WWDC Keynote wrap-up

WDC '10 Steve Jobs took the stage in his typical fashion wearing Levi’s 501 jeans, a St. Croix black mock turtleneck and New Balance 991 shoes to a standing ovation then WWDC started with his typical phrase: “It’s great to be here!”

Then the Reality Distortion Field spun up as Job’s provided some updates concerning iPad sales starting with an email quote he received stating that the iPad was indeed magical:

“I was sitting in a cafe with my iPad, and it got a girl interested in me. Now that’s what I call a magical device!”

iPad sales have topped 2M units sold which is equivalent to an iPad sale every 3 seconds. Since this is the Developer Conference Job’s made sure to mention that there are now 8.5K iPad-specific apps with 35M downloads representing 17 apps per iPad. Wolfram Associates, the developer of The Elements, earned more on the first day than 5 years of google ads on periodictable.com.

Additionally over 5M books have been sold in the first 65 days of iBookstore which breaks down to 2.5 books per iPad and five of the six biggest publishers in the US say the share of eBooks now going through the iBookstore is about 22%. Personally, I had no idea iBookstore was gaining so much market share so quickly because the books I’ve searched for were not available. Even a Geek can be wrong I guess.

Jobs went straight into iBooks enhancements mentioning that in addition to highlighting, you can now create notes and bookmarks. iBooks also now has PDF support for reading and viewing and Apple put in a selector right on top to switch bookshelves between books and PDFs. The other geeks I was chatting with and I are really excited by this enhancement.

Next, it was made clear that Apple supports two platforms: HTML5 which is a fully open, uncontrolled platform and the second is the App Store which provides a curated platform with over 225K apps. He then went on to talk about the process to get an app approved. There are over 15K apps submitted for inclusion on a weekly basis and 95% are approved within 7 days. Jobs mentioned the top three reasons apps are not approved include 1) app doesn’t function as advertised, 2) use of private APIs and 3) crashing apps.

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