Just now Vodafone published a press release, that the Vodafone Group will sell the Apple iPhone in the following 10 countries:

• Australia
• Czech Republic
• Egypt
• Greece
• Italy
• India
• New Zealand
• Portugal
• South Africa
• Turkey

… wow. There is still an open question, which rates Vodafone will offer with the iPhone – and whether Apple will go on with their strategy of working with national exclusive partners. Whatever we’ll here in the future – that deal will boost the market for mobile iPhone applications.

So, let’s see what will come next …

From June 9 to 13 it’s all about the Mac and iPhone developer community in San Francisco under the warm sun of California: At the Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference the whole hardware and software developer community is gathering to get and exchange Mac and iPhone first-hand insights.
The company is running a scholarship program for students developing for Macs and mobile iPhone and iPod-touch devices. This year, 400 students will get scholarships to enter the conference for free (a US $ 1,595 value). But coming to California has to be arranged by the student him- or herself.
Application deadline is April 10, 2008 at 5:00 PM PDT – so, if you are a student and want to join the conference, apply now.

Source: development.apple.com

Good news from the iPhone Software Roadmap event in Cupertino: All business users who use (or want to use) the iPhone in an enterprise environment can be delighted: Apple licensed ActiveSync from Microsoft an will offer a direct connection between the iPhone Mail, Calender and Contact applications to a Microsoft Exchange server.
This strikes a blow against Apples competitor RIM with their Blackberry-solution: Within a Blackberry solution all messages are redirected through a server owend and managed by RIM itself – a real nightmare for everyone responsible for data security and protection within a company. Apple offers a direct connection between the iPhone and the Exchange server of the business customer himself with their new iPhone-solution.

Apple starts a series of tutorials on Rails 2.0 development on Mac OS X Leopard. A great introduction in the elegant web developer platform on the Mac. And great to see, that now also Apple starts to promote the open source framework actively.

It’s quite interesting to go into the browser / OS marketshare statistics Net Applications is gathering.
Within the last 12 months, the marketshare of Apple Mac OS X powered computers increased from 6.38% in Feb 2007 to 7.57% in Jan 2008 – a growth rate of about 19%. This great news for the Mac community – but what’s really surprising is the significant marketshare of iPhone surfers in the last month. The iPhone was introduced to the US market on June 29th 2007 – and in Jan 2008 it’s internet surfer worldwide market share is 0.13% according to the Net Applications. Focussing only on the US market it’s share is even higher at 0.20%!
It looks like the iPhone really fuels the use of mobile internet.

Source: Net Applications