Chopi, the Thomas Howe Company designer, caught this link today of an iPhone UI simulator. Steve Jobs has announced that the API for the iPhone will be Safari (after bashing the browser as an interface just a few weeks earlier). As I wrote about earlier in the Jaduka post this morning, you can do some pretty neat things with phone/web integration, but my suspicion will be that the choice of Safari will be initially limiting.

How limiting? Well, now you can know. The iPhone UI simulator will show you exactly what you can do with the iPhone, on your OS X laptop. Funtionality includes :

• Test your iPhone-enabled Web 2.0 applications and compatible web sites.
• Open any website that works with Safari.
• Rotate to see websites in either portrait or landscape orientation
• Show or hide the location bar for a full-screen iPhone experience.
• Simulate the iPhone user agent, to test browser redirection scripts.

So, how does it look? I checked out some Telephony 2.0 sites to see how they fared….

I truly believe that presence is an important enabler for applications, and the example I was thinking about in the last presence post was Iotum’s Talk Now. (In full disclosure here, I am on their advisory board, which means that I really believe in what they are doing. I expect no material benefit from the Iotum relationship other than the satisfaction of seeing good people and good technology succeed.) For those of you not in-the-know, Talk Now is an application that you use to tell people when you want to speak with them, and when you can take their inbound calls. Essentially, it helps to make sure you connect with the people you want to. This helps you reduce anxiety around your communications, because you can have some confidence that the calls you want to take, you won’t miss, and that you have some power to control when that happens.

Due to disintermediation, I expect that the handset vendors will have an outsized portion of the value chain in next generation communications. FMC efforts will ensure that the transport layer is quite generic and reliable, giving large wireless carriers little room to charge hefty connection fees. The handset, and applications that run on them or are enabled with them, will be where the game is at. Any application that leverages that is gold.

This is a powerful thing, really, and just like Ken Camp said, I would expect the likes of Nokia or Motorola to jump on this bandwagon by snapping up places like Iotum. This is a double win for each presence enabled application they can snap up. It gives them real value that can be leveraged without the permission of the carrier, and it keeps it out of the hands of their competitors.

An excellent post from uber-blogger Alec Saunders today, talking about “VoIP not being a business category anymore.” From his post:

Perhaps the real issue is simply this. VoIP isn’t the reinvention of the telephone which we all foresaw five years ago. At least, not the VoIP peddled by the likes of Vonage. It’s ordinary telephone service… delivered on IP. While popular, it has failed to deliver the revolution industry types envisioned. “Innovations” like web-based dashboards are long in the tooth, and the truly revolutionary applications which could have been delivered have never seen the light of day.

I agree with Alec, and I think I know the reason for the lack of innovation: education and habituation. Even if you have the world’s best telephone service, if people don’t know about it, they won’t use it. And even if they DO know the service exists, habits are hard to change. That’s why Iotum is my bell-weather… the canary in the coal mine, as it were. To me, the Iotum applications are super valuable. If these guys don’t make it, it’s hard to see how anyone in the carrier services market will.