Last week Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple town-hall meeting and announced two major things for the iPhone: 1) support for Microsoft Exchange and 2) the iPhone SDK. The Exchange support was a relatively unexpected move, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. In order to unseat BlackBerry as the No. 1 wireless player in the U.S., Apple needed to have an enterprise story. What’s more, Apple has realized that the days when people carried two phones are over.
With support for the enterprise (one device for both home and business use), together with its utility as a music player, camera and Web browser, the iPhone is well positioned now to be that “one phone.”
by Michael Learmonth, Senior Editor, Silicon Alley Insider
Remember how the writers’ strike was forcing people to shut off their TVs and turn to their Web browsers? Think again: Nielsen says video viewership actually dropped 5% from December (6.2 billion streams) to January (5.9 billion). Not surprising, then, that YouTube, the dominant purveyor of Web video, also slipped from 2.64 billion streams in December to 2.57 billion in January. Unique viewers at YouTube were also down slightly from 67.2 million to 66.2 million in January. But YouTube kept its 42% market share of total streams.
Microsoft unveiled the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8 today, and we’ve been playing with it at PC World. … In this early version, IE 8 is not an upgrade that’s going to bowl you over with amazing new functionality. Microsoft is touting its better compliance with Web standards. (Shouldn’t the world’s dominant browser already be super-compatible with the Web?) It says that IE now recovers from crashes more gracefully. (Wouldn’t it be nicer if it didn’t crash?) A feature called Activities lets developers add functionality to IE in a way that doesn’t seem radically different from things clever sites have done for years with plain ol’ bookmark buttons; Web Slices, which let sites create widgety little snippets of information that you can view by clicking a bookmark button, are kind of interesting–but they’ll only take off if they’re widely supported by major sites, and they’re not radically different from Apple’s Web Clip feature in Safari, which works with all Web pages, not just ones designed to support it.
How much is the entity that manages the Microsoft IE-killing browser Firefox worth, and when will it go public? Answers: 1) A lot; and 2) Probably this year or next.
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