"Game Changing" New iPhone Game Coming

Amazing new iPhone game coming next week. This by itself is more exciting to me than the new hardware or any enhancements to the software. I mean you actually reach in and build bridges and walkways for your characters with your friggin fingers. It's called Rolando and it's developed by Handcircus.

Duh: Intel disappointed with Apple over iPhone chip choice

Forbes says that Intel is "disappointed" with Apple over it's iPhone chip choice. Well duh. Apple is great at learning for growth in areas that are somewhat foreign to them. This is Apple's MO. Work really closely with a company in an industry that they don't have experience in. Turn around in a couple of years and apply what they've learned coupled with their own engineering smarts to do it themselves even better.

Remember the ROKR project with Motorola? Fact finding mission for Apple.

Heck, remember the PARC visits? The rest is Macintosh history.

Apple has it's own really, really small, low-powered chip design IP now in PA Semi. My guess is that they've learned quite a bit about the ins and outs of the silicon business over the past 3 years in working with Intel to design groundbreaking board and chip configurations. Just take a peek at the MacBook Air for reference.

Diversinet Offers Secure Vertical Mobile Banking Solution

I met and had lunch today with Lars Graf from Diversinet, a California based company specializing in mobile platform security. He demonstrated for me an amazing product named MobiSecure, part of a platform offering truly secure, mobile financial management including payments, OTP generation and even a digital safe deposit box. The downloadable application uses a locally encrypted data store and talks to a server via an encrypted channel. MobiSecure is available on just about all mobile platforms, including RIM and Symbian.

MobiSecure moves beyond mobile banking and into a comprehensive platform that allows you to manage your most personal data across multiple devices leveraging patented security technology that is licensed by RSA today. Beyond your mobile phone, you can access your data from any PC using a USB token that doesn't require driver installation. Diversinet is working towards Google health integration.

Lars showed me how he could send and receive funds using a variety of accounts and currency using an incredibly simple UI. Exchange rates were calculated for cross-currency transactions. He was also able to show me his passport information and his medical records, including his allergies and current prescriptions.

MobiSecure is brandable, allowing FIs to offer it as a fee-based service that allows customers to securely manage critical financial and personal information wherever they are. For FIs seeking to realize the real cradle-to-grave customer relationship, MobiSecure provides a valuable tool that helps to bring more of the customer under their umbrella.

Learn more at www.diversinet.com.

First Notes From the Mobile Commerce Summit

The pre-conference workshop "Mobile Marketing: How Financial Institutions Can Deploy the Newest Marketing Channel" just wrapped up. It was fairly interesting in that it focused not on the state of mobile as a marketing channel today but instead focused more on the coming mobile ecosystem that is expected to reach maturity in 2010 - 2011 time frame. Essentially in the next two years we are going to see mobile commerce explode in a big way and the FI is a central player in this. When you think about it, if done properly, the bank owns the customer relationship given that they are present at every point of sale. More on this later. Here are some general talking points from today:

• 53% of all US banks plan to offer mobile in the next 12-24 months.
• 70% of all call center call volume will be via mobile.
• 40% of gen Y feel that having a mobile option dictates their choice of cards and accounts.
• The Air Force is effectively leveraging mobile capabilities as a recruiting tool.

McCain Baits Obama Into Wearing Flip-Flops

Wow this was smart. McCain essentially baited Obama into rejecting public funding, painting himself as a flip-flopper in a major way. McCain has essentially been laying low all of these months while Obama duked it out with Billary. All the while, McCain knew that he could raise some serious cash once he started to get into it. Obama was lulled into thinking that his "grassroots" fundraising revolution had put him far ahead of the game. Now he's left on equal financial footing with McCain and with the mark of a hypocrite on his record. This is gonna be fun to watch.

Read the story here.

Lotus Notes 8.5 Calendaring Works Well With Others

When canceling an appointment in my Notes calendar today, I noticed this nifty option:




I've always felt that Notes calendaring worked well with other standards-based calendaring systems. While I'm not quite sure yet how this feature functions, I think it's a great detail and somewhat reassuring from an interface perspective. Kudos to the Lotus user experience team.

Apple Inc. Is About To Redefine Mobility

On Monday, June 9, all eyes in the tech world will be focused on Steve Jobs as he addresses the WWDC crowd. As usual, the rumor mill is running at a fevered pitch with impossible predictions and fantastic expectations. I should be conditioned by now to prepare for a let-down given that it's almost always too good to be true. With the exception of last year's Macworld iPhone announcement, Apple almost always seems to underwhelm by delivering great but seemingly restrained products. After all, Apple has carefully crafted the reputation as the world's greatest innovator. Why wouldn't we expect them to change the world on an annual basis?

I have a hunch that this time Apple will deliver in ways that most of us didn't see coming. While we've all been obsessed with the iPhone, Apple has been thinking much bigger. Well not that much bigger, maybe a couple of inches across and slightly thicker. You see, this is the way they do things there in Cupertino. They give us products that completely captivate and amaze to the point where Apple is able to work behind the cover of distraction to cook up something even more enthralling than before. They had us so focused on the iPod's evolution as a media player that our wildest iPod + phone fantasies didn't envision the convergence device that was finally introduced to us as the iPhone.

This time Apple will introduce the world to a product that it never thought that it wanted. The Ultra Mobile PC has been around for years and Bill Gates has been ready to change the world with it in just about every interview he's given since 2003. The problem with the UMPC isn't only that it runs a clunky version of Windows or that nobody has ever figured out a way to market it or that it's never been presented in a sexy form factor. The problem is really that it's a concept that was ahead of it's time. Like the mp3 player before it, the consumer market hadn't really yet gotten it's head around the concept of digital media and nobody had given them a cohesive approach to managing it. In stepped Apple with it's iTunes software and service and suddenly the mp3 player is a common household item. On Monday, I fully expect Apple to show the world what it really wants in mobile computing.

The world wants a device that it doesn't have to unfold and lay on a table or our laps. The world wants a device that it can use standing up or sitting down. The world wants a device that allows us to do all of the things that we typically do while mobile - consume media, IM, check email, surf the web, create documents and not much else. The laptop is really overkill for what most of us need in a portable computer and it's not all that convenient to use either. Imagine a device that you can whip out of your backpack, purse or man-purse at a moment's notice and begin using with the same level of effort that it takes to engage your iPhone. Imagine a device that allows us to interact with our digital objects in a tactile manner. The iPhone has taken us there in a small way. It has changed the way we navigate on a handheld device. This new device will change things in a much larger way.

Not only will Apple deliver to the world this device that it doesn't yet know it wants, but it will package and market it in a way that will leave us all wondering why it's taken so long to get here. Like the iPod and iPhone, this new device will be integrated with software both on the desktop and in the cloud that will make our digital lives more seamless than we ever imagined.

Of course I've always been accused of being a dreamer and I won't shy away from those allegations. Monday could very well come and go and all I'll be looking at when Steve leaves the stage is a new iPhone with faster internet and hundreds of 3rd party applications. In fact, I'm almost certain that will be the case. However, in the event that the dreamer in me was right, don't say I didn't tell you about it first. Afterall, Apple patented this over 3 years ago.