The iPhone really is a phenomenal leap as far as mobile phone usability is concerned, but it’s far from perfect. Here’s a few ways it can be improved:

Remote Control Functionality and AppleTV Integration

Although the AppleTV is a great product, the only way to currently control it is through the no-frills mac remote. This is particularly bad in buildings that more than one Mac calls home, where you’ll come across multiple remotes, but only one will control your AppleTV

Apple should include an option to control AppleTV from iPhones on the same network. Apple should extend this great protocol they support, zeroconf, that allows you to browse your network of Macs through the finder, to allow for the pairing of iPhones, AppleTVs and perhaps, even Macs themselves

It would work a bit like this: on the iPhone, a “Remote Control” will be added. Tapping on this should take you to a list of found devices; devices you’ve paired before should appear at the top of the list; other devices at the bottom, should have a Setup button. Tapping on this should send a signal to AppleTV that this phone wants to pair with it; to this end, AppleTV will show a screen with a 4-digit PIN (if it’s in the middle of playing something, it should just project the number on the bottom.) On the iPhone, you have two options: Enter the number you see on the screen, or hide the device entry from the Remote Control Devices List.

Once you’ve set this up, you should be able to control the AppleTV in the exact same way you control the iPod functionality of the iPhone, including browsing the music in coverflow

Remote Control for the Mac should work in the same way, but I see room for an extra feature: Using the iPhone as a high-end Keynote controller, where not only can you switch between slides by dragging your finger across the phone, but also allow for selecting a specific slide in cover flow.

How presentation with coverflow might look (slides: Dr. Jason Eisner)

Filesystem

This is one of the rumored upgrades, but the iPhone really should support being mounted as a filesystem, especially over WiFi. Of course, this can get hairy with account maintainance, so I think Apple should use the same kind of the Pairing they’d use with Remote Control. In fact, mounting the iPod as a remote should also give you the option of mounting it as a storage medium (another checkbox on the Remote Control coupling screen.)

Games

The iPhone would make a great gaming device. Recently Games were introduced for the iPod - I don’t know how well they’re doing, but I understand they’re designed for the iPod interface, and they use a clickwheel as a controller. It’s going to take some work to convert these to be iPhone friendly, but the iPhone is a much better platform for games than either the iPod or any other phone out there

The most promising new developments are the tapping and tilting inputs. Tapping, dragging and dropping should make games like Solitaire or Whack-a-mole work extremely well, and requires little elaboration on my part. Tilting would be great for any game where you’re controlling the motion of a certain central piece. For example in Tetris, tilting the phone to the left and to the right makes the piece move to the left or right; tilting it downwards makes the piece drop faster. I’m using simple examples, but as the Wii has shown, the sky is the limit.

iTunes on the go and Ringtones

The iPhone should be able to sync directly with the iTunes Store. I’m sure it will be slow and painful, so perhaps it should be allowed only on wifi for now, until the iPhone 2G comes along with GSM-3G. The iPhone would really be a great vehicle for iTunes Store purchases. Consider for example the mobile phone ringtone business. By some estimates, this will be a 4 billion dollar business by 2008, and most of these are clipped songs. Consider Apple’s competitive advantage: what the ringtone business sells is 15 second clips for as much as a dollar; Apple sells full songs at roughly the same price.

The fixes and small little features that everyone wants

It seems like development was rushed a bit in order to get it out on its pre-announced launch date. Now that thats in the past, Apple has work to do. They have to fix a buggy safari browser that crashes from time to time, an iPod functionality that sometimes stops playing while you’re doing something else, and a VPN function I can’t get to work. Personally I wouldn’t mind having some sort of copy-paste functionality either

But the most annoying non-feature of the iPhone right now is the AT&T lockup. I’d much rather use a local sim card when I travel, and the iPhone should allow me to do so.

What other features would you like to see on the iPhone? Post a comment below.

Bloomberg has posted a great article examining more of the iPhone buzz, comparing it to the Ford Mustang and Windows (95) product launch. They’re pointing out how the ads hit the spot, and instead of selling the coolness factor of the device, they demonstrate how to use the features. Here’s a sample:

The newer IPhone ads show what people can do, with emphasis on how it is done. A consumer recently told Gartenberg he wished his handset had the same Google Inc. map function as the iPhone. In fact, that application is available for the phone the consumer had, he just hadn’t realized it, Gartenberg says.

Read the Bloomberg article about the iPhone campaign.

With an imminent launching date, Apple is stepping up the marketing machinery for the iPhone, and the new television spots have to be my favorite Apple ad campaign, ever.

While the keynote that introduced the latest Apple endeavor had some negative elements, specifically the lengthy comparison with the “old world” phones, the new ads are simple, focus on the ease of use of the phone and demonstrate the way the great way in which the device’s different functions blend together.

Perhaps, if this works out well and the Get A Mac ad campaign wears out, the Mac campaigns might want to try this sort of thing. Besides, the campaign and the iPods bring customers to Apple stores, but the interaction with the UI is what really seals the deal.

Watch the new ads here.

I was at Johns Hopkins over the weekend visiting the alma-mater in what arguably is its best season. The campus is beautiful in springtime, perhaps more breathtaking than its sensational fall self.

During my visit, I was delighted to find out that the plans for the renovation of our most historic and iconic building, Gilman Hall, are finally laid out. The Gilman Renovation plans have been endlessly talked about for most of my 4.5 years at Hopkins, but planning for this must have been exceptionally difficult. Reinventing a building full of dead-end corridors and cranky heating pipes, without robbing it of its character, is no easy task.

This is what they came up with:

It seems, according to the Hopkins Gazette article I took these pictures from, they’ve managed to strike a good balance; It’s a shame it won’t be up and running again until 2010, and I envy the class of ‘14 already (Are they even born yet?)

Move over US News and World report.

A site recently published a list of high PageRank sites for PageRank 9 and 10. I’m not sure this is an exhaustive or authoritative list, but I was surprised at how few sites and how few universities are PR9+. I’m shocked that so few international universities make the list either.

So seeing this, I’m glad I went to a PR9 university. Woohoo! Care to link back, Hopkins?

SSH and the file transfering protocols on top of it (SSHFS, Konqueror’s fish://, SFTP and scp), were a big deal for me before I switched from a Linux to a Mac notebook. So the FUSE port for Mac, or MacFUSE, is a really exciting, much wished-for addition to the great free software library available for the Mac.
What’s more exciting is that it’s developed here at Google.

There’s a couple of ways to make this work even better for you, one of which is SSH Passwordless Authentication, or Key Authentication. Here’s how you can set it up:

1. Generate an SSH key pair. Use either an empty passphrase or one that you can easily type (a short password is fine, because an attacker would still need to use your key!)

   You can do this by typing this into the terminal:

   ssh-keygen -t rsa

2. Now, create a script that will install this key on remote locations by pasting these lines into the terminal:

   sudo touch /usr/bin/ssh-install-key ;
   sudo chmod a+w /usr/bin/ssh-install-key
   echo "cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub | ssh \${1} \"cat - >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys\"" \
        > /usr/bin/ssh-install-key
   sudo chmod a-w+x /usr/bin/ssh-install-key

Now you can install your key to whatever server you please! Just do

ssh-install-key user@someserver.com

Enter your password as many times as you’re prompted, and then just login with

ssh user@someserver.com

If you’ve put a non-empty passphrase, you should be asked for the passphrase; otherwise, you’re already logged in!

I’m happy to see that iTunes has hit the 2bn song cumulative download mark - it was mentioned in the Steve Jobs Macworld keynote speech last week, but understandably, the press has been focusing on iPhone coming out and quickly forgot the ‘iTunes death’ brouhaha that was taking place just a few weeks ago. This new iTunes milestone proves that, as the ComScore people said, paraphrasing Mark Twain, reports of iTunes death have been greatly exaggerated.
This is what I wrote almost a year ago when 1bn downloads was hit:

“We can see that if this growth continues, we expect iTunes to reach 2 billion downloads by February 2007.”

So it seems my simplistic model has been the best predictor of iTunes performance out there. The question now is: will iTunes sales keep up this pace, selling another 2 billion songs in the next 11 months?

My New Years resolution is to work at Google as an Engineer.

Of course this means that I will not be posting my opinion on Google shares and strategies or infact most of the industry (the most observant of you will have noticed that this hasn’t happened in a while) but this is a blessing in disguise - it might inspire me to familiarize myself and better understand other industries, and hopefully diversify more!

Also I will try and post about other, non finance matters that interest me; I’ve done so more recently with some photography and some geekier posts, so stay tuned!

Sometimes you need a quick way to translate from state code abbreviations to the full state name and vice versa, and every time I’ve needed this I had to waste a good five minutes to create it from source. Hopefully this will help other people too.

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iTunes is not dying.

Apparently, while I’ve been busy with my last days at Johns Hopkins before moving on to industry there have been a lot of talk of iTunes death and so on; one would think Wall Street has seen plenty of these to know better. Unfortunately, once again, all hell broke loose; convince yourself of this by going to Google news and searching for iTunes.

Fortunately there are some better articles out there; one of them was written by Charles Arthur of British newspaper the Guardian (the Manchester Guardian for the boomers out there) who came across my iTunes page. You can read the Guardian article here.

Having read his article as well as some of the initial pessimistic articles, I am going to write down my own two cents about this: I find the initial claim by Forrester Research that iTunes sales had dropped by a whoping 64% simply naive.

I made a point in late September 2006 of how Steve Jobs had announced in passing the 1.5 billion download mark had been reached, in the debut presentation of the iTunes Movie Store. I was particularly pleased by this announcement, because 1.5 Billion downloads was perfectly aligned to my 6 month old (at the time) model’s predictions.

Now, suppose the Jobs number is correct (could he be lying to us?) then to subsequently claim that sales dropped 64% in the months following January is absurd - we have numbers for the store up until late February when the 1 Billion mark was hit, and then, we have 6 months during which the store sold half as many songs as it sold in its entire lifetime! This fact suggests the ComScore figures (which suggest a rise of 67% in transactions) are closer to reality.

Note, that my numbers are not seasonally adjusted at all. When Apple releases milestones, which have been the sole basis of my model, they are absolute. With that said, seasonal spikes probably exist, as giftcards tend to be cashed after the holidays.

Can the kind of growth my charts show continue? Of course - claiming in 2006 that digital media have reached their peak is silly. The iTunes fate is bright, and the movie store will help accelerate this process.

Update: Guardian published a correction regarding the reversal of my name in the article shortly after I pointed out that Michael is in fact my surname.