Widgetbox is jumping on the iPhone bandwagon by releasing a special gallery of widgets tailored to the popular device’s screen.

There are 16 widgets available to start, including an RSS output of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and a BART QuickPlanner tool for finding mass transport rides around the Bay Area. A tutorial is being provided for developers to create their own iPhone-ready widgets, which will then go into the gallery.

Despite Jobs’ insistence that all regular websites work well on the iPhone, it’s always nice to see websites tailored for the device because when it comes down to it, pinching to zoom in and out gets tiresome. This new gallery is especially nice because mobile users generally want access to quick information while on the go, and widgets are inherently designed for small bits of consumption. If you find a few widgets you like, you can add them to your home screen for easy access.

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Widgetbox is jumping on the iPhone bandwagon by releasing a special gallery of widgets tailored to the popular device’s screen.

There are 16 widgets available to start, including an RSS output of The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs and a BART QuickPlanner tool for finding mass transport rides around the Bay Area. A tutorial is being provided for developers to create their own iPhone-ready widgets, which will then go into the gallery.

Despite Jobs’ insistence that all regular websites work well on the iPhone, it’s always nice to see websites tailored for the device because when it comes down to it, pinching to zoom in and out gets tiresome. This new gallery is especially nice because mobile users generally want access to quick information while on the go, and widgets are inherently designed for small bits of consumption. If you find a few widgets you like, you can add them to your home screen for easy access.

Also see Apple’s own gallery for iPhone-ready web apps.

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Anyone who’s been reading this blog for more than a few months knows I’m bullish on mobile social networking.

The space is wide open at this point – no one has created an application that has gotten enough traction to go mainstream. That’s party because of tech limitations – browser based networks don’t leverage the power of the mobile device, and client based applications are blocked by service providers and handset limitations.

But it’s coming. A few years from now we’ll use our mobile devices to help us remember details of people we know, but not well. And it will help us meet new people for dating, business and friendship. Imagine walking into a meeting, classroom, party, bar, subway station, airplane, etc. and seeing profile information about other people in the area, depending on privacy settings. Picture, name, dating status, resume information, etc. The information that is available would be relevant to the setting – quick LinkedIn-type information for a business meeting v. Facebook dating status for a bar.

That requires a social network that has presence, location and contextual information about you. It needs to know where you are (via GPS or triangulation), if you are in business or personal mode, and similar information for the people around you. It also needs, at a basic level, the ability to sort and browse the people around you based on their picture and name, and what they are looking for (dating, investments, job, friendship). Once this network is established, you’ll know everyone’s name who’s around you (if they choose to share it), and enough basic information to jog your memory if you know them, or meet them if there’s mutual interest. Poking someone on Facebook is great, but “poking” them when you’re in the same bar as them can result in much more immediate social gratification.

The mobile social network that wins will go way beyond, say, Facebook’s iPhone site, which doesn’t leverage location information, or help you meet people around you.

So when mobile social network startups reach out to us, we give them a lot of attention. I waded through a bunch of them in September 2007, and followed up with a look at LimeJuice in December.

Frankly, MySpace and Facebook could lock up this space simply by focusing on it, but as far as I can tell from discussions with execs at both companies, they’re more focused on each other than in dominating the mobile space. That creates an incredible vacuum for a startup.

Start With The iPhone

In February I wrote a post called “Will There Be A (Successful) iPhone-Only Social Network?” and presented an argument that the iPhone SDK presented a compelling opportunity to launch a mobile social network while avoiding the chicken and egg problem that any new network, and particularly a mobile network, would encounter. iPhone penetration in Silicon Valley, and among early adopters, is so high that the application could spread virally among those communities. As the network gains traction, it could expand to Google’s Android platform and grow from there.

iPhone users are the perfect group to launch the network to. They’re passionate and elitist, and will like the idea of being in an iPhone-only club. Go to a party and see a picture and first name of everyone there who’s holding an iPhone – then meet them and add them as friends. Then, once mutual friendship is established, see those people wherever they are in the world, along with presence information telling you what they’re thinking, or up to.

I believe in the idea so much that I explored putting together a team to build a basic network on top of the iPhone SDK. But I abandoned that idea last week when I saw a live demo, on the iPhone, of an upcoming social network that does everything I called for in that February post.

It’s Coming

The startup behind the new application won’t let me disclose their name yet. But the application is awesome. It shows you everyone around you who has it installed on an iPhone (default privacy is set to off, but can be changed). Users can scroll through nearby users, and set filters for men, women or age ranges. If you find someone interesting you can pull up their profile and ping them. If they respond you can start a chat, on the phone or in person. Of course, they can also choose to block you.

Location is based on the triangulation feature of the iPhone, which is accurate enough to get this going. And the startup thinks they’ve found a way around the fact that third party iPhone applications can’t run in the background (meaning you’d have to have the application open, and not use any other iPhone features, to run the social network and see others). They explained the work around in general terms to me, but asked that it remain confidential for now.

As I said, I saw the app running on an iPhone and even the early prototype left me speechless. It will, I believe, prove to be very popular, and very valuable.

The image shows a mockup of the functionality I saw working live on the phone (I should be able to show a photo or video of it running in the next week or two as well). Look for a launch when the iPhone app store opens this summer.

Credit for that awesome image at top of post is to Hank Grebe at MediaSpin.

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Fortune is reporting that Microsoft may be eyeing the iPhone as a potential outlet for their software, including Office applications and voice control for Apple’s iPhone.

“It’s really important for us to understand what we can bring to the iPhone,” Tom Gibbons, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Specialized Devices and Applications Group, told Fortune on Monday. “To the extent that Mac Office customers have functionality that they need in that environment, we’re actually in the process of trying to understand that now.”

This comes fast on the heels of the SDK announcement and some rumors that Slilverlight might be coming to the iPhone before Flash.

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There has been a lot of talk about the new iPhone firmware and its enterprise capabilities. Well, the iPhoneDevTeam has cracked the 2.0 (actually 1.2) firmware and created a version of the firmware that works with any GSM SIM card without difficult incantations and installations. The firmware isn’t out yet — they’re sitting on it until the final version comes out — but this is what iPhone 2.0 will look like a few months from now. Watch it just so you can send it to your IT guy to convince him to buy iPhones for your team. After all, it does run Exchange.

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Obviously Steve Jobs and team didn’t go through all the details today when they announced the availability of the iPhone SDK. It was more of a high level pass. But details are what third party developers need to think about before jumping into the iPhone with both feet.

Last year when Facebook announced Facebook Platform, developers had to decide to ignore it, build for it along with a standard web site, or build exclusively for Facebook. Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman layed out an argument that some developers should immediately build on Facebook v. developing for MySpace, despite the fact that it was (and is) proprietary.

Facebook Platform has its own venture funds to support new startups. As of today, so does the iPhone.

The decision to build an iPhone application is very similar. Some developers will add one to their existing products. Others will go iPhone only.

Should we expect Kopelman to write a new post, urging developers to build an iPhone application as soon as possible? Maybe. But a number of bloggers and developers did some digging today into the fine print, and there are some troubling details.

Some of the limitations were announced at the event today. VOIP services, for example, are basically out of luck. They can access the Internet only via wifi, not the cell networks. That’s a signal of a larger issue, though – that Apple isn’t going to allow applications to threaten any of their revenue streams from the iPhone. Likewise, SIM unlocking is forbidden. But what about other, less black and white applications? John Gruber asks if Amazon would be able to launch an iPhone application that allowed users to buy songs from the Amazon MP3 store. That’s a great question, currently without an answer.

Other limitations can be found in the developer agreement. Developers can only use the published APIs and only in the way Apple says they can use them. Ok, that helps with stability. Applications also cannot write data anywhere except its their designated area, meaning developers can’t modify data from any other applications.

But the single biggest issue we’ve found is in the 100 page iPhone Human Interface Guidelines (embedded below). It’s a public document, but you must be a registered iPhone developer to see it. We’ve embedded it below via docstoc.

Users can only run one application at a time. That doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it means that you can’t switch away from an application and have it continue to do things. That’s a big issue with the current support for websites on the iPhone – as soon as you leave the browser the connection is broken. With the iPhone, the hope was that an installed application could continue to run in the background and, most usefully, gather and send information from and to the web.

Only one iPhone application can run at a time, and third-party applications never run in the background. This means that when users switch to another application, answer the phone, or check their email, the application they were using quits. (p. 16)

This will be a serious problem for some developers. For example, say a developer wanted to take location information from the iPhone (created via the iPhones cellular triangulation feature) and dump it into FireEagle to keep track of where you’ve been. Well, that won’t work unless you keep the application open at all times, and don’t use the iPhone for anything other than that. The bottom line is – any application that wants to periodically interact with the web to do stuff, won’t be able to on a continual basis.

If you know of or find other significant limitations, let us know in the comments with a link or text and we’ll add them here.

iPhones Human Interface Guidelines – Get more free documents

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John Doerr took the stage today at Apple’s announcement of its iPhone software developer kit and announced a $100 million fund to invest in startups that create apps for the iPhone. “”I can’t wait to see the great new companies that we build together,” he says. The fund will be led by Matt Murphy at Kleiner and will be called the iFund. From the the Kleiner Perkins Website:

KPCB’s iFund is a $100M investment initiative that will fund market-changing ideas and products that extend the revolutionary new iPhone and iPod touch platform. The iFund is agnostic to size and stage of investment and will invest in companies building applications, services and components. Focus areas include location based services, social networking, mCommerce (including advertising and payments), communication, and entertainment. The iFund will back innovators pursuing transformative, high-impact ideas with an eye towards building independent durable companies atop the iPhone / iPod touch platform.

This is in line with similar, if smaller, funds announced to invest in Facebook apps, the $10 million fbFund and a Facebook-only fund from Bay Partners.

Steve Jobs truly wants to turn the iPhone into an industry, and he got Kleiner to jump start it with $100 million. That should get the ball rolling on iPhone-only startups. Some ideas we’d like to see get funded: an iPhone-only social network and a company that can make Flash work on the iPhone (that would be huge). Pictured to the left is Electronic Art’s Spore on the iPhone, which will be released in September.

The iPhone does have many unique features (you could base a whole startup on just creating accelerometer apps), but those features also become quickly copied. Everywhere you turn there is another touchscreen phone these days. Does it make sense to start a company that produces apps only for the iPhone and no other mobile device? Maybe what we will see are startups that develop for the iPhone first and then port to other mobile phones.

But you don’t need a new $100 million fund for that either. We are seeing that already as the iPhone is becoming the de facto mobile platform for mobile Web apps. Actual third party applications won’t be available until June, but developers can start building today.

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Tune in tomorrow here and on CrunchGear for live coverage of Apple’s iPhone SDK event at Apple HQ in Cupertino. The event starts at 10 am PST.

What do we expect will be said? Well, hopefully we’ll get an idea when the SDK will be available, since it really looks like Apple will miss their promised February launch.

Apple is also saying they’ll announce “some exciting new enterprise features.” I hope that means business users will have Exchange Server like features going forward.

Lots more rumors over at iLounge. In a few short hours we’ll know what’s up.

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This looks surprisingly familiar. Available in August. More pictures here.

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iPhone owners, like users of most Apple products, are a fairly passionate, elitist group of people.

I think an iPhone-only social network, if it had the right features, would be a huge hit with these users. Actually, I think any mobile social network would be a big hit, if it had presence awareness and was able to tell you both where your friends are and what they are up to. And also let you meet new people around you who were open to it.

I wrote about some of the early experiments with mobile social networks last September (see our more recent coverage of LimeJuice as well). The big social networks, of course, aren’t ignoring mobile, either. But even Facebook’s iPhone app is just the desktop version optimized for that phone. It doesn’t leverage the device itself to tell you when friends are close.

The goal here isn’t just to let users see where their friends are and what they are up to. The killer app is to facilitate meeting new people – either for dating (see a picture of everyone around you who’s single and looking, along with their basic bio), or business (see the professional bio and picture of everyone at the cocktail party). Subject to privacy controls, of course.

Once a network has critical mass users will, depending on privacy settings, be able to walk into any gathering and see information on the people in the room. Whoever gets there first will have a far more valuable asset than the existing networks at MySpace and Facebook today. Social networks are about being social. And social implies being around other people. The device they have with them when they’re doing that, and which can enhance those social gatherings, is their mobile phone. The key to doing that is through GPS or cell phone triangulation (which the iPhone now has).

None of the mobile social networks we’ve covered have even come close to establishing a critical mass. The key to winning is getting users on devices that have GPS or triangulation for presence and location, and having software on the phone instead of just accessing it from a website. Getting java apps on phones in Europe is much easier in the U.S., which is why most of the mobile social network startups are located there.

The iPhone, though, has both. Or rather, soon will have both (the SDK to allow third party apps on the phone may have been delayed). As soon as that SDK is released, look for a flurry of third party applications to try and create a social network on the iPhone.

The front runners will be Facebook and MySpace, who, I assume, will get their users to install software on the phone as quickly as possible and try to add location information for users who choose to share it.

But new startups will try as well. And one way to differentiate themselves may be to offer a social networks that is open only to iPhone users, and no one else. The exclusivity factor may be exactly what will draw enough iPhone users to kick start the service.

Fon11 – Giving It A Shot

Berkeley-based Fon11 is one startup that we’re tracking that plans to do this. The service works already through the web browser on the iPhone. In fact, you have to use it from an iPhone – it’s the only way you can register for an account, add friends or do anything else. The website, when accessed from any where but an iPhone, just shows information about the service (note – that isn’t entirely true – you can go to testiphone.com and enter fon11.com/home and see it just like it would appear on the iPhone – but only from the Safari browser).

The service is fairly limited right now to setting presence/status information. They can’t use the iPhone triangulation feature, so they set up a separate service called OpenLandmark to let people set their location information (it works well for places you visit frequently). The service caught the eye of the iPhone team, who made it a Staff Pick earlier this month.

Blackberry has a true GPS and allows third party apps on their phone. And Google’s Android will also do all of this as well. But something tells me that iPhone users might be the first group of people to jump on mobile social networks, and wouldn’t mind letting other iPhone users in the room know they’re part of the cult.

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