iPhone 3G will MAKE YOU MONEY.

So as has been pointed out by a commenter’s (”the vis”) on a previous video, the iPhone 3G will actually cost more over 2 years than the original iPhone’s. The math goes like this, $399 for the original 8GB iPhone +$20/mo for the data plan (on top of your voice plan)= $879. The new iPhone 3G (8GB version) will retail for $199 (half the price) but will cost $30/mo for the data plan= $919 (I won’t tell you that to get 500 text messages a month it will be an additional $5/month as that will go against my argument.. wait I just wrote that, whoops).

So we’re looking at the new iPhone 3G costing $40 more than the current iPhone and much more than a baseline cell phone. So the question posed by “the vis” was, is there a way the new iPhone can pay for itself over the two years of your contract? I don’t think you can have the iPhone “pay for itself over two years, but I do think that there will be some great ways of saving money over the two years you have your new iPhone 3G, and let’s just see how much money we could potentially save with the new iPhone.

Free GPS
I feel that I know the city of Seattle fairly well, and that at most I may need to go onto google maps to figure out where something is located in Seattle. However, if last Christmas proved anything, people love in car GPS units (along with digital picture frames, which I guess you could use your iPhone for as well). When you’re in an unfamiliar city, is there anything better than having someone guide you, turn by turn, through directions. Well the new iPhone should be able to do that with it’s GPS. The savings right there is apx $150 if you were to buy a new one on sale, and $10/day for each day you may rent a car on vacation. Let’s call this a savings of $200 over two years.

Location Based To-Do Lists
Omnidrive will be offering location based to-do lists on the new iPhone, and so as “the vis” suggested, this will dramitically cut down on the ammount of gas you use running your errands. One of the main ways people are suggesting saving money with today’s high gas prices is to make all your errands in one run. Rather than taking many short runs, making one big loop will save you much more time, mileage, and money. Omnidrive’s location based to-do list will help guide these errands, and make sure that you remember what to do, and also show you the closest place to take care of each task. Very cool and if you figure it can save you even 10 miles a week, that is 1000 miles over 2 years, at $4/gal. and to make it easy on the math let’s say you get 25mi./gal that adds up to $160 over two years.

GPS traffic maps
Google offers traffic maps for their mobile maps, and although you can access these maps on other phones, the iPhone will make these maps much more accessible and much more widely distributed (at least I hope that they will). As Minneapolis has shown us, idling your car for even three minutes will kill the earth, and also cost you money. Something like half a gallon of gas per hour. With these mobile traffic maps you’ll be able to see what roads are backed up with traffic and avoid many hours of being stuck in traffic. So, if you’re able to avoid even 11 minutes of traffic a week, you’re looking at saving 1200 minutes over two years, which would be another $40 in savings.

Scanned Membership Cards
Lifehacker layed out a great idea for how to carry many store membership and reward cards with you by scanning them, saving them as a picture on your iPhone, and then presenting them to get your savings at your local store. Rather than having to worry about holding onto all of these cards, and packing them all in your wallet for every trip out of the house, just take your iPhone and present your scanned card. I recently went on a trip to California, and was able to signup for a Ralph’s card to save $15 in a single shopping trip. I have no idea where this card is, and won’t use it again, unless I were to signup for yet another card to save $10 or more on my next trip to California. If you didn’t want to take the time to signup for the card more than once, you’d be able to save say $50 a year on club cards that you don’t normally carry with you per year. Over two years that’s another $100 in savings.

Coupons and Special offers from Location Based ads
Through Loopt, Whrrl, Brightkite, as I talked about in a recent video, I expect that we will start recieiving special offers for restaurants and stores that will be of more interest to us. Based on our location and our friends recommendations and behavior we will get much more targeted offers that will bring more value than today’s google adwords ads. If you get an offer for a free appetizer or drink and use the offer every other week, that could be $ every other week, would be about $400 in savings over two years!

Having the same phone for 2 years
Most people get a new cell phone every 18 months. Since the iPhone is so revolutionary, it will be a much easier phone to hold onto for the extra 6 months than your run of the mil Motorola phone. Yes , there will be a new iPhone out before the two year contract is up, but it still won’t be a necessity to buy as, the 3rd generation iPhone will probably only add a better camera, video conferencing, and maybe some new colors. Holding onto a phone for 6 months will save you the equivalent of $20 in that amount of time.

Add up all of those costs and you have saved $920 over two years! Actually giving you an extra $1 over the course of two years! Yes, the iPhone will pay for itself through the amount of money it saves you. It’s just like Steve Jobs is paying you $1 to use the iPhone!

Yes, I know these are stretches, but it was a fun list to put together and it does show that the iPhone will actually be able to help you save money over the life of it’s contract, even if it’s not THIS much.

So everyone, does this math make you want to get to your nearest Apple Store or ATT store come July 11th? I’ll see you all there.

Since the iPhone is less than a year old and already has gained a large market share it seems like a hot product with alot of room for growth, both on its platform and in the consumers hands (on their ears?). Apple has announced that they will be controlling ALL application sales through their iPhone Apps Store. This will allow them to make that all apps have been approved by Apple and that they are malicious, or porn, or anything like that. It will also make sure that Apple gets a cut of each application that is sold (30%). They have however, allowed each developer the freedom to charge whatever they want for the applications they have developed, even if it is free. This store, the platform, and what appears to be the ease of development for these applications seems to be reason enough to build an application, but Apple seems to think it needs more.

So the iFund will help developers get up and going and get their ideas funded to develop iPhone applications. I just don’t understand what the exit strategy for these companies will be though. Other than Apple acquiring them I just don’t see another exit strategy. Seems like a great deal for Apple, but not a great deal for Kleiner Perkins or the developers who take funding. Although Kleiner Perkins is generaly viewed as one of the top VC firms in the industry, so maybe I’m just young and don’t understand the business well enough yet.

Tech Crunch wrapup

The obvious reason they are announcing this in a press release is to beat the thunder that Apple will be announcing tomorrow. Nobody knows exactly what Steve will be announcing on screen, but most people think that one of the minor announcements will be that you can rent movies through iTunes. Not a bad move, but if they only have one or two studios on board and Netflix has over 6,000 movies, well I think we know who the winner would be. However, if Apple were to announce some other new offerings to help people watch more movies through the iTunes rental store, it may put their limited selection in high demand.

The title of this post refers to the banners that have been hung outside of the Mac World Expo which begins tomorrow. The predictions for what it means are all over the place, from WiMax, to Slingbox, to computers that don’t need any cords for charging or connecting to other machines. My predictions are an ultra slim macbook (under 12 inches), an updated appleTV (maybe stream HD to your tv from your computer), updated cinema displays (with isghts built in), and for good measure lets hope that this MacBook Air is happening.

I doubt they will be announcing anything that I will be NEEDING, but who knows what my reaction will be once I see the new toys. Last years event almost sent me to the U Village Apple Store during my lunch break…if only the iPhone had have been available that day, I would have been $500 poorer.

Any guesses what will be announced today?

What if I could get the news on my iPod each morning before I wanted to run.  What if I could get the right ammount of information on there, so that I don’t have to miss out on the last 10 minutes of the news when I get home and want to get ready.  Here’s the idea:

You create a network of news tidbits.  You break the news down into as small as segments as you can ie, news about each different sports team is broken down into 30 second clips and therefore rather than having to listen to 2 minutes worth of information I don’t care about, I just choose which teams or sports I want to hear about.  The same can be done with weather, local news, world news, business news, really anything.  The information is then broken down into very specific 15 second- to 1 minute clips and you select which items you want downloaded, and how long you want the podcast to be.  The program then selects the items you want and creates a news station that is just for you and only has the news you want on it. 

Each morning the podcast is automatically downloaded to your iPod and all you have to do is grab your iPod and run! 

Who knows you could even include some encouragement on there from sponsored partners.  Also, I bet you could play ads to help with the revenue.  People would put up with some ads, just as long as it wasn’t more than say 30 seconds per 10 minutes or so.  Plus the web portal where you select your news can have ads.  Maybe you could charge a small fee as well.  The details can be worked out later.  For now,  who wants to help me build this? :)

This is remeniscent of the time that engadget reported a rumor on Apple delaying the iPhone and their new OS when the stocks took a huge hit, but quickly recovered.

Why is Apple such a volatile stock that goes up and down with the rumors so quickly?  Is it because it’s so new?  Because people love the company, but are always scared of the comeback kid and wondering if they are for real this time around?  I don’t know, but it’s crazy that this has happened twice withing the past two and a half months.