I’ve now been using my iPhone for a month and am now ready to share some initial thoughts about the device. I finally solved my activation problem, which was caused by the automated credit approval service on AT&T’s side not knowing how to deal with my identity-theft prevention service, so after 24 hours of initial frustration, I was off to the races.

First off, the iPhone is a beautiful device and a pleasure to use: it is certainly the best iPod ever, with the coverflow interface for browsing music and the coolest photo browsing app I have ever seen on a handheld device, both made even more enjoyable by the beautiful screen the iPhone sports. The web experience is great (when using wifi) as are the YouTube and Google Maps applications.

It is also the most intuitive phone I have ever used: I love the visual voicemail (a feature I’ve been fantasizing about for a long time), and it was dead simple for me to figure out how to assign custom photos and ringtones to people in my contact list. While I know that doing this is, in theory, possible on almost every other phone I’ve owned, I have never had the patience to struggle through the generally awful interfaces on most of the other phones I have had (various Nokias, a RAZR, Moto Q, T-Mobile Dash, etc).

I am a lifelong mac user and Apple fanboy and I have ditched my old T-mobile Dash in favor of the iPhone. That being said, the iPhone suffers from two tragic flaws, one of which Apple can fix on the current platform and one of which will require me to buy a new device at some point in the future.

The unfixable problem is the slow-as-molasses 2.5G AT&T Edge Network. Why, oh why did you do this, Apple? While I am sure AT&T was the carrier who was most willing to prostrate themselves before the great Steve Jobs, the iPhone will forever fight with one arm tied behind its back until it can get on a 3G network. Clearly, Apple must have been able able to cut a great financial deal with AT&T, but it may have been shortsighted since the slow network will likely impede long term user adoption. As a very happy user of Verizon’s EVDO network on my laptop, it is very frustrating to go back to the speeds of the dial-up era on my iPhone.

Tragic flaw number two is the absence of enterprise class email. This hurts me big time. As it does any other business user who has used a Blackberry, Windows Mobile or Good Mobile-powered device. Real-time over-the-air sync of mail, contacts and calendar is the killer business app for mobile devices and it boggles my mind that Apple didn’t launch with a solution for this. Please let me sync over-the-air with my office’s Exchange server. This is a serious step backwards for me and the amount of time I can live with this shortcoming is measured in months, so I sincerely hope Apple is working on a solution for this. C’mon guys, just license Good or ActiveSync. The Macintosh has made serious inroads into the enterprise with the help of Apple’s enlightened support of BootCamp and the rise of great virtualization apps like Parallels. Clearly good enterprise class email support on the iPhone would only help Apple. One rumor I heard was that Apple had been far down the path to license Good when Motorola bought them, and that Moto subsequently scuttled the deal because of bad blood over the stillborn MotoROKR iTunes phone, but that is probably nothing more than rumor.

I have some other minor gripes WRT UI consistency across applications and the lack of a keyword search feature in the address book and calendar and the fact that there is no iChat client on the phone, but in general I think Apple has substantially raised the bar in UI and usability in the smartphone market. They’ve also done a great service to the industry by breaking the carrier’s stranglehold on the phone’s software, something that has been stifling innovation to the detriment of users since the dawn of the cellphone era.

Now if Apple can fix these small gripes I have and add enterprise-class email, I will be a happy user. I can live with the slow EDGE network for a while if I have good email. So I am hoping to blown away by the first software update and will fantasize about the gen two hardware and hope it adds GPS, stereo bluetooth, a 4 megapixel camera and 3G network capability. If Apple did all those things on the next iPhone, it would truly be unbeatable.

Update: I just realized I left out my comments on one of the more controversial aspects of the iPhone: the virtual keyboard. Before I ever used an iPhone, I knew it would be a big change to go from a real physical keyboard rich with tactile feedback to a virtual touchscreen one, so I committed myself to suffer through the inevitable learning curve for the first few weeks. I really disliked the keyboard for the first few days and then quickly improved. Now, I would say that I am 80% as fast and accurate as I was on my Dash and I think I am still improving.

One can argue that devices shouldn’t force you to learn how to work with them, but I found that a couple weeks worth of practice got me to a level where the virtual keyboard is totally sufficient. You basically have to “use the force” and trust that it will do the right thing — the error correction algorithm is very good and based on the likely mistakes of hitting adjacent keys and I am consistently impressed with how well the error correction works. The one app where the error correction is undesired is in SMS — given the acronym- and shorthand-laden SMS vocabulary, the correction in this context is not helpful. And finally, filling in password fields on the Safari browser isn’t great either — it really helps to see what you are typing when using the virtual keyboard and it should be possible to have your input show up in plaintext while you are entering it in this scenario.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Gadgets, iPhone, Review

I was gassing up my car today when I noticed an decommissioned pay phone stall on the side of road (see the first picture above).  The now cheap and ubiquitous mobile phone has turned the pay phone into an anachronistic dinosaur.  I wonder how many pay phones actually turned a profit before the cell phone era?  And how many (if any) do so now?  Clearly this one was a liability for whichever company had been operating it.

This bit of outmoded technology got me thinking about other everyday technologies that may one day seem quaint.  A scene from Star Trek IV stuck with me through the years:  after the intrepid crew travels back to the 20th century to find a humpback whale, Scotty sits down in front of an old-school Macintosh and picks up the mouse, assumes it is a microphone, says "hello computer" several times to no avail, and quickly becomes frustrated once he realizes he has to interact with the computer using a mouse and keyboard instead of speech.  (For those of you who are geeky enough to remember what Scotty was doing sitting in front of the Mac SE in that scene, keep in mind that I’d happily invest in a transparent aluminum company.)

As Brad has mentioned on his blog, we spend time at Foundry Group thinking about the evolution of human-computer interaction (HCI) and the fact that the mouse/keyboard/GUI paradigm is getting a bit long in the tooth, while alternative means to interact with our computers and other devices are popping up all over the place — think iPhone, Guitar Hero, Wii, or one of Mobius VC’s portfolio companies, Reactrix.

A key driver of changes in the human-computer interface is the fact that we are now endowing our machines with senses via the availability of ever cheaper sensors.  Cameras (in the human visual spectrum but also beyond in infrared or UV) for vision, microphones (see our investment in Akustica) for hearing, track pads and touch screens for the sense of touch, and a host of other sensors such as GPS, accelerometers, SQUIDs or vibration sensors can provide our machines with senses we don’t even possess as humans.  Integrate these sensors with copious amounts of processing power and smart software, and you get wonderful things like the face detection in my new Sony camera, voice recognition systems (still rudimentary but improving steadily), "multi-touch" displays, fun and games with the Wii and Guitar Hero, and Minority Report-esque systems that react to gestures you make with your hands.

And while many of the examples I’ve provided here are in consumer devices and in "play" applications, rest assured that these new capabilities will have equally profound impact in the worlds of business, science and engineering.  And remember too that increasingly, interacting with a computer doesn’t have to be done while sitting in front of a PC, smartphone or game console.  Computers are gaining these senses while at the same time they are becoming invisible and pervasive in our environment.  Heady stuff rife with opportunity…

Technorati Tags: Akustica, Guitar Hero, HCI, iPhone, Wii

I am excited to announce that Postini has entered into an agreement to be acquired by Google for $625 million in cash, subject to working capital and other adjustments, and Postini will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Google. As investors, we at Mobius Venture Capital couldn’t be happier with this development. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the world-class team of management, investors and fellow board members at Postini since we invested in October of 2001. I have watched the company grow from a small and relatively obscure service with perhaps a couple hundred customers to a significant company with international operations and multiple data centers supporting over ten million users across 35,000 businesses. Postini’s scale is impressive; their servers block a billion spams a day while processing as many as two billion SMTP connections every 24 hours.

Postini is a great example of a company that managed to grow and prosper during the “nuclear winter” in the technology and venture capital industry following the bursting of the bubble in 2000/2001. To put the time of our investment in context, I sat across my dining room table from Postini’s founder Scott Petry and then-CEO Shinya Akamine on the morning of September 11th as we negotiated the term sheet for Mobius’ investment in the company.

What attracted us most to Postini was Scott Petry’s vision of building out a true platform company built around the simple notion that email had become more important to corporate America than the telephone. A company that could build a suite of services around messaging would have the potential to harness a huge customer base given the broad horizontal nature of email. The total addressable market was every email address in the world.

Equally important was Postini’s architecture and deployment model. Postini was a SaaS company well before SaaS was cool, and probably even before the acronym of SaaS had been coined. We loved the ease of deployment (just a change to the MX record in DNS) and the recurring revenue subscription model. And while the most notable SaaS companies to date have been built around specific vertical business applications, Postini is arguably among the first SaaS infrastructure companies.

Our main concern as investors early on was whether enterprise customers would buy an outsourced security service for email that ran “in the cloud”. Happily, Postini’s choice to focus on anti-spam and anti-virus as the initial applications to deploy on their elegant and highly efficient message-processing architecture proved to be prescient, and when the spam problem exploded in 2002 and 2003, Postini’s revenues ramped prodigiously. Of course, the CAN-SPAM act of 2003 did nothing to put a dent in the spam problem, and Postini’s growth continued unabated. Today, Postini’s customers range from ISPs and small and medium sized enterprises with minimal or non-existent IT staff, all the way up to big companies with sophisticated and demanding IT departments such as Merrill Lynch, Business Objects, Cooley Godward, Johnson Controls, Mitsubishi Motors and United Technologies, to name but a few.

By late 2005, Postini had grown substantially and we had the good fortune of attracting Quentin Gallivan (formerly an executive at Netscape and then Verisign) to join the company as CEO. Under Quentin’s able leadership, the company’s growth accelerated further and began to fulfill Scott Petry’s original platform vision when Postini released a series of new products for instant messaging and archiving that have seen great uptake within Postini’s existing customer base and have also served to bring many new customers into the Postini fold.

As we entered 2007, Postini began to prepare for an IPO. At the same time, in February of this year, the company announced a partnership with Google to provide their messaging security services to customers of Google Apps Premier Edition. As often happens, following the early success of this initial partnership, deeper discussions with Google about a more strategic relationship began. As the management teams of both companies got to know one another, it became clear that Google and Postini shared a common vision around the power and potential of email as the most important communications platform in the enterprise and the value and leverage that Postini’s communications suite could bring to Google’s broader enterprise vision. While the company had been pretty far down the IPO path, Google was the one M&A suitor Postini had encountered that was compelling enough to divert the company from a public offering. And with today’s announcement, Postini is now quite happily joining forces with the most significant technology company to emerge in a generation.

Congratulations to Quentin, Scott, Jocelyn, Ramesh, Cindy, Don and everyone on the team at Postini. And congrats to Google as well for recognizing the incredible technology and enviable customer base Postini has built over the years. I can’t wait to see what Postini will do in combination with Google’s world-class technology, infrastructure and distribution, though I will sorely miss the day-to-day opportunity I have had over the past six years to work with such a great company.

Technorati Tags: Google, Postini, SaaS

Via Gizmodo, a great design chronology of Apple products from 1976′s Apple I to 2007′s iPhone.  Very large image, here.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone

My lovely wife Katherine has been blogging up a storm lately and I realized I had not outed her on my blog. In fact, my partner Brad beat me to the punch. So now it is time for me to link to her consistently insightful and amusing observations about, well, pretty much anything.

We just returned from a very quiet weekend away in Aspen and were both a bit shell-shocked upon our arrival home as we were welcomed by our precocious and very verbal son. Katherine captures it beautifully here.

Other posts of note are one my favorites, Elmo doesn’t love the Jews, and Gym Porn, which apparently is one of her most trafficked posts because it shows up on the second page of Google’s results when people search for “gym porn”. I’m pretty sure they aren’t looking for Katherine’s witticisms when they follow the link to her blog…

Technorati Tags: McIntyre Family

My brother Ross A. McIntyre is a founder/producer/actor in a comedy troupe in New York called spurn.  Ross sent me note today mentioning that spurn (and Ross) was featured today in BlogChelsea noting spurn’s upcoming return to the People’s Improv Theater for the next three Saturdays at 8pm beginning this Saturday, July 7th. 

Ross and spurn have been early adopters of internet technology and have had a web presence for years and got into distribution of video via podcasting and video-sharing sites early on and are close to reaching their millionth download of spurn video content.  The photo I’ve included at the head of this post is a shot from a sketch in the new show called Twentieth Century Fops.  My brother is the fop on the left.  I’m amused without even seeing the sketch. 

A couple years ago, I also had the pleasure of collaborating with my brother on a short film spurn produced called Mr. Unlucky.  My bandmates and I spent a weekend writing, arranging, recording and performing the soundtrack to this seven minute short.  It was the first time we’d tried soundtrack work, and we were all pleased with the results and hope to do more some day.  You can download Mr. Unlucky here.

I’ve had the pleasure of seeing several Spurn shows through the years and have enjoyed laughing heartily (and often with a strange mixture of outrage, discomfort and embarrassment) at each of the shows I’ve been to.  If you are in NYC over the next few weekends, go check out spurn!

Technorati Tags: comedy, spurn, McIntyre Family