I’ve been able to play around with the iPhone 2.0 3G for the past few days.

It’s definitely a great phone. Apple fanboys will really play this up, another reason why Apple stomps MS. Skeptics will play up the inevitable cons. And I probably fall more on the line of a fanboy with each incremental Apple device I pick up, thinking how amazing it is that an electronic device can give you a comforting, warm fuzzy feeling.

For the cool factor, most agree it’s a no-brainer though.

However, the main argument against the iPhone comes from BlackBerry users citing superior e-mail push and functionality largely due to the lack of tactile keyboard (see comments on this Web Worker Daily thread). Most, including myself, have cited the iPhone as “just a toy” not suitable for real business usage.

So how does the iPhone stack up from a productivity standpoint?

What’s good?

• Keyboard Works Better Than Expected. Before getting the iPhone 2.0 and based on limited testing, I was one of those who shunned the iPhone based on its touchscreen keying. The biggest downside I’ve found so far is that walking and texting/e-mailing is seemingly impossible: you actually have to concentrate when there’s no tactile feel for typing. That being said, I’m remarkably fast when I am concentrating on said keyboard - it seems faster than my old Treo.
• E-mail Setup Fast and Accurate. In syncing with my MacMail settings, e-mail worked immediately on my iPhone. I’ve struggled with numerous problems in the past with Windows Mobile; Blackberry tends to work pretty well.
• App Store. Developers and Web 2.0-types are most interested in the new App Store this time around. It has to be the coolest new platform to come through for a while, enabling application ideas that not too long ago were only pipe dreams. When cross-platform interoperability can increase networks to the HUGE user base of mobile users, it will become the greatest network ever. Loopt for location-based social networking. Music matching and collection based on a live audio matching. Pandora for incredible music recommendations and streaming radio on the go!
• All in one. The convergence of a phone, visual voicemail, GPS device, sync’ed life recorder (largely delivered via Apps such as Evernote, more), Internet browser, games machine and more in one really makes this device a killer.

What’s limited?

• Easy, Almost Too Easy. In typical Apple fashion, simplicity and ease of use means there’s a limit to functionality within the device. Moving mail around folders is really easy but there’s no multiple select for marking items as read, for example. Lack of copy & paste is another.
• Push E-mail. The push on e-mail is not as seamless as Blackberry. There may be tricks to improve this, but my iPhone really does seem to be pushing e-mail to me.
• Flash! To me, this is huge. A large number of sites use Flash for simple graphs and navigation, such as Google Analytics. This is pretty important to me, and productivity suffers because even highly business-related sites become more limited without the use of flash.
• Apple Lockdown. Since I did write about tethering my Treo with Bluetooth to my MacBook Pro, it stands to reason that I grew attached to that backup solution if I was unable to catch a WiFi signal. By locking down the iPhone, you have to jailbreak the iPhone in order to tether your iPhone to use the 3G connection as a modem for your laptop. As of this date, we’re still waiting for free WiFi from AT&T for all wireless customers at all Starbucks. As great as Apple can be, this is where their control for great purposes goes too far and goes wrong.

So there are pro’s and con’s. But what does this means from a productivity standpoint?

One pivotal piece to mention is that I instinctively did not think of applications I wanted to install from a productivity standpoint as much. Yes, my Facebook activity may be a little faster. Yes, productivity tools like Evernote can be great life sync tools moving forward. But will there be a Microsoft Office killer app? I don’t think so.

Yes, I think that net the iPhone makes me more productive for many of the above reasons. It falls short because of Apple’s choices, largely constraints made due to limited screen real estate. But it’s also a lot of fun.

Finally, I would question anyone that says you are really that productive on a phone. The iPhone does a fine job with many productivity tasks, despite some limitations. You still need the full screen experience to get real work and production done. Short, pithy e-mails plus piecemeal clean up so that you don’t have a pile of things waiting for you at the office after a long day away, are great to be able to do, but to me that’s not where the real work is done.

Entertainment can be done better on the go. A PSP or a Gameboy holds its own when you want to waste some time on the go.

As far as the evolution of the phone goes, I see a “good” productivity device and a “great” entertainment device to be as good as it gets. And the iPhone is getting close. Please improve some of the limitations and I’ll rave even more :-).

I could have almost missed this: Yahoo has announced Yahoo! Search BOSS (Build your own search service) as also reported by GigaOM and TechCrunch. You can access Yahoo! search results via API or framework, mashing up Yahoo’s index, and ranking and relevance, with your own algorithmic take on search. Not much concrete is being commented, possibly because there’s not much to be said. Om Malik has has reservations, but is interested in seeing what comes of it.

Broadly, it is one of the neater applications of open strategy and web service. For Yahoo, it’s smart indeed just like SearchMonkey was the neat and smart first part of its open strategy.

It is hard, or maybe impossible, to tell what will come of the strategy. It still hinges on someone to create a better secret sauce of smart algorithms, data mining, machine learning, artificial intelligence and all the cornerstones of CS intelligence. And it must be done: it’s a hedge to give Yahoo a better shot at possibly acquiring or partnering with the big bang company that somehow does search better than Google. But all the infrastructure savings doesn’t presume that a better algorithm will emerge.

So I do applaud Yahoo for going down the long tail of search with BOSS. Yet Farecast, Kayak and Sidestep, Oodle, Vast, SimplyHired, NexTag, Shopping.com and many more “vertical search” aggregators ofttimes rich in metadata dominate the fat middle (fat belly?)– and I bet they will continue to do so.

Compete has Yelp beating Citysearch in monthly unique visitors for a few months now, although both the New York Times (via Comscore for March) and Quantcast have Citysearch trouncing Yelp with 8M or 16M uniques to Yelp’s approximately 3M uniques, respectively depending on who you believe.

Yelp is most definitely an interesting, and thus far successful, case study but certainly the story is not over for finding success in local with SMBs as a notoriously difficult group of businesses to sell into.

Yet Yelp is not universally known.  It’s a Bay Area staple and people SWEAR by it here.  A business that doesn’t have a Yelp sticker on its window is clearly clueless.  But step just barely outside of Yelp’s big presence here and outside of the technorati and it’s probably the biggest property for which you’ll hear “what’s that?”  It’s still showing a great growth curve, and the biggest hurdle for Yelp is just simply the difficulty of repeating its success here into nationwide success.

At its heart, Yelp is still just a venue reviews site.  They’ve done a insanely tremendous job of integrating the famous Yelp parties and Yelper badge of honor, and translating that fanatic behavior into fanatic online behavior.  The same went visa versa, and the snowball effect launched from there.

My top questions from the Yelp story:

• How do you best cultivate offline “socializing” to translate to online activity?
• Is there an upcoming backlash in social media and social networks?  It’s en vogue to call this fatigue, but I would call this “I’d rather be outside than staring at a computer” for the vast majority of people.  It’s well known that traffic spikes during the week and during work hours when you’re forced to stare at a computer.
• In the long run, what garners more wins: utility or entertainment “time wasters”?  I personally think there will still be winners in both, but the current Web 2.0 landscape is focused on the time wasters.  Note that also an explosive success like YouTube successfully navigates both.
• What are the opportunities in ubiquitous computing?  A march back towards utility benefits mobile and ubiquitous computing.

I sometime wonder how much we really “enjoy” being in front of a computer.  Even for a computer geek like me, I still have to answer “not so much.”  Maybe that’s what Yelp beating (or soon beating) Citysearch means.

Latest (direct from Compete site):

May 2007 to May 2008 traffic (saved):

Correlation does not imply causation. The logical fallacy that correlation implies causation will be starkly pointed to if you falsely make a cause-and-effect determination based on your observation of the world, your observation of data, or your study findings of a correlation.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief and famed writer of The Long Tail, has tackled the idea that the deluge of data makes the scientific method obsolete. That correlation is sufficient in the Petabyte Age as he calls it, and the practice of causation only leads us to realize that we understand even less about the world.

Jackson West rightly points out the dangers of throwing the scientific method under the bus for the sake of applied mathematics and relegating the creation of models of the world to high and mighty, “pansy” theoreticians. And he’s generally right to be critical of a loss of strict rationality and too much focus on faith.

Data can be manipulated to show what you want. Not always in an evil manner, but methodology and the very collection of data itself can affect the outcome. You can get what you ask for, or perhaps deserve as Mr. West concludes.

Take it further and a strict reliance on data leaves room for dangerous regimes. Tyranny of the majority, self-fulfilling prophecies: these are all dangers that are left on the table when strict rationality goes out the window.

Yet Anderson is certainly not suggesting this, only pointing out a real observation of the world in which we live. And yes applied mathematics can be profited from, theoretical mathematics not so much. Ian Ayres, a Yale Professor, is the author of Supercrunchers whose very title is number crunching is the way to be smart.

The examples are largely the same: information (Google), airline predictions (Farecast), legal discovery, predicting the outcome of an election. It’s easiest to see manipulation possible in the last example.

Oh well, so be it. I’ve written that blind faith is basically idiotic. A strict reliance on numbers may not mean you’re determining a causation, but perhaps correlation is enough. And for those who operate in a gray area where luck plays a part, where luck is better described as a set of circumstances beyond your control, Anderson’s piece could be comforting.

But more importantly, it outlines a real path to be smart and succeed. And so you might be wise to heed the words that correlation is enough, and that correlation supersedes causation in a world dictated by Petabytes of information ready to crunched.

The contradictions and absurdities that exist in the city always crack me up. I could honestly go on and on.

Another interesting week in San Francisco. A stranger tracks your contact information down, and mails you your a stranded credit card as simple courtesy. An accidental bump when running down a busy boardwalk with a group leads to a lecture about “running in single file line” as the proper formation when going for a leisurely run. Or at a free concert: defensiveness over a piece of grass when there was no outward intention to steal the free grass, yet a willingness just minutes later to scoot in closer to your two children just to make your young neighbors a little more comfortable.

This is generally a business blog, but it’s also just my ramblings about how to tie life and business together and a process I find unendingly enjoyable.

There was a short interview with Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster, on GigaOM. There are elements here of benevolence as a effective business strategy. The essence, without agreeing completely with some overly save the world sentiments, is that changing the world with a side consequence of making a lot of money is today’s recipe for success both in life and work.

This is not the touchy-feely argument either. There are many reasons by focusing on “get rich! get rich!” will lead you down the wrong path. Most simply, you’re not going to innovate. And you’re just another rider just looking to steal a position too late to ride a wave of money, ready to get pummeled in the white water. Ride the wave you’re meant to ride in a strong yet principled way, and you might ride the wave of your life.

My question in today’s world is: which of these above people are you and do you want to be? Seems like a simple choice to me.

Put quite simply, building a business that scales is what separates the pros from the amateurs.

Every business hits a brick wall. The business will not grow without drastic changes, and really at that point, you are simply using your existing business structure to go into a BRAND NEW business as a means to growth.

You can scale up vertically within your choice market and vertical. There are a number of ways to then scale horizontally: different applications, different verticals, different markets.

In every conversation I have with would-be and startup entrepreneurs, possibly the number one piece of advice that frankly many ignore is to choose a business that will scale. In other words, choose a big sandbox to play in even if you’re playing in just a very small corner to start.

Investors tend to intuitively understand this. Maximization of returns requires scalability. It still surprises me sometimes, and sometimes doesn’t, that many entrepreneurs don’t think about top-level scale from the get go. Maybe it’s a byproduct of experience. Most often, it’s a byproduct of understated expectations.

But as an entrepreneur, building a scale business gives you more leeway for being wrong. Things will almost never go your way - those are the odds. Building a scale business means that you can move into different directions in a seamless, and yes scalable, way. When your business scales effortlessly, you stand a better chance of hitting numbers you can be proud of. When you scale, you also “let a thousand flowers blossom” and you might be surprised what comes of it.

It can be hard to spot scalability sometimes. For example, it was possibly hard to see why Facebook could be a scalable business when looking at walled gardens of colleges. Someone was thinking bigger from the beginning, even if it seemed otherwise.

I’m not talking about server scalability. It’s almost always a mistake to build for too much scalability there. You can rebuild your server farm. You can’t quite as easily rebuild your business whose very success is dictated by moment-over-moment momentum.

Competing in an undifferentiated manner within a commoditized market is not scalable. Selling someone else’s wares under your banner with no discernible value-add is not scalable.

Maybe Yahoo can get its mojo back, but many people don’t think it’s possible. Not understanding the importance of something as fundamental as business at scale at this stage of Yahoo’s company history for many is inexcusable.

Max Levchin, co-founder of PayPal and Founder/CEO of Slide, walked into the coffee shop I was posted up at this afternoon.  He was talking something about widgets, RockYou and such, but I didn’t encroach enough to gather much more than that or anything of substance.

Cool though… Yet another gotta love SF Tech story!

Two principles I believe in from this talk from Paul Graham at Startup School 2008:

• Benevolence and helping people can parallel profitability (and improves your morale)
• Work on core problems, make something people want

Go here.

I’ve recently summarized my current status many times as “long term I’m very confident, but tons of short term stress”.

This probably characterizes most startups and entrepreneurs.  If you’ve given up on the long-term confidence, the battle is probably lost.  Phrased this way, short-term stress can be alleviated by what an entrepreneur does best, producing results, en route to long term realization of that confidence.  It requires two skills:

• Ability to push through short-term stress to get to long-term success
• Ability to spot when your long-term optimism is simply delusion

Notice I call them skills, instead of abilities.  Skills of most stripes can be learned, abilities are more innate.  It’s the subject of Seth Godin’s The Dip.  It’s not a new subject, but perhaps still underrated as required skills of succeeding.  If you don’t acquire and possess BOTH, your chance of success is truly reduced.

I’ve been busy in the weeds, the real work to make iLetYou as useful to people as possibly can be.  Blog posts have been slow in coming, and this post might even be a little light on substance (although most are).

As of this writing, I’m about 8 months into my San Francisco/Silicon Valley/Bay Area adventure.  I could make hundreds of observations thus far, but I’ll make one stand out: acclimation comes quickly here.

When applied to the hype machine of the Valley, live here for a while and you start to see things the way the collective “we” of the patch stretching from approximately San Jose to San Francisco (maybe partially into Marin County) sees things…  And I think most people actually believe that is a positive.  I tend to agree.

This is a land of forward thinkers, borne of reason and deep contemplation (there’s the Ivy influence for you).  I always fancied myself a forward thinker, but this is where forward thinking is pushed to boundaries.  That boundary where most reasonable people would label people a “nut job”.

Steve Wozniak was a nut job.  Bruce Sterling can seem like a nut job.  On and on.

And it’s in the fabric here.  Everyone who’s anyone has an idea, everyone’s an innovator of some sort small or not.

An aside about Twitter: I have not yet set up a Twitter account.  To balance the sides out, I can see how a lot of people don’t get Twitter.   I can see how it’s enjoyable as is updating your Facebook status, but I really can’t understand it myself because I’m not addicted to it.  There’s just so much going on, that sometimes I choose to filter noise to the better cause of focus.  Lots of people here choose to always be the prototypical early adopter - some wisely, some not I would think.  For me, sometimes you can’t always allow yourself to hear the noise - it’s much better to concentrate on the signal.

So now when people ask about Facebook apps, social networking monetization, online video monetization, Twittering, Office versus Google apps, altruistic and open source projects, cloud computing, software as a service, I just tell people that it’s just a matter of time.  In these easy cases, the signal is loud and clear.

To do something interesting and to have the best chance of success, you have to get ahead of the curve.  This is especially the case in technology.  Like I said, I think I possess the ability to see ahead but it’s a process that I’m glad my peers in the area embrace likewise.  And, yes, you do have to be right.  And you do have to be in a position to take advantage of trends.

Sometimes you get trampled.  But it’s necessary to lose that sensibility that every naysayer espouses.  That loss of sensibility is what drives the area, what makes me really embrace all that the Valley is about.