This is the day: Apple will start their press event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco. At 10:00 am PST or 07:00 pm MEZ.

Like the legendary Steve Jobs Keynotes in the past, it is quite a tradition that some journalists blog live from the event … so Apple fans all over the planet can take part on the press conference. Here are the most important liveblogs:

• Jason Snell, Dan Moren & Jonathan Seff, Macworld.com
• Jason Chen for Gizmodo
• Erica Ogg for cnet news
• Joshua Topolsky for engadget
• John Paczkowski for All Things Digital
• Technologizer staff for Technologizer
• Ars staff for Ars Technica
• John Biggs for TechCrunch / CrunchGear
• Brian X. Chen for Gadget Lab at Wired

As soon as the videorecording of the event is online as a Quicktime videostream … there’ll be an update

Apple invited the press to their “Come see our latest creation” event in San Francisco on January 27th. And the computer and e-book industry starts trembling with fear: Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are getting really nervous, because Apple may conquer the emerging market of Active Content.

Apple did not announce that the company will be engaged in the e-book or tablet-market – but the rumors about an “iSlate” or “iPad” are quite persistent. Therefore Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer tried to steal Apple the show at his keynote at the CES in Las Vegas: He just renamed the tablet-PCs on stage as “slate-PCs” … but it’s not about a name.

Now Amazon announced, that the company will open up their e-book platform for third party developers: Within some month, they’ll release a Kindle Development Kit (KDK) and will also provide the sales channel for the active content created with that software development kit (SDK).
The revenue sharing model looks quite familiar to iPhone developers: 70% to the developer and content provider, 30% for Amazon. But Amazon charges an additional $0.15 per MB for content delivery … as the Kindle is not sold with a mobile phone contract. Amazon has to pay the distribution costs to the mobile network operators if the content is delivered via the mobile data channel.

Amazon is probably in a better starting position in the battle for market shares in the emerging market of Active Content: They have a lot of experience with content distribution with the Kindle and they are in direct contact with the publishers … but Apple has the ability to rouse the e-book-market from slumber by innovation. They may transfer the pathetic e-books into a new and emerging market: Active Content.

There are a lot of advantages for Apple to tip the scales:

• big and growing iPhone SDK developer community … Amazon has to build up a comparable dev community around the KDK
• well-engineered and sophisticated iPhone SDK … with a full bandwidth of network-, graphic-, data- and sensor-support
• color instead of grayscale screens and computing and graphic power
• touchscreen with gestures
• amazing design
• … and there are probably some innovations we don’t expect

Amazon’s move to open up the Kindle to 3rd party developers and create a platform for Active Content is absolutely right … but can it compete with Apples offering? On January 27th 2010 we’ll know much, much more.

On Sep 9th 2009 at 9am PST Apple invited selected journalists to a special event in San Francisco. Apple did not bring up the Rolling Stones with Mick Jagger on stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater … but their song “It’s only Rock’n Roll (But I like it)” from 1974 was the intro of the event
Steve Jobs showed up on stage the first time since his liver transplantation and got a very warm welcome. Great to see, that he is doing better, now. He and Phil Schiller shared a lot of news and innovations:

Video-on-demand Quicktime-Stream of the Apple Special Event September 2009

Here are the facts of the 75min event:

Sales figures:

• Apple sold 30 million iPhones over the last 2 years
• In total they sold 220 million iPods since now. 20 million of these are iPod touch and 100 million are iPod Nano devices
• This means of over 50 million customers have access to the AppStore and can buy apps.
• 1.8 billion AppStore app-downloads (without updates)
• iTunes is #1 music retailer in the world
• iTunes has more than 100 million accounts

iTunes & iPhone OS update:

• iTunes 9 and iPhone OS update 3.1
• Genius-recommendations for apps in the AppStore
• 30.000 ringtones
• Genius Mixes … automatic mixes of songs in your library
• Improved synchronization
• Management of the iPhone / iPod touch apps within iTunes
• Home Sharing of songs
• Improved interface and optimized navigation within iTunes
• iTunes LP for music albums – the interactive replacement for LP-booklets
• iTunes Extras for Movies – Extras and chapter-selection for movies
• iTunes wish list

Sneak previews of new games:

• Ubisoft – Ben Mattens: Assasins Creed II Discovery
• Tapulous – Bart Decrem: Riddim Ribbon
• Gameloft – Mark Hickey: Nova
• EA Electronic Arts – Travis Boatman: Madden NFL 10

Update of the iPod product line:

• iPod touch – new price tags for iPod touch: $199 8GB – $299 – 32GB – $399 64GB. The two bigger models also have a faster processor and are up to 50% faster and they also support OpenGL ES 2.0 – like the iPhone 3GS.
• iPod classic – now comes with 160GB at the same price
• iPod shuffle – new colors and better prices as well as a new polished stainless steel special edition.
• iPod Nano – comes with a video camera, an fm-radio, audio recording, a pedometer and in many different colors.

Now, it’s official: The WWDC09 starts on June 8th and will end on Friday, June 12th. iPhone OS is just in the front row Mac OS X just behind – so it’ll be interesting to be at Moscone West in San Francisco and meet all those iPhone- and Mac-developers.
If you are a student – checkout the WWCD Student Scholarship and apply for a free pass. Deadline for the Stundent Scholarship application is April 14!!!

Today, at March 17 2009 at 10 am PST the invitation only event starts at the Apple headquater in Cupertino. Here a list of blogs who report live from the event:

• Jason Snell & Dan Moren for MacWorld
• Jason Chen for Gizmodo
• Tom Krazit for cnet news
• Joshua Topolsky for engadget
• John Paczkowski for All Things Digital
• Harry McCracken for Technologizer
• David Chartier for Ars Technica
• Greg Kumparak from MobileCrunch for TechCrunch

There is only one last thing … have fun … and let’s hope that our feature dreams will come true