Yesterday I watched the presentation about the release of the iPhone OS 3.0. This release has a lot of new features that will enrich the Apple’s business ecosystem.

I will try to explain briefly the most interesting part of the main features of this new operating system:

1) With this new OS, it is possible to purchase content and services directly from the application. In this way, a company can manage directly all aspects of the transaction including process payment and can also provide the customer all the information regarding the purchase. This is managed by Itunes Store like a services provider.

2) The Apple Push service will be available not only for the email application but for all applications that needs it; this service has been designed in order to save energy.

3) APIs for the new OS will be released to connect every application with external HW either through the 30 pin connector or wirelessly with bluetooth; that means that a new developer of HW products and the connection of the iphone with real world can be done through sensors, machines, instruments, appliance, etc…

4) Applications can use the bluetooth in a very simple way, without pairing, to develop social network and facilitate smart messaging; not just games but also the possibility to bring the social network from the virtual world to the real world with a face-to-face interaction among people.

5) The option to use google maps like a tool inside the applications allows the development of information mash-ups.

6) The possibility for applications to use the contents of Itunes and perhaps, in the future, the use of  personal preferences can allow the development of personalized services.

I see a convergence between these new features of Iphone 3.0 and so do our researchers in Future Centre.

Points 1, 3, and 6 could enhance applications’ performance in the Micromachine and Market@One project.

Point 4 could be used in an application for the direct interaction among people who are in the same physical place according to their profile and tastes; it could be used by a services provider like Facebook or other social networks for a face-to-face interaction; Life and Lives project is studying this kind of scenario.

Finally, point 5 can facilitate the mash-ups for Iphone applications.

I think that it’s an amazing idea to give payments and process control tools to companies that want to improve and manage their business models; it means flexibility, true payment services with one click, no troubles to manage accounts.

Integration with mobile CRM can add value to these tools; in the presentation, Oracle has showed an application based on his mobile CRM.

Iphone, Ipod, Itunes, and Apple Store are becoming a business platform and it’s amazing that this platform can be used to improve services in different vertical markets. I think that it can be a good opportunity for Telco operators to improve ecosystems in different areas.

Apple is looking at the market and how to help companies to develop their business in different markets…and now it’s only the beginning of this new way to play in the business ecosystems.

On photographic paper the minimum resolution depends on the smallest droplets of ink that can be deposited on the paper (inkjet, thermal, laser,….they use different techniques but for the sake of defining resolution we can stick to the droplets of ink…).

Resolution on video depends on the smallest size that a single pixel can have. Plasma has relatively bigger pixel size than LCD. This is why we don’t have plasma used in screen below 30”. 6 million pixels (what is needed for an HD TV- 2 million per red, blue and green) simply won’t fit.

New technologies like OLED and Nano Emissive Display (NED) can have much smaller pixel size (NED can be as small as 1/300 of an LCD and would be ok for  delivering much higher resolution than today’s screen.

Although OLED technologies can increase resolution to over 150 dot per inch it is only with nanotech that we can get closer to paper resolution (we can reach 500 dots per inch, whilst with paper we can exceed 1000 dots per inch; however since our eye is not able to appreciate any resolution over 300 dots per inch we can say that nanotech would be indistinguishable to us from paper).

When will we see NED screens?  The first screen based on this technology was a 5” prototype produced by Motorola in 2005.

Samsung and Sharp have been working on this technology, originally slated to appear on the mass market this year. Why it is not here as promised?

The reason is simple: the main motivation to produce NED screen was not resolution but lower production cost. The diffusion of LCDs and Plasma has driven cost down so much that this incentive is no longer there.

Higher resolution screens would be of interest to the market but we are missing the transmission technology that would bring content in Ultra High resolution to the screen.

Now the situation may change, thanks to multimegapixel digital camera but the market is too small, today, to convince video manufactures to invest billions of $ in this area.