Apple's WWDC insights and new iOS

The Apple Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) takes place in San Francisco from Monday through Friday this week, geeks of the world unite. Of course you have to get a ticket to attend, I think all of them were sold out in less than three minutes. For this years event, I saw online that a bit of perspective is needed, the same tickets took 12 hours to sell out in 2011, and 2 hours in 2012. And just three minutes (or was it 71 seconds) in 2013. So tell me, do you think that the developers are keen to see the new products and platforms? You betcha!


So far there have been some software update announcements, the most key for individual users of the iPhone (newer versions): Apple Unveils iOS 7. I read in detail through all the releases yesterday and came to two conclusions. One, photos are bigger than we all think: "iPhones are used to take more photos around the world every day than any other camera, and with iOS 7 the new Camera app features filters so you can add real-time photo effects. The Camera app now includes a square camera option, and you can quickly and easily switch between your four cameras—video, photo, square and panorama—with just a swipe."


Instagram was bought by Facebook for around 1 billion Dollars last year, making one of the founders, Kevin Systrom wildly rich. 400 million odd Dollars in 2012, and all this after graduating in 2006. Systrom is only 30, what now for him?

Of course the square photos were meant for Instagram posting on the fly. All the other effects for posting directly to your Twitter account, or your Facebook account, and so on, perhaps this is a direct competition to Instagram. Photos are key to social media and unsurprisingly people want you to see their sunset (better than where you are sitting), sunrise, cute kids (always cleverer than yours), lunch, dinner (yours is worse), latest dish they cooked, their cat (too many of those), where they are staying (jealousy makes you nasty), their dog, their car, the car they want, the event they are attending (that you are not) and the list goes on. Simple things really, but the tools that allow us to do this are getting better and better.


The second thing that struck me, back to that developers ticketing part is that there is definitely app store revenue acceleration taking place. The folks over at the BusinessInsider stuck up their chart of the day and showed how the mix in terms of the money paid to developers was starting to accelerate. 5 billion Dollars this time last year, 7 billion in January and then 10 billion Dollars now. Accelerating and that is great news, because it means that the best developers are locked in and developing applications inside of the Apple ecosystem, which is growing as we can see with tablet and smartphone sales. Incentivise the developers who have made packets already. All in all, whilst Mr. Market is still waiting for a wow new product, this new operating system update will possibly do the trick for now.