I went to today’s Seattle Lunch 2.0 at Whitepages.com. Great food spread, +1 to Whitepages. There were at least 200 people there.
Michael Arrington of TechCrunch moderated a panel of Urbanspoon, Jott, and WhitePages founders & VPE’s, who talked about their companies’ iPhone applications.
I may have accidentally snubbed John Cook. I didn’t recognize him. But then again, maybe he was looking at someone standing behind me. So maybe no harm, no foul.
Seek Nuance 
John,
No snub at all. I didn’t see you there. Next time say ‘hi’
BTW, check out my wrap up of the event.
http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/venture/archives/145018.asp#comments
John Cook
Heh, thanks for the reply!
So any great take-away regarding iPhone applications? Anything strike you as new, different, or whatever?
@Joe: Take a look at John Cook’s write-up, and the comments on his write-up. Lots of good info there.
The Jott founder argued that even though the iPhone app store is a closed ecosystem (someone, I think he, said, “If Microsoft required all Windows applications to be purchased through their web site, there would be an open revolt, but we accept it from Apple,” or something along those lines), it was in fact good for developers in this case, because the channel was simple and direct from the app writer to the end customer. (Basically, a little dictatorship wasn’t a bad thing. 🙂 ) Nobody was counting Android out, but only one said he was positive about Android in the long term. The case was made that Symbian was a nearly entirely open mobile phone OS, and since it didn’t take over the world, there’s no reason to ipso facto expect Android to do so.
Michael Arrington said he expected iPhone to win over Android, i.e. for Apple to repeat what it did with the iPod.
About 40% of those in attendance had iPhones, I believe. About half of those 40% had the 3G model, and half has the first model.
For more, see Cook’s column…