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

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

Steve Jobs presented a new feature of the iPhone - and also the iPod touch. Especially the iPod touch transforms into a new category of devices by adding location based services: By cooperating with Skyhook Wireless it is possible to get the own location by triangulating the signals from different WiFi-hotspots. The iPhone uses also the well known method by using the cell-ids to find the current location. It’s quite interesting, that it seems that Apple is not cooperating with the mobile network operators to get the location by cell ids and triangulation: They realized this feature by cooperating with Google. When I think of the hurdles to realize mobile Location Based Services (LBS) with the different operators … this is not a bad idea.
We really can be curious, whether the iPhone SDK will be the kickoff of a new era in LBS. Maybe Apple will also provide the iPhone web developers with the LBS-SDK Loki SDK for their web applications - that would really roll up the LBS-scene