As have many others, I’ve been relatively impressed by the innovation and popularity of the iPhone. I think Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a unique ability to gauge when and how a specific industry is ready to change (the Apple way). Though he somewhat missed the first PC market, he definitely didn’t miss the Internet music one, and now he is right on track to owning a big part of the next generation mobile market. The latest iPhone 3G phenomenon (product and buzz) is definitely a great example of Steve Job’s pioneering vision, and while most of the features of the iPhone were more or less expected, the total package, including the pricing and the developer platform strategy, is pretty darn impressive.

However, as a business user, I am mostly interested in three main following features, and so far, I can safely see only one out of these three.

Concerning the first feature, Microsoft Exchange synchronization, the latest iPhone 3G seems to have the full package, meaning e-mail, calendar, and contact push synchronization. I am still skeptical about this last one, since to my knowledge, Microsoft still has not published the full MAPI or ActiveSync protocol. However, I am going to take Apple’s word on it.

The second feature, the 3G modem, is one of the features I have been using a lot lately on my Treo750, and I would not conceive of buying a mobile device without this feature. The 3G modem with ATTW actually works remarkably well and is extremely useful for avoiding hotel surcharges, slow Wi-Fi connections, and hunting for unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots. I can’t live without it, and for now, it is not clear that the new iPhone will have it.

The last one, unfortunately, is a given, or, rather, an “un-given.” The new iPhones will still be “officially” available only as network-locked devices. I still don’t understand how carriers and device manufacturers can get away with these kinds of practices. I completely understand giving a big discount as part of a subscription package, but I don’t understand how a corporation can lock an Internet device to a specific network. It seems so counter to what the Internet is all about. It would be comparable to buying a PC that could only connect to the Internet via Comcast (Microsoft and Comcast could never get away with that). Anyway, I just hope that one day Apple or Google will use their market weight to force the wireless networks to fully embrace the open devices. Unfortunately, Apple does not seem to be headed that way (see iPhone 3G Requires 2 Year Contract, In Store Activation)

At this time, the deciding factor for me will be the 3G modem. If the new iPhone has it, I might just take the plunge.

	Skype has recently launched its Skype v2.0 beta with an interesting mix of enterprise and consumer features.

Skype v2.0 has the following new features:

• Video: Skype 2.0 Video seems to work well. It did recognized my old Logitech web cam, and I did manage to video-conference easily with my family. I remember that I had more troubles when I tried to video-conference with MSN and Yahoo.
• Personalization, self-expression, contact organization: Users can now set avatars, ring tones, and mood. Nothing really new in this area, just some cute icons and sounds.
• Outlook toolbar: This toolbar allows calling contacts from the Outlook address book, and it does help you to match your contacts with their respective SkypeID. However, I could not get it to show the presence or the call function from an email (on right click, it actually shows the default Outlook call menu). Also, it does not seem to add any "smart tag," which would have been useful.
• Blog and Web site integration: Skype formalized its Web integration with commercial blog service Six Apart. And it still has its Skype Buttons HTML code generator, which allows any Web site (static or dynamic) to integrate with Skype client.

This is definitely good news for consumers. However, as Om Malik mentioned in his post, this is no breakthrough. Here are couple of ideas that would have been interesting.

• Desktop sharing: For business use, I would agree with Michael Arrington that desktop sharing would have been a great thing to have.
• Co-browsing: Skype would benefit from deeper and less intrusive means of integration with Browsers. Some users might want to Skype-enabled their browser without adding yet another Web toolbar. Also, co-browsing would have been a great feature to include and a short-term solution to the problem of desktop sharing.
• Standard compliance: Skype should support the XMPP protocol. This might sounds unreasonable from a business strategy point of view. However, if text chat is not Skype’s core business, then Skype could integrate XMPP distributed network into its voice and video service. It could also create a great viral marketing opportunity: when Skype users and XMPP users (e.g., Google Talk) decide during a chat to initiate a voice or video call, Skype could generate a text message suggesting that the non-Skype user install Skype.

As I mentioned in my previous post (”Web 2.0 Simplified“) , standardizing presence and text chat would create a multitude of new opportunities. Google, not surprisingly, has been adopting this strategy by supporting XMPP. It will be interesting to see what strategy will prove to be better.

I also think there is great room for innovation around P2P for Web 2.0, but it has to be open and creative- and if it is, it will probably be disruptive.

Some good discussions about Skype v2.0 appear on Michael Parekh’s blog. A good overview of Skype v2.0 Beta can be found on Daily Wireless.

One thing I have always wished for is to get from OpenOffice functions that I cannot get from Microsoft Office. OpenOffice does a good job at providing similar functionality as Microsoft Office. However, while OpenOffice provides innovation and modern functionality, it does not provide much more than Microsoft Office, at least not in a "Web 2.0" sense.

For example, in nowadays, most Web Applications (such as Flickr, Blog Service, Wikis, …) offer some powerful Web services. It would be useful to integrate these services directly into the OpenOffice editing experience. Here are a couple of features I would love to see in OpenOffice:

• Use OpenOffice Writer as [super] blog publishing tool (for WordPress, Bloggers, and TypePad).
• Use Flickr or any other photo services directly into Writer, Impress or even Calc., basically, being able to search and insert images from any photo services (i.e. ‘a la Flock‘) while editing my document.
• Use any blog and Wiki services as a data source for Writer and Impress. For example, while writing a document or presentation, having the ability to quote a section of a blog or Wiki page (e.g., Wikipedia).
• Many other possible integrations exist.

I am sure the OpenOffice platform and architecture allows for such extensions. It would also be great to include some of these integrations in the default OpenOffice package … just to stimulate engineering creativity and to offer a good reason to use OpenOffice even if we still have to use Microsoft Office, at least for a while ;).

Overall opinion: Not too bad for no WYSIWYG editing. I need to play a little bit more with it. However, for a more involved post, I might be using Dreamweaver. BTW, it would be nice if Dreamweaver can add some of these blog posting capabilities … just a thought.

Here are my quick pros/cons:

• Pros:
  • Easy configuration: Not too hard to configure your blog settings (connects well with Wordpress). Easy to start blogging.
  • Useful preferences: Can be on system tray, can start with last open post, can configure proxy (per blog!!), and can export/import preferences
  • Good HTML tag support: For people who like to edit HTML code, it does provide a simple yet useful HTML code editor with a “helper” toolbar like Wordpress’s “quick tag toolbar.”
  • HTML preview: Good HTML preview tab.
  • Spell check: Good spell check capabilities.
  • Offline support: Simple but good enough offline support.
  • Support categories: It does download your categories from Wordpress.
  • Good post synchronization: This is pretty cool – you can go back to previous post from Tools>Post>Last 5 Posts. It will then download it back, and you can make your changes and republish it. Unfortunately, it does not sync with our local one (.post) that you created previously.
• Cons
  • No WYSIWYG editing: It does not seem to be that important in blogger’s world, However, I would really like that. Not saying that I do not want to still be able to look at the code. A program like Dreamweaver would be a good compromise. There are some blog editors that does offer this functionality, though I will try to profile them.
  • No source formating: This does not allow you to “XML format” your html code. Since it generates mostly XHTML, it should not be too hard, and will help readability for a complex HTML document. However, I guess that hard core HTML coders prefer having full control over their HTML code.
  • No tag autocomplete: Again, this is not a must but should be easy to do for a native application. The simplest one is to autocomplete the closing tags.

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