“They call this area the home of the BlackBerry. But Waterloo Region also has its share of developers who have migrated to the BlackBerry’s brash young rival, Apple Inc.’s iPhone,” Matt Walcoff reports for TheRecord.com.
“Some of these programmers are attracted to the iPhone’s touch screen, the ease of coding for the device or the ability to reach potential buyers though Apple’s iPhone App Store. And they all agree that sooner or later, the iPhone craze will have millions of adherents in their target markets,” Walcoff reports. “‘I’m confident in the fact this is the future,’ says Marty Lachance, whose Cambridge company, Utopria, creates websites for real estate agents. ‘Whether they have the iPhone now or not, they’re going to have it (or a similar smartphone) in two years.'”
MacDailyNews Take: Don’t be so sure. Contrary to popular belief, Apple isn’t in business to provide IP for the rest of the tech industry. We’ve been pushing the state-of-the-art in every facet of design… We’ve been innovating like crazy for the last few years on this and we’ve filed for over 200 patents for all of the inventions in iPhone. And we intend to protect them. – Steve Jobs, January 9, 2007
Walcoff continues, “No local iPhone project is more ambitious than what Sybase Inc. is cooking up a few golf shots from Research In Motion’s home base. Sybase, which has a large office in Waterloo, says it is enabling business users to switch to the iPhone without losing the esteemed security of BlackBerrys.”
“The impetus for the project, says Terry Stepien, president of Sybase’s iAnywhere subsidiary, comes from what Sybase is hearing from corporate information technology departments,” Walcoff reports. “‘They go off on a half-hour chat about how all they’re [sic] executives have iPhones,’ Stepien says.”
“Lachance says efforts to make mobile versions of his company’s multimedia websites for real estate agents were frustrated by the limited capabilities of mobile devices before the iPhone,” Walcoff reports. “‘When the iPhone came out, we thought, ‘Now we can really do this properly,’ he said.”
Walcoff reports, “The potential market for the software is huge, says David Janik-Jones of Waterloo, who has written two games for the iPhone. ‘I suspect that in a number of years, there will be a number of pundits saying I didn’t know they (iPhones) were going to be that big,’ he says.”
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Bruce” for the heads up.]
Woah!!!! Psychotic Claustrophobia looms ahead for RIM as it swirls & gurgles down the proverbial bowl!!!!!!
“hour chat about how all they’re [sic] executives have iPhones”
Holy grammar police.
iPhone? never heard of it or seen it!
I wonder what his reaction is now?
Grammar?
We’re bordering on functional illiteracy, here.
two days ago, Telcel in Mexico (exclusive carrier for iPhone in Mexico) started selling the CrapBerry Bold, but there was no lines for that… what could be happening? lol
A lot of pundits will say: ‘we knew it was going to be big – if we didn’t denigrate it’.
They denigrated it all right – and lost.
I’d like to hear/read a pundit making that kind of admission:
‘I suspect that in a number of years, there will be a number of pundits saying I didn’t know they (iPhones) were going to be that big,’ he says.”
No, in a few years there will be a number of pundits explaining how the iPhone came to dominate the market.
In a few years, they’re will be a few pundits who will tell you that there sources didn’t know what their talking about.