Christopher Allen’s mission is to make one of the ultimate social devices – the iPhone – even more social by developing applications on the new iPhone SDK. In his presentation at eComm 2008, Allen describes the level of success the iPhone has reached in the U.S. smartphone market.
Developers downloaded 100,000 copies of the new iPhone SDK on its first day of release this year, evidence of the huge interest in app development for this device. Allen gives an update on the business model Apple will use for iPhone apps. The apps must be approved by Apple who is limiting the distribution channel, but the model allows a low cost of entry, access to a huge market, and micropayments.
Christopher Allen is a Berkeley, California based social software entrepreneur who has been a leader in the software industry, much of which has been centered on facilitation of online communities. As the founder of Consensus Development, Christopher initially focused on groupware, later helped invent SSL and is the co-author of IETF TLS internet-draft. More recently Christopher has been an angel investor of numerous technology startups, founder of a multiplayer online game company, and current authors his blog Life With Alacrity on the topics including collaboration, security, privacy, social software and internet tools. He is co-author of "iPhone in Action: Introduction to Web and SDK Development", is the founder of iPhoneWebDev, the largest iPhone web developer support community, is maintainer of iUI at iui.googlecode.com a popular iPhone javascript library, and is keynote speaker and co-founder of iPhoneDevCamp where he moderates the popular Hackathon Contest.
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