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.

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

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