Mobile Web News: Week of July 2, 2007

July 3, 2007 on 11:53 am | In Mobile Web News |

The IPhone Has Landed!The most important mobile event so far in 2007 has occurred: the Iphone was released to the market on June 29th.

Piper Jaffrey reported Sunday night that an estimated 500,000 Iphones were sold between 6 PM Friday evening and close of business on Sunday. At an average profit of 20-50%, Apple has cleared a cool $50 - $100 million profit in a single weekend!

95% of buyers bought the 8GB model for $600, according to a survey of 253 buyers by Piper Jaffrey, out of which about half were new customers for AT&T.

According to Bloomberg, Trip Chowdhry of Global Equities Research says Apple stores sold 128,000 phones on Friday while AT&T stores sold 72,000.

Katie Fehrenbacher of GigaOm says that at a nearby mall, the line in front of the Apple store was twice as long as the one in front of the AT&T store just across the street. Clearly the Iphone is more of an Apple offering than an AT&T offering.

Steve Jobs, a master of cult development, has given all Apple employees who have been with the Company more than a year a free Iphone. Taking the cue, I’m standing in my garden now, hoping that as an act of goodwill he will airdrop one on me…

Google Buys Grand Central

Yes, the search behemoth has now swallowed grand central … no, no, I’m not talking abut the railway station (although I wouldn’t be surprised if they bought that too in the near future), but a web service that manages all your personal telephone numbers. I just caught it in BusinessWeek.

What do I mean by manage? That’s best explained by example. If you have four personal numbers (office, home, mobile and skype), very often people will not know which one they can reach you on. Grand Central provides you a single 10-digit number, which you give to your friends and associates. When they dial that number, all your four numbers ring and you do not miss the call.

That was a simplified picture to explain the concept. You can have six numbers entered, enable or disable any of the numbers to ring at certain times, callers can leave voice messages, you can send voice messages via email and you can screen calls. And the best thing of all is.. it’s free! (at least for now).

That’s it for the week… keep watching this blog category on a daily basis to catch the mobile news as it happens!