Antenna-Boosting Case for iPhone

Griffin has released ClearBoost a case that captures wireless signal and sends it to your iPhones internal antenna.

This clever case conceals a built-in booster antenna that captures more of the available wireless signal and sends it to your iPhone’s internal antenna. The result is a better signal for your iPhone, especially in border areas—which translates to fewer dropped calls, wider coverage areas, and faster downloads.

Nothing to plug in -- just snap iPhone in ClearBoost’s durable polycarbonate case. Your iPhone gets protection from real-world hazards, and its antenna gets a boost.

Features:
* Boosts the built-in antenna of your iPhone
* Fewer dropped calls, cleaner signal
* Wider service areas
* Physical protection against bumps and scratches

How Apple sells 45 million iPhones in 2009

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster took a lot of heat back in June 2007 when he predicted, three weeks before Apple even began selling the iPhone, that the company would be shipping them at the rate of 45 million a year by 2009.

But Munster is sticking to his guns, and on Monday released a detailed report to clients in which he lays out the steps by which he expects Apple (AAPL) to hit his target — quadrupling 2008 sales.

By introducing a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months

By offering a family of 2 to 3 iPhones — including lower-priced models selling for $200 to $300 — by Jan 2009 at the latest

By entering new countries, effectively doubling the addressable market every year for the next two years.

By adding new features, such as games (Tiger Woods Golf, played by swinging the iPhone?) and remote purchases (Starbucks lattes without the wait?) starting in June.

Conceding that most investors consider his 45 million estimate “outrageously aggressive,” Munster supports it with a somewhat mysterious chart that compares the 409% year-to-year growth rate of the iPod in its breakout years with his estimate of just over 300% for the iPhone.


What’s mysterious about this chart is that it shows sales of 35.6 million iPhones in fiscal 2009, not the 45 million Munster is projecting. The discrepancy may be due to the difference between Apple’s fiscal year and our calender year, but Munster does not explain it.

Slightly clearer is the roadmap Munster offers for Apple’s overseas expansion. He points out that iPhone has achieved roughly 3% penetration of the 153 million subscriber base in the six countries in which it is currently sold. The following chart shows how he expects Apple to double that addressable market over the next two years. Note that Japan is the only Asian country he’s counting on for 2008. China, he says, is not likely to sign on until Apple drops its insistence on revenue sharing, something he expects the company to do in 2009.

HOW APPLEL GOT EVERYTHING RIGHT BY DOING EVERY THING WRONG

One Infinite Loop, Apple's street address, is a programming in-joke — it refers to a routine that never ends. But it is also an apt description of the travails of parking at the Cupertino, California, campus. Like most things in Silicon Valley, Apple's lots are egalitarian; there are no reserved spots for managers or higher-ups. Even if you're a Porsche-driving senior executive, if you arrive after 10 am, you should be prepared to circle the lot endlessly, hunting for a space.

But there is one Mercedes that doesn't need to search for very long, and it belongs to Steve Jobs. If there's no easy-to-find spot and he's in a hurry, Jobs has been known to pull up to Apple's front entrance and park in a handicapped space. (Sometimes he takes up two spaces.) It's become a piece of Apple lore — and a running gag at the company. Employees have stuck notes under his windshield wiper: "Park Different." They have also converted the minimalist wheelchair symbol on the pavement into a Mercedes logo.

Jobs' fabled attitude toward parking reflects his approach to business: For him, the regular rules do not apply. Everybody is familiar with Google's famous catchphrase, "Don't be evil." It has become a shorthand mission statement for Silicon Valley, encompassing a variety of ideals that — proponents say — are good for business and good for the world: Embrace open platforms. Trust decisions to the wisdom of crowds. Treat your employees like gods.

It's ironic, then, that one of the Valley's most successful companies ignored all of these tenets. Google and Apple may have a friendly relationship — Google CEO Eric Schmidt sits on Apple's board, after all — but by Google's definition, Apple is irredeemably evil, behaving more like an old-fashioned industrial titan than a different-thinking business of the future. Apple operates with a level of secrecy that makes Thomas Pynchon look like Paris Hilton. It locks consumers into a proprietary ecosystem. And as for treating employees like gods? Yeah, Apple doesn't do that either.

But by deliberately flouting the Google mantra, Apple has thrived. When Jobs retook the helm in 1997, the company was struggling to survive. Today it has a market cap of $105 billion, placing it ahead of Dell and behind Intel. Its iPod commands 70 percent of the MP3 player market. Four billion songs have been purchased from iTunes. The iPhone is reshaping the entire wireless industry. Even the underdog Mac operating system has begun to nibble into Windows' once-unassailable dominance; last year, its share of the US market topped 6 percent, more than double its portion in 2003.

It's hard to see how any of this would have happened had Jobs hewed to the standard touchy-feely philosophies of Silicon Valley. Apple creates must-have products the old-fashioned way: by locking the doors and sweating and bleeding until something emerges perfectly formed. It's hard to see the Mac OS and the iPhone coming out of the same design-by-committee process that produced Microsoft Vista or Dell's Pocket DJ music player. Likewise, had Apple opened its iTunes-iPod juggernaut to outside developers, the company would have risked turning its uniquely integrated service into a hodgepodge of independent applications — kind of like the rest of the Internet, come to think of it.

And now observers, academics, and even some other companies are taking notes. Because while Apple's tactics may seem like Industrial Revolution relics, they've helped the company position itself ahead of its competitors and at the forefront of the tech industry. Sometimes, evil works.

Over the past 100 years, management theory has followed a smooth trajectory, from enslavement to empowerment. The 20th century began with Taylorism — engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor's notion that workers are interchangeable cogs — but with every decade came a new philosophy, each advocating that more power be passed down the chain of command to division managers, group leaders, and workers themselves. In 1977, Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership argued that CEOs should think of themselves as slaves to their workers and focus on keeping them happy.

Silicon Valley has always been at the forefront of this kind of egalitarianism. In the 1940s, Bill Hewlett and David Packard pioneered what business author Tom Peters dubbed "managing by walking around," an approach that encouraged executives to communicate informally with their employees. In the 1990s, Intel's executives expressed solidarity with the engineers by renouncing their swanky corner offices in favor of standard-issue cubicles. And today, if Google hasn't made itself a Greenleaf-esque slave to its employees, it's at least a cruise director: The Mountain View campus is famous for its perks, including in-house masseuses, roller-hockey games, and a cafeteria where employees gobble gourmet vittles for free. What's more, Google's engineers have unprecedented autonomy; they choose which projects they work on and whom they work with. And they are encouraged to allot 20 percent of their work week to pursuing their own software ideas. The result? Products like Gmail and Google News, which began as personal endeavors.

APPLE RELEASE A NEW SAFARI 3.1 FOR BOTH MAC FOR WINDOW PC

The famous American multinational corporation focusing on consumer electronics and closely related software products, Apple has launched the latest version of its Safari web browser - Safari 3.1, which the company claims as the world’s fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs (1.9 times faster than IE 7 [Internet Explorer 7] and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2), aiming to enhance your web browsing experience.

The famous American multinational corporation focusing on consumer electronics and closely related software products, Apple has launched the latest version of its Safari web browser - Safari 3.1, which the company claims as the world’s fastest web browser for Mac and Windows PCs (1.9 times faster than IE 7 [Internet Explorer 7] and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2), aiming to enhance your web browsing experience.



In addition, JavaScript is also said to load faster (up to 6 times) with new Safari which is the first browser to support the latest innovative web standards needed to deliver the next generation of highly interactive Web 2.0 experiences.

“Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.”

According to the company, “Safari 3.1 is the first browser to support the new video and audio tags in HTML 5 and the first to support CSS Animations. Safari also supports CSS Web Fonts, giving designers limitless choices of fonts to create stunning new web sites.”

The new Safari 3.1 web browser is now available as a free download from Apple’s official site, or use the

direct download links to download Safari.

Can the iPhone be everything to everyone?

Attention all technology companies: you have three months to get your act together. Start pedaling now because in June Apple may steal your business. Why all tech companies? Because Apple's software development kit (SDK) announcement revealed the real scope of the company's ambition for the iPhone. Not since Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap (it's shampoo! Laundry detergent! Mouthwash! Massage oil! Dishwashing liquid!) has one product tried to be so many things to so many people.

The iPhone threatens to replace the BlackBerry for corporate users, the PSP for portable gaming and entertainment lovers, and the SideKick for tween IM freaks. With its accelerometer-friendly games, it's taking on the Nintendo Wii. With its pill-identification application it's even trying to sneak its way into your doctor's white coat pocket. The new iPhone software flexibility will turn the iPhone from an impressive product to a great one. Click Continue to read more about what the iPhone SDK announcement means for you, whoever you are.

Cracking the CrackBerry

When I learned that Apple was probably going to announce push e-mail today for the iPhone, I was a little worried. Push e-mail is what makes the BlackBerry so popular among businesses: it's the "crack" in CrackBerry. And it doesn't just mean that you'll get e-mail immediately without having to hit "reload." The new software also allows your company to delete all of your e-mail at any time. Sure, it's a useful feature in case of theft, and it probably won't affect non-corporate phone owners. But for those users it's a constant reminder of their creepy corporate overlords. I worried that the iPhone would lose its "cool" and become just another tool for corporate drones — the crystal meth to BlackBerry's "crack" image.

I shouldn't have bothered worrying that the iPhone would become just another BlackBerry or Treo, however. The enterprise aspect of the announcement turned out only to be a small part of Apple's master plan. By the time Jobs and Co. finished talking about Spore, Sega and AIM, the corporate mumbo-jumbo was long forgotten. The announcements were so awesome-looking that it's easy to forget that the phone is already an MP3 and video player and Web browser. Also, it's a phone.

Complaints, Complaints

Of course not everybody's going to be perfectly pleased. Apple will not be allowing users to develop and distribute SIM unlock software, so some users will still be taking their phones off the grid, voiding their warranty and enraging AT&T as they go.

And the iPhone's browser still won't be Flash-friendly, leaving users no way to access awesome websites like this one and, well, this one (at least parts of it).

Some will complain that all these new applications will be available only through the iTunes store. I've criticized Apple many times and am frequently called an Apple hater on this site. Not this time. It makes sense that Apple does business through its store. It's one of the company's safeguards against anyone creating damaging apps, and it's not some unexpected surprise. If iTunes really bothers you, you should have a Windows Mobile-based phone. Nobody was expecting Apple to change its entire business model today just because customers had been unlocking its phone.

Finally, there will be some grumbling that consumers won't actually get to use any of the new software until June. They'll only be grumbling until June.

Winners and Losers

I predict that in June we'll see an amazing array of programming for the iPhone, much of it free. I believe these programs will go a long way towards convincing people not to hack their iPhones. Those hacks will become niche operations run by die-hards whom Apple never had a shot at convincing in the first place.

Is Apple attacking too many markets at once? Besides the doctors, lawyers, gamers, casual gamers, movie watchers, businessmen, and teenagers, the company is going to institute parental controls so that you can give an iPhone to your toddler. Can it be successful in all these areas? Is the company, and by extension the iPhone, spreading itself too thin? I don't see it that way: all of the individual programs look too strong. The iPhone is an expensive product, so I don't expect the change to happen all at once. But slowly, steadily, Apple is going to consume the cellphone and PDA markets, even as it begins to gnaw its way into other areas like the portable-gaming sphere. Other tech companies are going to feel it, unless they come up with some pretty amazing products, stat.