Apple is Encouraging iPhone Programmers

Apple’s chief executive, Steven P. Jobs, left, and the venture capitalist John Doerr at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, Calif.

High-flying venture capitalist firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers placed a $100 million bet on Apple's iPhone on Thursday by creating the iFund.

KPCB partner Matt Murphy will manage that gamble, by heading up a team that will invest in game-changing applications for the mobile Internet. His group will include KCPB co-founder John Doerr and Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, along with high-ranking advisers from Apple.

in an Interview - talked to Murphy late Thursday about his new charge and the significance of the iFund. Following is a brief excerpt of the interview, but the entire Q&A will be posted here Friday.

Deatil:
Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone’s appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it.
John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers.

At an event Thursday at Apple headquarters, Mr. Jobs announced a low-cost software development kit that outside programmers can use to create programs for the iPhone, much as they now write the vast majority of the programs created for the Macintosh. Until now, iPhones have officially been able to run only the limited assortment of applications that Apple includes. (Some buyers have modified the phones to add unauthorized software.)

“We’re very excited about this,” said Mr. Jobs, who also announced that the company was adding features to make the iPhone more appealing to business users. “We think a lot of people, after understanding where we are going, are going to want to become an iPhone developer.”

Sharing the stage with Mr. Jobs, Mr. Doerr announced that his firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, had established a $100 million venture capital fund for iPhone entrepreneurs. Called the iFund, it is the largest fund the company has created for a specific technology.

“The potential for iPhone is huge,” Mr. Doerr said.

Matt Murphy, the Kleiner partner overseeing the fund, said he expected the fund to last two to three years, after which the company might decide to add more capital.

Mr. Jobs said Apple would offer a developer kit for $99 that would allow programmers to create everything from games to business programs. On Thursday, Sega and AOL demonstrated applications they created for the iPhone using the kit.

The programs that are created will then be available to iPhone users exclusively through a new service on all iPhones called the Apps Store, an aspect of the plan that may discourage some developers. Apple will keep 30 percent of the sale price.

Mr. Jobs said that Apple would offer only those programs that it approves, rejecting pornography, for example, and programs that might not provide adequate security for users.

He argued that developers would benefit from Apple’s being the sole distributor because only Apple could give third-party programs such wide exposure to customers. All iPhone users will be able to browse the available programs directly from their devices. Customers will also benefit, he said, from Apple’s weeding out of malicious programs.

“We can track the developers and we can tell their parents,” Mr. Jobs said, joking about the demographic profile of many Apple entrepreneurs.

In an attempt to lure corporate customers, Apple executives also announced that the iPhone would be able to work directly with Microsoft’s Exchange software, allowing it to interact closely with corporate networks and e-mail systems in much the way that BlackBerry devices do. Apple said Genentech and Nike were among the companies that were already taking advantage of this feature.

The new business abilities will be added to the iPhone in June and will come to existing owners in a free upgrade. The software will include extensive security features, like the ability to lock and erase the system remotely in the event of loss or theft.

“The majority of the objections I.T. managers have had about the iPhone have been addressed today,” said Van L. Baker, an analyst with Gartner Inc., referring to corporate information technology managers. “It’s a very valid and robust device, and for that reason it’s a viable platform for the enterprise in competition with the BlackBerry and others.”

But attracting a huge following among corporations is something Apple has not been able to achieve with the Macintosh, and it remains to be seen whether the iPhone will take sales from the BlackBerry, the popular business communicator sold by Research in Motion of Waterloo, Ontario.

“It’s a better device and platform that does more things than the BlackBerry,” Mr. Murphy said. If people have been questioning whether the iPhone is a business tool, the integration with Exchange “takes the issue off the table,” he said.

The iPhone is already the second most popular smartphone after the BlackBerry, with a 28 percent share of the market, but its inability to communicate with corporate computer systems running Microsoft Exchange has hindered its growth in that market.

Swiss bank drops suit against Wikileaks site

Swiss Bank Julius Baer Holding AG has announced that they have dropped their lawsuit against the web site Wikileaks. This comes less than a week after a federal judge ruled in favor of Wikileaks.org, stating it would be unconstitutional to take the site offline.
Swiss bank Julius Baer Holding AG (BAER.VX: Quote, Profile, Research) on Wednesday dropped its lawsuit against a whistle-blower Web site after losing a battle to keep the site from posting private account-holder information.
The bank dismissed the lawsuit against the Web site, Wikileaks.org, and Dynadot LLC, the site's registrar, without explanation in a filing in U.S. district court in San Francisco. It left open the possibility of filing another lawsuit in the same or in a different court.
A Baer spokeswoman said the company had nothing to say beyond the court filing dismissing the case.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White last week reversed his earlier order shutting down Wikileaks.org after Baer and Dynadot entered a settlement agreeing to take it down. White and Baer drew international criticism from free-speech advocates who said the order was an unconstitutional prior restraint on speech.
"A prior restraint should not issue against free speech no matter how serious the plaintiff's claim of wrongdoing may sound," Paul Alan Levy, attorney for Public Citizen Litigation Group, said in a statement after Wednesday's dismissal.
Baer, based in Zurich, had said the documents posted on Wikileaks.org invaded the privacy of account holders and others and made unfounded allegations of wrongdoing against the bank.

Attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union and other civil-rights groups argued that Baer should seek other remedies, such as monetary damages after publication of the documents, rather than ban the Web site. The judge agreed.
White last week said from the bench that his earlier order raised "serious questions of prior restraint and possible violations of the First Amendment."
He also questioned whether the order was enforceable as several so-called mirror sites offering a back door to Wikileaks.org went up in the wake of his earlier ruling.

more......



A Swiss bank on Wednesday moved to withdraw a lawsuit that it had filed against a Web site that it claimed had displayed stolen documents revealing confidential information about the accounts of the bank’s clients.
Lawyers involved in the case said the move by Bank Julius Baer most likely ends its battle against Wikileaks, a Web site that allows people to post documents anonymously “to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”
The bank last month obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in San Francisco that obstructed, but did not absolutely prevent, access to material posted on Wikileaks by turning off the domain name wikileaks.org. The judge’s action drew a flurry of media attention and a barrage of legal filings by media and other organizations arguing that the order violated the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
After a hearing on Friday, Judge White withdrew that order, saying that he was worried about its First Amendment implications and that he thought it might not be possible to prevent viewing of the documents once they had been posted on the Web anyway.
In its court filing, lawyers for Bank Julius Baer wrote that the bank “may, at their option, later pursue their claims, including in an alternate court, jurisdiction or venue.” But lawyers for the organizations that filed motions to intervene and friend-of-the-court briefs said they thought it unlikely that the bank would attempt to continue litigation elsewhere.
“I frankly find it hard to think that they are actually going to try to do that, at least in the United States,” said Matthew Zimmerman, a senior lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They may very well try to go after their former employee,” who the bank claimed had stolen and posted the documents, he added.
A call to lawyers for Bank Julius Baer at the firm of Lavely & Singer in Los Angeles was not returned on Wednesday afternoon.
Mr. Zimmerman speculated that Wikileaks might move the registration of its domain name to a company outside the United States, making it more difficult for an American court to exercise jurisdiction over it. Bank Julius Baer had named Dynadot, a company in San Mateo, Calif., that was the registrar of the wikileaks.org domain name, as a defendant in the case, and the judge’s controversial order was aimed at Dynadot.
Garret D. Murai, a lawyer for Dynadot, said that as of Wednesday afternoon the owner of the domain name, John Shipton, had not transferred the domain name to a different registrar.
Roger Myers, a lawyer for Mr. Shipton, who is Australian and lives in Kenya, said his client may not yet have received word of Bank Julius Baer’s action.
Lawyers for the intervening parties in the case had threatened to try to recover legal fees in the case under a California law intended to prevent frivolous lawsuits, said Paul Alan Levy, a lawyer at Public Citizen who argued against the judge’s order at the hearing on Friday.
Mr. Levy said that the judge’s decision to withdraw his order would offer a powerful message in future cases in which plaintiffs might try to shut down Web sites because of the content they display.
“A judge who’s confronted with a request like the bank’s in the future is going to be much more reluctant to give this order,” Mr. Levy said. “The lesson of the case is going to be taken very seriously.”