In the long term, it’s probably a bigger deal that Apple’s creating the first mobile platform that people I know outside the mobile business actually seem excited about developing things for, in a way people never got excited about Java or XHTML or WAP or BREW (never heard of any of those? Exactly) with the iPhone 2.0 software update and the new iPhone 3G. Really looking forward to seeing the first wave of socially-networked, GPS-enabled, high-speed iPhone applications and all the great entrepreneurial opportunities they’ll create — Piper Jaffray has estimated there’s a $1 billion business in iPhone apps in 2009.

But in the short term, the biggest deal for me looks like MobileMe. I don’t love the name — if it sounds like something Microsoft would name a product, that’s because it is.

But as a feature I’m really looking forward to it, and I don’t even need to buy a 3G iPhone to benefit from it, I can use it with my good old iPhone Classic. Here’s why: in a normal week, I can’t be bothered to sync my iPhone more than once or twice, but these days, I absolutely live by iCal. I don’t have an assistant — if I schedule a meeting or a call, I put it in iCal and set a reminder. If I have a task to do, I create a to-do and set a date and priority. If I’m out, I pull up my iPhone calendar to see where I need to be next. But that doesn’t work if you don’t sync your phone every day. Add to the complication that I use three different Macs regularly — one at home, and a Mac Pro and a laptop at work — and even with regular .Mac syncing it gets hard to keep everything up to date.

For a while, I was tempted to move completely to Google Calendar, but that’s not ideal when you don’t have an Internet connection. So I’ve created a crazy quilt system using a plugin called BusySync to sync my three different computers’ iCals with a Google Calendar account. It works pretty well: when I’m out, and my iPhone calendar isn’t up to date, I can pull up Google Calendar via a mobile phone or over a web browser, and my coworkers can subscribe to my free/busy information in Google Calendar or iCal without too much trouble. Plus it syncs in real time over the Internet as things change, instead of on a once-a-day schedule via iTunes or .Mac, both of which always seem to take forever to complete a sync.

MobileMe will let me throw the whole system out: any time I update a calendar entry or to-do on any of my computers, or my iPhone, as long as I have a data connection, everything else will be updated seamlessly, if all works as promised. And I imagine it won’t be hard to find some way to keep a Google calendar updated too, for any friends I have who prefer that.

I’m a little bummed the .Mac brand is going away. I’ve been a subscriber for years, still use my mac.com email as my main personal address, and like the name a lot more than MobileMe or the new “me.com” domain. But on the plus side, I’m happy to see that much of the visual design of MobileMe was done by two of my favorite designers in the world, Meg Frost (of Cute Overload fame) and Bobby Andersen. Bobby did a bunch of design work for Next New Networks (including the site for Ultra Kawaii) and Tumblr (including the amazing Dashboard icons) before going to Apple, and I won’t lie: we tried our best to hire him here instead. But it’s a once in a lifetime chance to work directly with Steve Jobs in the Apple designer priesthood on a key project, and it looks like Bobby’s knocked this one out of the park, from the screenshots I’ve seen so far. Congrats, Bobby, and I can’t wait to try it.

Ahoy, bilge rats! In observation of International Talk Like a Pirate Day 2007, Next New Networks will be beginning and ending all office correspondences with pirate terminology. So grab some grog ye salty dogs, because today the pirates have landed!

Arrrrgghh!

Albie Hecht is one of my best friends –ah, one of our best friends; all of the Next New partners have worked together with Albie a lot over the years– his company World Wide Biggies –”a New York-based developer of digital entertainment for kids, families and young adults”– has just announced the opening of a digital production studio, an investment raise of $9million, and distribution deals. His partners include co-leaders NBC Universal and Platform Equity, and Hearst Corp., Greycroft Ventures and Prism VentureWorks. Wow.

Nobody’s going to beat Albie and his great team (including our other close friend, and I might add, my first creative hire in television, Scott Webb), nobody. They were early media converts to the transformative power of the interactive digital world’s effect on the traditional television business.

Albie’s one of the cultural stars of the last dozen years. As Herb’s President of Nickelodeon Entertainment produced an unending string of hits like the humngo series and movie SpongeBob SquarePants, the $100 million movies of A Series of Unfortunate Events and Rugrats, and lately Nick’s runaway success The Naked Brothers Band. And Scott was Nickelodeon’s innovative Worldwide Creative Director for several years; you’ll remember, among other things, his sheparding of the truly original series Pete & Pete, and his mid-90s foresight to be an early internet pioneer with the creation of Nickelodeon Online.

Did I mention that nobody’s going to beat Albie? Congratulations to the Biggies.

Saw via Bijan’s blog that our friends (and office mates) at Davidville made Time’s Top 50 Websites list for their Tumblr tool.

All of us at Next New are big fans of Tumblr and use it for many of our personal blogs, and it’s been fun for me to see Tumblr evolve over the past year from a sparkle in David’s eye to the phenomenon it is today. Congrats, guys! (Also fun: they’re right ahead of Twitter.)

This post has absolutely nothing to do with the internet, or networks, or any of the stuff we do here.

I’ve been cleaning out my drawers lately which caused me to scan some of my stuff and throw it on my Flickr page. Some of it’ll eventually get linked to on my old branding agency archive, but who knows about the rest.

The picture above is from the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. It’s from a random collection of photographs I found in a box at a junk shop specializing in then-uncool mid-century furniture. I couldn’t resist the hundreds of vintage prints of these amazing deco buildlings I’d really only seen in amazing stylized illustrations from the fair. I had no idea what I was going to do with the snaps –hell, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with them– but they were great just to have.

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In the late 70s I was producing jazz records and became friendly with Michael Cuscuna, soon to become one of the medium’s most revered producers and the leading reissue producer in history. (more…)