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Tuesday, January 9, 2007

Steve Jobs Unveils iPhone

... and Engadget covers the keynote revelation with some live-blogging. The keyboard-less, touchscreen-enabled iPhone is both a phone and an iPod, runs OS X, comes with a 2 megapixel camera, and allows developers to “create desktop class applications and networking, not the crippled stuff you find on most phones,” Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs says. (Tony Ruscoe wonders if this is an answer to our prayers?)

[Thanks Tony! Photo by Engadget.]

Update: There’s a Google part in the announcement too, according to Engadget:

Steve Jobs: From Google, what we have on the phone is Google search built right into the browser, and Google Maps. We’ve been working closely with them... it’s my pleasure now to introduce Dr. Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO.

Eric Schmidt: I’ve had the privilege of joining the board and there’s a lot of relationships... if we merge the companies we can call it Applegoo – but I’m not a marketing guy. You can actually merge without merging. Each company should do the absolutely best thing they can do every time, and he’s shown it today.

We can take the enormous brain trust of the Apple team and the open protocols of companies like Google, and put them in an environment for end users. From a Google perspective we’ve pushed very hard to partner with Apple and working with many, many different data services (...) It comes together seamlessly. This is the first of a whole new generation...

Steve, my congratulations to you, this product is going to be hot.

Steve Jobs: As a board member you’ll get one of the first ones!

For a look at the Google Maps feature, see the internet section of the Apple iPhone tour.

Yahoo is partnering with Apple as well, Engadget reports. Steve also announced that the iPhone (announced to ship in the US in June, and late 2007 in Europe, with a $499 price tag on the 4 GB/ service contract version) will run the Safari browser. The keynote presentation claims this to be the “first fully usable HTML browser on a phone” (Web app Google Maps, for example, runs fine in Safari. The only remaining issue for some web pages may be the iPhone’s screen size, though Apple innovates here as well, as the tour shows.)

[Thanks everyone in the comments! Second image based on Apple tour photos.]

On Spamming Digg

Just stumbled on an old but still relevant article by SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin discussing why it doesn’t pay to game Digg (from March 2006).

Yahoo Acquires MyBlogLog

Yahoo has snatched up blog community tracker MyBlogLog, Search Engine Land reports. (Forbes puts a $10+ million price tag on the acquision, citing “knowledgeable sources.”) I’d argue Yahoo is more directed at acquiring communities or community-created content (like Flickr), whereas Google looks to buy technologies or technology-makers (like JotSpot), but the 2006 Google-YouTube deal doesn’t fit that theory. [Thanks Search-Engines-Web.com!]

Join the ongoing forum comments.

Got Questions for Marissa Mayer?

My always-on-the-road video reporting buddy Mario Sixtus – he managed to pull Lawrence Lessig, Brewster Kahle and others in front of the Elektrischer Reporter camera – might be getting a chance to interview Google’s Marissa Mayer at the upcoming DLD conference in Munich (January 21st - 23rd). It’s not final yet but in case it happens, Mario wanted to ask all of you here if you have any questions for Marissa he might be able to pass on.

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