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.

Well today I just started using Zemanta and it seems to be speeding up the process quite a bit. It reads my post as I write it, and automatically finds links, pictures, suggests tags, and other stories for me to look into. This is only the second post I’ve written with Zemanta, but it seems to be very useful so far (unfortunately there are no good picture recommendations for this post), and hopefully it will make it easier for me to continue to write more blog posts down the road. With the addition of video, I am focusing more on that and less on the writing, but I hope to continue to post thought provoking, informative pieces here.

Michael Arrington on Twitter

Michael Arrington gave me this plug earlier today.  Not bad to have a rave review like that for the internet resume.  Everyone listen to Arrington, he knows what is going on in the tech and startup world.  His comment gave me 20 new followers within about 5 minutes, kinda fun.  Now I need to make sure I’m updating my blog and twittering the most amazing 140 character messages there are.

You know where you can find me on twitter if you’re on there already.

However, over the last few weeks I have come to realize that twitter is not only a powerful tool for communicating online and via your cell phone, but that it is also a much better way of getting you casually connected with alot of people who you would not meet or become friends with on facebook. Most of the people who I “follow” on Twitter, I have never met in person, and would not consider them my friends. I follow Ben Bernanke, Jim Cramer, Guy Kawasaki, and that is just a few of the people I follow that I otherwise would have no “access” to in the real world, or even meaningful contact with on Facebook.

The reason that I am now enjoying twitter is that I have started to follow people who are smarter and more connected than I am, as well as the few actual friends I do have on twitter. I now get interesting articles sent my way, keep in the know about web/tech happenings, and get to see what some of the smartest most succesful people in the tech industry are working on and thinking about. I don’t follow anybody that starts following me and this helps keep my feed down to a managable ammount of information that I consistantly find interesting.

If you’re on twitter, or join, let me know!

After the jump a good video by Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the guys who I am really enjoying following on twitter, on why facebook needs to adapt or get passed by twitter. A good take, and if you head over to his site check out his other videos there is some good stuff in 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

Dreamhost sent out an email, posted a blog entry, and many other blogs started writing about the mixup. The billing team at Dreamhost has taken a very non-chalant tone in all of their customer contact pieces, and they continued this tone, even in a HUGE mixup that they made. They actually billed $7.5M to customers today, which isn’t bad for a single day of billing I guess.

The honesty and humor was a perfect mix of being up front as well as keeping their same tone to keep me feeling good about hosting my domains with Dreamhost. A great company who I highly recommend… unless they triple bill you.

For a good reach check out their blog entry addressing the issue: Dreamhost Blog- “Um, Whoops”

Jawbone, is representing at CES with a booth, and not only that, they are using up some of their new money on an amazing PR move. Jawbone, is accepting any other phone headset as a trade-in for their amazing headsets. I have one and LOVE it. It has made using a bluetooth headset bearable and actually very enjoyable.
This move puts the amazing headsets in the right ears as CES is mostly attended by bloggers and reports, so therefor the loss leader will quickly turn into alot of written words about how peoples lives have been changed since they started using their free Jawbone headset.

Engadget story

Well this weekend I read about my new favorite exchange that I really hope takes off.  Yoonew, is an exchange for sports tickets, that is focusing for now on Super Bowl 42 tickets.  This is a great way for fans to potentially get tickets to watch their teams in big games, at a fraction of the costs.  For example, I can buy tickets to watch the Seahawks (if they make it) in this years Super bowl, for about half the price of face value and exponentially cheaper than the after market value.  However, if the Hawks were not to make it to the Super Bowl, I would be out a few hundred dollars.  You can also buy futures for tickets and still make money if the prices of tickets were to go down.

I think this is a phenomenal business idea and with fans always feeling more optimistic about their team, than the odds actually are, this will lead to alot of trading if the business can get to a critical mass.  It can also lead to an affordable way for people to experience dream events.  I hope the word spreads and this exchange takes off, because everyone wins, as opposed to only a select few ticket brokers winning at this time.

Tech Crunch Story

Video: Bill Gates Last Day CES Clip

Actually, he’ll be heading up the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but a rich man can dream can’t he?

Not only does this help Facebook land more of a mature audience, but it also helps give Blackberry a great new app to lure in the younger crowd.  With the Blackberry Curve and the Pearl both having cameras, being small, and looking good.  Why wouldn’t you want to have Facebook, email and gchat at your fingertips.

Since I use both Facebook and my Blackberry 8800 excessively I’m happy to see this roll-out for two of my more major addictions.