VivaBusiness 2.0

Allright, I know this is getting real paparazzi-ish, but check out this video of Apple CEO Steve Jobs entering the downtown Palo Alto store moments after the West Coast iPhone launch, then going back to accompany his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs:

Steve Jobs may have advised customers to go to an AT&T store — not an Apple shop — come June 29, but it appears his iPhone-hungry fans didn’t listen.

By 10pm on Thursday night — still some 20 hours before the actual launch of the coveted touchscreen device — nearly 100 people had gathered around the flagship Apple store in Palo Alto, Calif., located just a few blocks away from CEO Steve Jobs’ house. As the night progressed, they played Scrabble, chatted with each other and ate take-out food. Many brought sleeping bags, blankets and beanbags to lounge on. Meanwhile, about ten Apple employees milled about the now-locked store in their signature black T-shirts.

But just a couple of miles away, on the corner of El Camino Real and Page Mill Road, only a bored-looking security guard (see above) could be seen at Palo Alto’s AT&T wireless shop — despite the fact that the very same phone will become available at the very same time in both places. And that, while there are 164 Apple stores nationwide, there are a whopping 1,800 AT&T shops throughout the US, guaranteeing a shorter wait.

Of course, camping out in front of an AT&T store isn’t the same as camping out under the iPhone maker’s signature lit-up apple, which decorates the company’s store windows; AT&T just doesn’t have the same frenzying effect on its customers.

Megan Dunn, a 17-year-old who had been standing in line at the Apple store since 2:30pm on Thursday, said she didn’t even consider going to AT&T to purchase the iPhone. In fact, none of the Palo Alto iPhone line-waiters asked seemed interested in moving over to the AT&T store, even if the line was shorter (as in, nonexistent) there. A rumor that none other than Steve Jobs was going to make an appearance at his hometown’s Apple store sometime today certainly didn’t help encourage anyone to switch over to the AT&T camp.

There is one logical advantage to buying an iPhone in an Apple store — earlier this week it was announced that Apple store shoppers would be able to buy two phones per customers. AT&T, meanwhile, has said it will limit devices to one per person. Customers will also be able to buy the $500-$600 handset online starting at 6pm.

In any case, the lack of camping-out-for-the-iPhone love shouldn’t concern AT&T just yet. After all, any iPhone — whether sold through Apple storefronts or even eBay — is money in the San Antonio-based carrier’s pocket, thanks to the required service plans that start at $60 per month and last a very long two years.

You may think throngs of people camping out on the street for hours on end would cause confusion and mayhem. But that’s not the case at the Apple store in Palo Alto, Calif., where the approximately 50 eager customers already gathered around the downtown shop have even devised their own numbering system to make sure everyone keeps their fair place in line.

It’s now less than 24 hours before the iPhone goes on sale across 164 Apple stores and 1800 AT&T stores nationwide. In Palo Alto – home of Steve Jobs himself – it’s 7pm, and soon-to-be iPhone owners are more-or-less neatly lined up around the block, typing away on their (Apple) laptops, sharing pizzas and waiting to get their hands on the much lusted-after handset.

At the head of the queue is 13-year-old Patrick Scoble, son of blogger Robert Scoble.

“I got here at 9:30am,” he says proudly. Luckily, school just got out for summer (no coincidence there, of course).

Others, like Shane Combest, arrived a little later in the day, around 12:30pm. A 22-year old Stanford graduate about to start his own record label, Combest says he plans to buy two iPhones (the maximum number allowed per customer) come 6pm Friday evening. Until then, he’s relying on the complimentary pizza to keep him going. As for bathroom usage, he says he’ll go to the Border’s across the street until they close.

“And I’ll try not to drink too much afterwards,” he adds, taking a bite of his pizza.

Stay tuned for more from the iPhone line….

David Pogue, iPhone reviewer for the New York Times, responds to my criticism of him, in the comments below:

There are many more books in the Missing Manual series about *Windows* than about Macintosh (see www.missingmanuals.com).

So by your calculations, my Apple reviews should be biased in a NEGATIVE way, not positive.

And I also speak on the Windows geek cruises, not just the Macintosh ones.

I don’t know whether you’re deliberately ignoring the facts or you just don’t do your homework. Either way, you’re off-base.

You also, frankly, have no business reviewing the reviews until you yourself have tried the iPhone. I would hope that by this point in your life, you’d recognize that there’s more to a product’s success than the length of its feature list.”

Bias is bias, David, and as an editor, I want to be sure none of my reviewers have it. I don’t care if it’s positive OR negative. (Indeed, I believe the rap on one of your predecessors was his constant negativity, which is just as corrosive to credibility.) You’re a fine reviewer—of everything BUT Apple stuff. You should steer clear of reviewing anything that comes out of 1 Infinite Loop.

I repeat: I’m surprised that the New York Times allows you to review Apple stuff. Just look at the list
of Apple-related how-to books you’ve authored! It’s a cottage industry!
At the very least, there should be a disclaimer every time you do an
Apple review. Whether you admit it to yourself or not, your vested
interest here is in helping Apple sell more products. If you panned the
flat-panel iMac, how could you then turn around and sell a book called The Flat Screen iMac for Dummies? (And I say this as someone who LOVED the flat-panel iMac, and was the designated TIME Magazine writer when Steve Jobs anointed TIME as the A List for that launch. More about this, much more, later.)
 

What you are doing is wrong, flat-out, flat-panel-for-non-dummies wrong, David.

And in case anyone is interested, you can already pre-order David’s
next book on Amazon now. It comes out August 15, and is called iPhone: The Missing Manual. Likewise, ditto for Big Four writer Ed Baig, of USA Today; his iPhones for Dummies book will compete with David’s. We may be dummies, but we’re not that stupid, dudes.

Apple’s iPhone has been very, very good to the blogosphere.

Whether the $500 gadget  actually sells out at Apple stores on Friday remains to be seen. But the blogs that have been fanning iPhone Fever since January can already declare a healthy windfall: Millions of extra dollars in ad-generated income have already flowed into bloggers’ pockets, thanks to record pageviews, according to estimates. And the best may be yet to come.

Pete Blackshaw, chief marketing officer at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, told me
today that the traffic generated by the phone is “higher than any
product launch we’ve monitored.” That includes the Nintendo Wii, the
surprise hit in the console wars last November, he said, which was also
huge but “nowhere close to this.” Blackshaw said that an astounding
1.5% of ALL blog posts made in the week following Steve Jobs’ unveiling
of the product, at Macworld in January, mentioned the phone.

According to Technorati, more than 305,000 posts have mentioned “iphone.”
(And, to be completely unscientific here, that compares to 238k for
“Microsoft Vista” and 387k for “al queda.”) Trying to figure out how
many pageviews those 305k mentions generated—and how much revenue—is
about as scientific as guessing the number of jellybeans in a goldfish
bowl. Estimates range from hundreds of millions to a billion pageviews.
Assuming an average $20 cpm at the bigger sites (many get more than
that), it’s easy to see how revenues to all blogs can top $2 million
thus far. And that doesn’t include ads from Apple itself, which have been appearing all over the Web.

The biggest winners? Engadget and Gizmodo, the TIME and Newsweek of the
propellerhead world.  Says Blackshaw: “Engadget was a decisive factor
in driving all the buzz.”

According to comScore qSearch, search engine traffic overwhelming went to
Engadget and Gizmodo. The big search engines delivered some 7,873,000
clickthroughs to the top 20 destinations. Of those, Apple got the
lion’s share, with 2,363,000 clicks. Next in line: Engadget, with 288k
clicks followed closely by Gizmodo.com 272k.

Ryan Block, Engadget’s editor, told Business 2.0’s Yi-Wyn Yen that
traffic has rocketed 30% since the phone’s unveiling. On the day of the
Macworld announcement, the liveblog alone cranked out 10 million
pageviews.

Since most of the traffic is to the gadget site’s front page, it’s
impossible to ascribe the whole bump to the phone, “but it absolutely
provided a healthy spike and consistent traffic drive,” said Block. He
pointed out that a Google search on “iphone” or “apple iphone” puts
Engadget in the number 2 slot.  Brian Lam, editor of Gizmodo, reported
similar traffic. His site delivered 1.8 million pageviews yesterday
“and it’s only going to get crazier. For the mainstream, this is just
building up. ”

Indeed Lam, who was in San Francisco today to hang out with justin.tv,
is planning to mount a camera on his head and send live feeds from
Apple stores on what his site has dubbed “Good Friday.” Just imagine what he can get for commercials.