My 14-month old loves our iPhones.

One of Cloudbrain’s summer interns has just launched his first iPhone application: iSkip.  The program is deceptively brilliant and something only a 17 year old high schooler could come up with:  iSkip simply asks you how sick you want your mom (or dad or boss) to think you are (“not feeling so well”, “under the weather”, “about to die” etc.) and then it transforms in to a vary convincing and high-tech looking thermometer which you hold to your head while it “reads” and displays your vitals.  Brilliant.

Once even more impressive is that this is John’s first application and he taught himself the iPhone programming language in just a few weeks.  He now has an application for sale ($0.99) in a store that reaches millions of people every day and a revenue sharing deal (70/30) with one of the world’s largest electronic manufacturers.  Anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch can use their computer or phone to buy his software and Apple sends him a check in the mail.  And all this took him three weeks to set up.  And he isn’t old enough to vote.

Click here to dowload iSkip

Read about iPhone apps making millions of dollars.

UPDATE: iSkip is available for FREE for today only (February 10th)

This brief 3-second clip from Pepsi’s “Refresh” Superbowl ad caught my attention.  What a contrast these two frames show.  We don’t have spaceships, flying cars or time machines, but the world has changed a lot in the last several decades.   A lot has been written about how mobile devices, instant communication, the internet, location-awareness etc. etc. is going to change the world.  And it will.  It already has.  This is just cool.

Watch the commercial:

An article in Forbes lays out Christian Lindholm’s 8 Trends for a Mobile World that he sees happening in 2008.  Among them he predicts: (1) A flood of bad touchscreen phones as companies try to copy the iPhone, (2) GPS becoming the new killer-app (he thinks 50% of phones will have it by the end of the year) and (3) The “Dawn of the Casual Computer” – the iphone in your pocket.  Read the article.  Its interesting.

A recent report by Portio Research is predicting that 75% of the people in the world will carry a mobile phone by the year 2011. We are already seeing reports of how mobile phones are changing societies, cultures and markets in developing areas (see the Indian fishing markets story). In the West, we’ve been living with the changes for a few years and enjoying the new ones. What happens when everyone can reach everyone else instantly? And what happens when the phones become more powerful?