique selling proposition – so maybe UPS, Fedex and DHL will use iPhone for tracking parcels in the future … just an idea

So, let’s wait and see what’s Steve is revealing on March 6th.

Sources: fscklog.com, fortune.cnn.com, Image courtesy of Apple.

Besides the well known top dogs in the mobile world, like Nokia and SonyEricsson we had one of the newcomers in our video walk through, yesterday. But that newcomer Garnim did not need to step to far from his core business as they are big in the GPS-handheld-device market. So it’s not a big issue for the mobile industry to classify their market entry.
Google, on the other hand, is not predictable in many dimensions: Open platforms, like the mobile OS called android, they are developing within the Open Handset Alliance, will be released as open source in the future. The mobile network operator smiled at open source projects in the past – or ignored them. Sometimes they even worked against these projects. The control over the (mostly subsidized) handsets should be in the hands of the operator. With android, everything should change and users should gain control over their own phone – like they did with their personal computer. That threatens the operators who are afraid of dropping SMS and speech telephony revenues because of VoIP and IM-clients on the new open handsets. But there is a chance of generating new forms of revenues.
At the MWC Google and the CPU manufacturer ARM give a first impression in the look and feel of the new android user interface. Here is an android Video of a reference design phone. It is powered by an ARM processor and is quite fast in user interaction. The asianmanufacturer E28 just used android as his chance and ported android on one of it’s handsets for the Congress. Here also: quite fast screen animation speed.
As Apple’s iPhone, also android will really change the mobile world

P.S. Deadline for the android Developer Challenge of Google awarding 10 Mio. $ in total is: April 14th 2008

The GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is the ultimate event in the global mobile industry: If you want to meet the global mobile communication leaders – it’s Barcelona and not Davos you have to be
But it’s not only about business. It’s also about fun – if you get into the right party at night. The artist and celebrity “density” at these events was high in the past – but as the mobile industry is developing towards a mobile content and media industry the artists even become part of the congress.
Years ago, when the congress was situated in Cannes, the Congress invited the science fiction author Douglas Adams to get a new perspective on the mobile industry.
But this time they go much much further and invited artists like will.i.am, producer, artist and founder of The Black Eyed Peas to share their view of the mobile music developments. Or the Hollywood legend, founder of the Sundance Institute and Film Festival, Sundance Channel, and the most recent of the brand’s entertainment companies, Sundance Cinemas, Robert Redford who will share his insights of the role of mobile in the short film genre. Or watch the Isabella Rosselini and Jody Shapiro presenting a case study on “Mobile Meets Film”.
So if you are attending the Mobile World Congress on February 13th 2008 in Barcelona – you have to go to the Mobile Backstage event at the National Palace (Palau Nacional).

P.S. For all of you who did not see will.i.am’s 48-hour work yet … until now more than 3 Million visitors watched his Barack-Obama support music video on Youtube yet. Remarkable!

It was quite interesting to watch a presentation at the MobileMonday in Munich of Antonio Vince Staybl, CEO of gofresh.de the creators of the mobile off-portal community itsmy.com.
They did an amazing job over the last five years in growing their mobile community and now, itsmy.com and an other German based portal called Peperonity.com are some of the bigges mobile off-portal communities in the US besides Fotochatter.com and Flirtomatic.com. Really amazing.
To make one thing clear: from a designers standpoint, it’s hard to believe that all of them are working, because it really reminds me to the times of C-64 … but they work