This article was published on April 1, 2010

Apple’s Had A Busy Day


Apple’s Had A Busy Day

Apple’s iPad has sparked a media circus as launch day looms less than two days away.

Kleiner Perkins, a major Silicon Valley venture capital firm, made two major announcements today. They doubled the size of their iFund, a venture capital fund providing capital to app developers (Booyah, InMobi, ngmoco, Shazam, shopkick, and Zynga are all iFund companies), from $100 million to $200 million.

This comes in the wake of Kleiner’s John Doerr saying, “it will rule the world,” because it fundamentally changes interface technology from WYSIWYG to what he calls “WYSIWII: What you see is what is.

And that’s just the beginning of the news coming from Cupertino today.

Apple’s not-yet-announced iPhone 4.0 OS will reportedly support multitasking, say Apple sources. The same sources say that the interface used to switch between apps will resemble OSX’s Exposé feature. While today’s iPhone does allow limited multitasking (such as allowing music to play in the background of other apps), this appears to support rumors that Apple has listened to complaints from users regarding multitasking.

But for those who were hoping that the iPad would have homegrown streaming music from Apple, prepare to be disappointed. Apple has reportedly not finished designing and testing such an app, and likely won’t finish this task until Q3 of this year. Apple recently purchased Lala, and many believed that the music streaming service was to form the backbone of an Apple-branded streaming service. At least for the short term, those rumors remain rumors.

Of course, there’s a decent chance a developer will create a competing service in the short term. The Wall Street Journal reported that the iPad has hastened developer movement away from platforms like BlackBerry, Nokia, Symbian, WebOS and WinMo. Citing Social Gaming Network Inc., the Journal reports that typical app developers are committing the vast majority of their resources to the iPhone and iPad OS.

In short, Apple’s been busy. And things will only get busier.

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