According to multiple sources, the long-anticipated public offering of Facebook is now likely to come in the second or third week of May.

That means that the company must file its IPO documents within the next month, given that the review by the Securities and Exchange Commission usually takes about three to four months.

That’s if there are no issues, of course, such as a turbulent market or thornier-than-usual questions from regulators that require amending the filing.

Groupon, for example, filed for its IPO in early June, but did not go public until five months later in November.

The usual caveat on the late-May timing (even though I called 143 people on this one): This IPO planning could all change, in a New York minute, to another month.

In any case, the Facebook IPO is expected to be one of the largest Web offerings ever — with some reports saying the company will be raising $10 billion on a $100 billion valuation. (The valuation and raise, sources tell me, will be much lower.)

That amount is presumably to match its huge consumer growth and revenue explosion. Users now number 800 million — a figure that is likely to hit one billion this year. And revenue, which was reportedly close to $4 billion in 2011, is expected to be higher by another third in 2012.

Facebook will need such oomph if it is to impress investors, although the social networking site’s leadership is still warning that its focus is products over dollars.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal last week, for example, co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hedged the point, even as he sang his same familiar strategic tune of the last few years.

“The thing to take away isn’t that we don’t care [about business]. People for years were asking me why aren’t we trying to make more money,” he said. “I would say I’m trying to build a business for the long term and it was clearly the right strategy.”

While admirably I’ll-row-my-way in tone, Zuckerberg needs a public offering heft more than ever, as Facebook’s battles with rivals — most especially Google — escalate.

Just last week, the monocratically-inclined search giant ham-handedly shoved its own social networking service, Google+, into its results, in a move that could severely disadvantage Facebook.

Thus, into the Wall Street breach, to get a giant pile of dough to fight back!

But, unlike Google’s more kookified 2004 IPO, sources said Facebook’s is probably going to hew to a more traditional offering script.

That is likely to include a hefty consortium of irksome investment bankers — think firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on top of the filings, and a spate of smaller ones (Allen & Co.) below, and you have the approximately accurate idea.

And, while shot-caller-in-chief Zuckerberg will be the one key voice in the IPO, the man to watch has been and will be CFO David Ebersman.

The longtime Genentech exec, who came to Facebook in 2009, has been doing all the heavy lifting in preparation for the IPO, said sources, and will continue to do so.

Facebook declined to comment (but I would too, if I were them).

At the president’s right hand, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg; at his left, Apple CEO Steve Jobs. And when Obama looked across the centerpiece, there were the piercing eyes of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Note that Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt are safely separated, in keeping with the first rule of dinner-party seating–avoid fistfights.

The theme of the evening’s conversation? Said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney, “The president specifically discussed his proposals to invest in research and development and expand incentives for companies to grow and hire.”

[Image credit: Flickr/WhiteHouse]

President Obama will dine with Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Google CEO Eric Schmidt and a handful of other top Silicon Valley executives at a private dinner at the home of venture capitalist John Doerr. The conversation topics of the evening: American innovation, education and clean energy, and quite a few others, I’m sure, given the guest list.

According to a White House official, other attendees include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, Cisco CEO John Chambers, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, Stanford president John Hennessy, chairman and former CEO of Genentech Art Levinson, and Westley Group’s managing partner and founder Steve Westly. Oddly absent: HP CEO Léo Apotheker. Perhaps, Ellison’s attendance canceled his out….

Amit Singh–a 20-year Oracle exec who has worked in product development, channel management, sales, strategy and acquisitions–has taken a job as VP of International Sales for Google’s enterprise business.

Singh (pictured) was most recently part of the North American team at Oracle (ORCL) responsible for running the company’s applications business.

At the search giant, he will focus on recruiting Fortune 500-size companies, especially in Europe and Asia, to use cloud-based apps being aggressively pushed by Google of late.

Google (GOOG) recently launched its Google Apps Marketplace store to offer more online business tools to customers as it seeks to compete with business software companies, especially Microsoft (MSFT), in providing all kinds of Web-based productivity and collaborative tools in the enterprise space.

Google’s approach has been to focus on the cloud-computing arena, which is what attracted Singh.

“I have become increasingly fascinated by the cloud and what it is doing,” said Singh in an interview with BoomTown this morning. “It is an absolutely exciting area.”

Singh said he got more interested in the arena and Google’s role in it, from his son, who is a big user of its online apps.

“I then became a user myself, and it was clear that there was real potential for a company that is accelerating into the space,” he said.

While Singh is aware that there is still some reluctance by big companies to turn over major swathes of their business computing to the cloud–mostly over issues of control, security and scalability–he said that attitude is changing fast.

“They are using Web-based technologies in the consumer market and then get to work and are frustrated by antiquated systems,” said Singh. “But it’s process and they have to get comfortable.”

Singh pointed to some recent big wins for Google in the enterprise space, such as Genentech (DNA) and Jaguar Land Rover.

“Everyone has a vision of business transformation and Google is at the forefront of that,” said Singh, who noted the cultural differences between his old job at Oracle and new one. “It will be an incredible change for me.”

Here’s Singh’s bio, via Google, and details about the new job, which he started at a week ago:

Amit Singh joins Google as Vice President, International Sales and Operations for Enterprise after nearly 20 years of leadership at Oracle in different facets of the business including Product Development, Channel Management, Sales, Strategy and Acquisitions. He started his career in Product Development designing and building some of the first Oracle Applications. He then moved into channel management to recruit ISV’s to build solutions on the Oracle database platform. Amit then joined direct sales and spent the next decade as a Sales Rep, Regional Manager and Vice President managing different regions in the country with responsibility for both database and Applications products. In his most recent role as Group Vice President, he led the Applications Strategy Group for Oracle and was responsible for Applications acquisitions. He also managed shared service functions in North America and ran Sales and Operations for some of the fastest growing acquisitions including Demantra, G-Log, Agile, Logical Apps and Peoplesoft HR. Amit also managed Oracle’s competitive strategies against companies like SAP and Salesforce. He is a graduate of Rensselaer with a Masters in Industrial and Management Engineering and an undergraduate Electrical Engineering degree from the Delhi College of Engineering. Amit, his wife Monika, and their three children live in the Boston area and are in the process of relocating to Mountain View, California.

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

Schmidt added a bit of nuance to that message today, noting that the company had been surprised to see its European business bounce back as quickly as it has. Here’s my transcript of his opening statement.

We are clearly seeing aspects of recovery, and what is notable is that we’re seeing aspects of recovery not just in the United States but in Europe. I had been in error in assuming that there would be a lag, that it would the U.S. first and Europe second. Asia, of course, was never significantly hit in the first place.

So that means from a Google perspective that…we never stopped hiring, but we told our team internally and again, we’ve said to many other people that we are increasing our hiring rate and our investment rate in anticipation of a recovery.

Schmidt and Google co-founder Sergey Brin covered a lot of ground in the hour-plus press conference, and I’ll try to go back and break out out some of the other highlights. A few items worth noting in summary:

• Brin expressed contrition over recent Gmail outages and said the company was working both to prevent future failures and to react more quickly if and when they do happen. But he reiterated the argument, common among cloud-computing fans, that conventional email systems fail much more frequently.
• Schmidt repeatedly defended the proposed settlement Google had reached with authors and publishers regarding its book archive. Recurring theme: It’s not a perfect settlement, but it’s workable.
• Schmidt stressed the importance of porting Google’s Chrome browser to Apple’s Mac platform and said this would happen within months.
• Schmidt said Google was working on ways to help publishers sell their work on the Web (via one-offs or subscription). But he said he had no interest in promoting one publisher’s results over another, as Associated Press officials had recently suggested: “We have to be very very careful not to favor one media organization over another, with regard to speed or latency.”
• Schmidt, who’d previously noted that he expected Google to start making an acquisition per month, said that these would likely be small, five-to-ten-person companies. He added that it was unlikely the company would be in the market for something the size of a YouTube acquisition, which cost Google $1.65 billion. Translation: Don’t expect us to pony up billions for Twitter.

Earlier: My live coverage of the press conference:

Google (GOOG) co-founder Sergey Brin is sitting down with about a dozen reporters in Google’s New York City headquarters for a Q&A session. Tune in for live coverage. This should be a wide-ranging conversation, which I’ll attempt to cover live as well as I can. Please consider everything below to be a paraphrase unless it’s in quotes.

Brin is joined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Brin gives an unofficial intro.

Schmidt adds his own informal introduction.

Schmidt: We’re here because we have a global sales meeting in New York, and we’re winding that up right now. A series of internal talks, and the mood was “very, very positive.” We told them that “the worst is behind us” (which Schmidt has said before). We’re seeing recovery not just in the U.S., but in Europe as well. I had been in error in thinking it would be U.S. first, then Europe second. Asia is less important, obviously. We’re increasing our hiring rate and investment rate in an anticipation of a recovery.

Brin discusses some tweaks to search. Do you feel that Microsoft’s innovations with Bing will cause you to accelerate your innovations?

Brin: Competition is healthy. Microsoft (MSFT) has made its contributions. So has Cuill. Many of the tweaks in Bing we’d already seen from Microsoft Live earlier in the year.

Schmidt: I agree!

But do you think Bing is really different? Or just a rebranding.

Brin: [Demurs]

Schmidt: You guys should judge us and our competitors. We’ve been criticized for having a self-referential view of the world. But I’d argue that our success so far proves that’s been a good strategy.

Please talk about Android and other mobile plans.

Brin: We started with Android because it was a problem for us, as an end-user and a developer, that phones lacked powerful browsers and the ability to install powerful apps. I think Android has addressed this very well, but it has also pushed the market. It has pushed Apple (AAPL) with the iPhone and RIM (RIMM) and Windows Mobile. I’m pretty excited about the future; they’re getting increasingly capable browsers, and you can now write native applications across five platforms that will cover most smart phones. I think that having the software platform has freed the hardware makers from spending time on that, and they can rejuvenate their efforts on hardware.

Please talk about enterprise efforts.

Brin: We started in enterprise, like mobile, to address our own needs. When we started with mail in ’04, Web email was like a toy. We really focused on something that would work in an enterprise and then made it available to consumers. We feel we’re farther ahead (than competitors) both in email and in collaborative document-editing. We’re moving toward eventually having everything (all our applications) available everywhere. “I just think the cloud model is a better model….I do think this install-less model of a cloud is better….It’s definitely made me more productive.”

More on enterprise from Brin: We’ve been successful with both SMB [small and medium business] and increasingly with enterprise. We’ve got a big implementation with Genetech (DNA), and in Washington D.C. We’re specifically adding features for enterprise. That’s part of the Postini acquisition–to add some of those email features for enterprises. You’d be surprised to hear some of the things businesses ask for.

Please talk about recent Gmail outages.

Brin: Certainly we’re not happy with any outages. With those outages we’re at the “three nines” level, which is not where we want to be. Targeting “four nines” by end of quarter. We’ll let you know how we do. Focusing not only on outages, which we don’t like, but recovery time. Second outage could have been resolved in five or ten minutes, but we made errors in handling it, and it extended over an hour. But if you look at a typical enterprise today, those outages tend to add up to more than even these kinds of outages that we had in Q3. Also, we’re working on the number of people affected by outages. Trying to group people into pods so that if one goes down it doesn’t affect others.

You’re adding more complexity to search. It’s more confusing than it ever was. Same thing with site links. Is that an issue (it is for Danny Sullivan)?

Brin: I’d like to see all the options, available in all the corpuses. We don’t have all the same options in each offering. In terms of the links and snippets that we’re offering, we’re trying to experiment with that.

On Google book deal: If the judge asked you why he shouldn’t be concerned by the concentration of Google’s power, what would you say?

Schmidt: It’s an error to answer a theoretical question from a journalist. But anyway, we won’t get that kind of question. With respect to book search, we were doing something that we thought was appropriate. We were sued, and after three years of discussion, we’ve come to a settlement. This is perfectly normal. From our perspective, this is a settlement we like, it’s a settlement we think they’ll like, and we’ll hear what the court says, within minutes. Let me reframe your question: There’s nothing particularly exclusive about what we’re doing. The rights registry we’re doing is for the benefit of orphan works. “It’s not a particularly good business for us. We’re going it because we think it’s the right thing to do.” We don’t think the settlement is perfect, but we think it’s good.

What are plans to expand book search?

Schmidt: We’re already huge. There are millions of books that have never been read, and we’re going to deliver readers to those books.

Brin: We want as many works as possible in some form, because that’s of tremendous value.

Schmidt: This doesn’t cover all international books, all books in the world. [Some disagreement about this between Brin and Schmidt]. It will take time to get the registry up and running, so for the near future I think that’s all we can achieve.

Back to the economy, please.

Schmidt: We’ve tried for a while to figure out if Google is an accurate predictor of the economy, and we can’t prove it. If we could, we’d brag about it. Last early in the year we saw a decline in U.K., which surprised us. From our perspective, the low point was somewhere in the spring. Which is why I said worst was behind us in May, June. We noticed a recovery “June-ish.” The conventional wisdom is that U.S. recessions are 18-24 months. Bernanke sees a recovery too, which we agree with. Conventional wisdom was that Europe would lag by three-five months, which we’re not seeing. Europe is not one country, and it varies a great deal depending on which country we’re in. I won’t go in to specifics but it’s the obvious stuff–the countries that didn’t have a big bump did not have a big fall. More on being a leading indicator: Obviously we’re a leading indicator in advertising.

Brin: And we’re good indicator for consumer spending, and you can see for yourself by looking at Google trends.

It seems as if Chrome isn’t having the impact with consumers that you would like.

Brin: [Starts, then stopped by Schmidt]

Schmidt: Some of your premise about Chrome is incorrect, in terms of adoption, and we’re going to get that message out.

Brin: It’s actually exceeding our benchmarks.

Schmidt: I see a lot of Macs in this room, and a lot of very sophisticated people are using Macs now and we need to get a version of Chrome out for that, which we’ll have in a couple of months. Key to browser strength is speed. In general, we announced Chrome OS and Chromium product. Everything is linked together: Cloud, chrome, etc.

At one point do Android and the Chrome OS come together or not come together?

Schmidt: Current definition of use platforms has to do with use patterns. Android for mobile, delivered via telecom store, heavily integrated with telco offerings, like our Verizon (VZ) deal, which we’re enormously excited about. The analog for Chrome is that it’s designed for a 10, 12-inch form factor. They both use Linux, etc. But they’re designed for different uses. [Netbooks?] May be some overlap there.

Is Google being too nice? Is there a rethinking of relationships with aggrieved groups?

Schmidt: In many ways we’ve always wanted to be this Google as opposed to the way we were perceived a few years ago. We’re particularly proud of the way we’re working with advertising agencies, which is very important to us. With the media industry, we’re having success with YouTube and YouTube monetization, and we’ll have more on that coming forward….”We have always wanted to have these partnerships….We’re learning how to do them in a way that they win, too.”

Brin: People can now differentiate between us and the Internet.

Schmidt: Google is an innovator. The Internet is causing collisions. Innovation plus collisions equals opportunity. For instance, the fact that Verizon has embraced most of the open principles that we put forth five years ago is shocking. “It’s pretty amazing. This is Verizon. It’s not some itty-bitty telecom start-up.”

Are you uncomfortable with Google employees’ sense of entitlement? [Per new Ken Auletta book]

Brin: [Refers to layoffs--Schmidt corrects him: "We did not have layoffs."] [Addendum: Schmidt was talking about Google closing engineering offices in Phoenix and other locations; Google did have layoffs last winter.] You’re right:

What do you think about publishers requiring pay walls, and how will you help surface that.

Schmidt: We’re starting with that YouTube. Overall, “there’s clearly a market for free content, and that market is the size of the Internet.” Also a market for subscription/paid. The analogy I would offer is TV. We all grew up with “free” TV. Now almost everyone pays for cable, and some people pay for pay-per-view, “which is ridiculously expensive,” but people will pay for particular events, like boxing. I think all three of those uses will emerge. We’re working on payment models, subscriptions, to enable that.

But what about surfacing paid content in search [this comes from WSJ.com editor Alan Murray]? Will you factor the desire of someone to pay for content into results?

Schmidt: We’re not going to use the price you use as our ranking in results. That’s not going to be our signal. But we’ll incorporate the price people are paying for your content into results. But I’m not going to answer this precisely because I don’t want to discuss how we produce results. The most interesting improvement you could make is that to the degree that we have more of the marketplace data available, we could take that information and reflect some of that in our rankings.

The AP CEO said Google or Microsoft might be willing to pay a premium for an advance look at the news.

Schmidt: We have a deal with the AP, and I don’t want to talk about any specifics of any deal. I don’t think that’s proper. “We have to be very very careful not to favor one media organization over another, with regard to speed or latency.” We are staying out of the media business. “You guys are very good at it, and we’re not.”

[Apologies for tech error; I missed the specific question and part of the following exchange, but the subject is entitlement.]

Brin: We cut down on snacks, etc. to “reset expectations” regarding entitlement.

Schmidt: “Google pays very well. Google is clearly a growth company. People at Google don’t work for those reasons at Google. We don’t want them to come to work for Google for those reasons. We want people to come to Google to change the world. Life is short.” The tightening in the last year has been good for this, by the way, the controls put into place by Patrick Pichette, who is our hero, have been very helpful.

Please talk about M&A plans and goal of one acquisition per month.

Schmidt: That’s been our historic pattern. I think we will be buying small companies–five, ten people. That’s where some of our best stuff has been. One day Larry and Sergey bought Android, and I didn’t even notice. Think about the strategic opportunities that has created. Sergey found Google Earth one day while he was surfing on the Web. And then he walked into my office and told me he bought them. “And I said, ‘for how much, Sergey?’ And it turned out to be a few million.”

Would you buy a YouTube?

Schmidt: Is there another one to buy? The problem with that size of acquisition is that you have to make your money back. I think that DoubleClick and YouTube will be two of our best acquisitions. DoubleClick is already close to paying back, and YouTube will get there soon. But bear in mind that any major acquisition now will involve a regulatory review, because of our size and because our competitors will make sure of that.

[Sorry, missed another question]

Do you anticipate making large upfront commitments for new or renewed search deals [as you did with MySpace and AOL]?

Schmidt: I’d rather not comment on search deals. We are in discussions with both of those companies. “Some of our best friends are in those companies.”

[Missed yet another one]

What will new tablet machines [like Apple's] mean for you? And to content producers?

Brin: Hardware is getting amazing with regard to cost. Used to be that display was expensive. Now that’s cheap, and so are chips, etc. Now, the main cost is broadband connection, or cellular, or however you get to the Internet. That’s why wide broadband availability is important to us. Think about how much you spend on access costs compared to the amount you spend on your handset. The phone cost is negligible.

Schmidt: Not sure how to answer question. We provide the infrastructure below what you’re talking about [touch interfaces, etc.]. Kindle is a good example. Don’t think about current one, think about one two or three years out. I think there will be many kinds of things like Kindles, and that’s a material change in the way people will interact with hardware, media.

Brin: I think it’s better if hardware isn’t locked down to specific platforms.

[Long exchange between Schmidt and Danny Sullivan that I'll have to pick up later]

Should Google be required to lease servers and access to Google checkout numbers to deal with “lock-in” issues that broke up the telcos?

Schmidt: Google Checkout isn’t interesting. But I think your analogy is wrong and that there are no data to support your theses.

[I missed the next question on the book settlement about orphan works, etc.]

Schmidt: A lot of these complaints are being made by people who don’t want a solution.

What are the reasonable book settlement proposals you’ve seen?

Schmidt: Goal is to get all the books to everyone and to get all the authors compensated properly. Some of the proposals make sense to me, but I don’t want to characterize them. Not a perfect solution, but the best one we can do.

How will book settlement affect international users?

Brin: It won’t. We’d love settlements that work across a range of countries.

Why won’t you be like Microsoft with regard to antitrust?

Schmidt: Many reasons. Culture, for one. Another reason is that majority of users are one click away from moving away from us. Third: If we went into an “evil room” and had an “evil light” shined on us, and we then behaved in an “evil way” we would be destroyed….There is a fundamental trust between Google and its users.”

Schmidt walks through “ludicrous” thought experiment whereby Chrome takes 80 percent of market share and then tries to lock consumers in, noting that it wouldn’t work due to open source.

Do you think you’ll take another stab at moving into radio, print?

Brin: We are quite optimistic on the TV front. Radio and print didn’t pan out as well as we thought initially. One of the reasons is that those mediums are moving online and consumers are moving online and the publishers/producers want to work with us there. “We were kind of at the dock where the ship had already left.” But TV is quite similar to the Web in terms, potentially, of measurability, so we’re excited about those prospects.

Is page rank broken? People are gaming it, etc.

Brin: No. We have to continually develop. Part of the issue is span, but the main issue is that everything changes. We’re doing a much better job of ranking than we did a decade ago. If we just rested on our laurels with what we wrote in paper from 1998, we’d be in big trouble.

BoomTown just got the following email from Anne Wojcicki, co-founder of 23andMe, the personal genetics start-up, about the departure of her co-founder, Linda Avey (pictured here). She will be starting a foundation related to Alzheimer’s disease.

The pair founded the high-profile company–whose Series A investors include Genentech (DNA), Google (GOOG) and New Enterprise Associates, as well as Wojcicki’s husband, Google co-founder Sergey Brin–in 2006.

It has collected almost $23 million in funding.

Avey noted in an email to staff, which is posted in its entirety below: “I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.”

Wojcicki’s email reads, in part:

I wanted to let you know that Linda Avey will be leaving 23andMe to focus her energy on transforming Alzheimer’s research and treatment, leveraging the 23andMe platform. Linda and I have talked about doing research in Alzheimer’s since the inception of the company. Linda, whose father-in-law recently died from the disorder, will be leveraging 23andMe’s platform as she works to revolutionize the research, treatments and prevention for Alzheimer’s.

Linda will be greatly missed by me and my colleagues but we’re glad she will continue to be in a related field, and we are committed to continuing the work that she and I started three years ago.

And here is the email from Avey to the staff, as well as Wojcicki’s below it and then the official press release:

Dear all-

As I trust you all know, 23andMe is very special to me. I also recognize that the company has reached a critical point in its growth where new leadership can take it to the successful heights we all think it can achieve.

I’ve decided that I’d like to focus my efforts on an area that is personally significant and will continue to have a huge impact on our healthcare system–Alzheimer’s disease. Effective today, I’m leaving 23andMe and have begun making plans for the creation of a foundation dedicated to the study of this disorder. The foundation will leverage the research platform we’ve built at 23andMe–the goal is to drive the formation of the world’s largest community of individuals with a family history of Alzheimer’s, empower them with their genetic information and track their brain health using state-of-the-art tools. We’ve always planned to include Alzheimer’s in our 23andWe research mission…I’m just approaching it from a new angle.

Some of you might be aware that my father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s and passed away last year. For this reason, Randy and I are motivated to do what we can to improve the understanding of what leads to the debilitating symptoms and what might prevent them from starting in the first place. The ApoE4 association is barely understood but gives us a great starting point.

I’ll miss working with you but will be excited to hear about the progress I know you’ll be making!

All the best,
Linda

Team:

As Linda has told you, she will be leaving 23andMe to focus her energy on transforming Alzheimer’s research and treatment, leveraging the 23andMe platform. While I am quite sad to see her leave I am excited and hopeful as she takes on this mission. As Linda’s co-founder and partner over the last three years, it has been clear that revolutionizing research has been a primary passion. Our drive to change health care has always had roots in our personal lives and we have tried to structure 23andMe so that any individual or organization could actively participate in research. Linda and I have talked about doing research in Alzheimer’s since the inception of the company and the need for the Alzheimer’s community to have a strong leader. With Linda’s involvement, I believe that the APOE4 community could be the first asymptomatic community to successfully develop preventative treatments. I hope that going forward we’ll both be able to shake up and transform the health care space, making health care and treatments better for all.

Linda’s departure is also a sign of 23andMe’s maturation. When we started the company, the personal genetics industry did not exist; now it is a thriving and competitive landscape. Our company has grown and we continue to be an innovative industry leader. While our success has been exceptional, it is also clear we have a lot of work ahead. We have created a significant and empowering tool, but we must find new and better ways to promote the value of knowing your DNA. In the weeks ahead, we will outline a strategy for the company that we believe will make genetics a routine part of health care and will lead us to making significant research discoveries.

Linda has been instrumental in making 23andMe what it is today and we thank her for her passion and dedication to the company. We have many exciting opportunities before us, and I look forward to working with all of you to make 23andMe a spectacular success.

Anne

Linda Avey to Create Alzheimer’s Foundation

Mountain View, CA–September 4, 2009–Linda Avey, co-founder of 23andMe, an industry leader in personal genetics, announced today that she is leaving the company to start a new foundation focused on Alzheimer’s disease. Ms. Avey’s foundation will leverage the 23andMe research platform to search for causes and treatments for the disease, which afflicts more than 5.2 million people in the United States.

Ms. Avey and Anne Wojcicki founded 23andMe together in 2006. The company provides personalized genetic information through DNA analysis and allows individuals to interact with their private information through a variety of web-based tools.

“I could not be more proud of what we have accomplished in the three years since Anne and I created 23andMe, and I am excited to take the next step in applying my experiences to one of the great health challenges of our time,” said Ms. Avey, who has more than 20 years of experience in the biopharmaceutical industry. “There is a clear need for revolutionary research and concentrated effort to confront Alzheimer’s, and we need to start now in order to make meaningful progress. The resources are out there–my goal is to marshal them to find answers for families, like mine, who have lost family members to such a debilitating disease.”

Concurrent with Ms. Avey’s announcement, Ms. Wojcicki said that 23andMe expects to make its genetic data platform available to Ms. Avey’s foundation in order to advance its research.

“Linda has been a true partner with me over these last three years, an innovative leader for our company and our industry, and instrumental in making 23andMe what it is today,” said Wojcicki. “It is only fitting that she will be making full use of our work together and leveraging the 23andMe platform for a tremendous cause. We look forward to joining her as a partner in her efforts.”

Ms. Avey’s departure announced today takes effect immediately.

Here is a video, in two parts, of Avey and Wojcicki demoing some new features of 23andMe at the sixth D: All Things Digital conference in 2008.

In the first one, they introduce 23andMe, explain the main service and ask News Corp. (NWS) head Rupert Murdoch, Walt and me about our tolerance for milk and about our racing abilities. (Full disclosure: News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones and this Web site.)

In the second one, Avey and Wojcicki survey Murdoch on his genetic traits and show me what genes my kids have in common (and discover that I am not hyperactive).

Here are the D6 demos:

Facebook picked a new CFO quietly, after its cloddish public parting with longtime top financial exec Gideon Yu earlier this year.

Facebook said in late March it was looking for a CFO with “public company experience,” and it seems to have gotten one in former Genentech CFO David Ebersman.

(He is pictured here–is it just me or does he look a lot like an older version of the man he will be reporting to, Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg?)

It’s an interesting choice of a high-profile exec for the job at the headed-for-an-IPO-someday social-networking company, and one from outside the Web sector.

And, indeed, with the addition of Ebersman, Facebook inches ever closer to a public offering.

It is also a good move for Ebersman, who has been at the biotech firm for almost 15 years. But the South San Francisco-based Genentech was acquired in March by Hoffman-La Roche, which already has a CFO.

Ebersman, who will formally start in September, will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations and real estate functions and will also be part of the Palo Alto, Calif., company’s executive management team.

Former Netscape exec and VC Peter Currie has served as a stand-in for Yu since he left, although has not been an active financial exec.

Here is the full press release from Facebook:

PALO ALTO, Calif.–June 29, 2009–Facebook today announced that David Ebersman, the former executive vice president and chief financial officer (CFO) of Genentech, the pioneering biotechnology firm recently acquired by Roche, will become the company’s chief financial officer.

Ebersman will report to Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Founder Mark Zuckerberg. He will oversee Facebook’s finance, accounting, investor relations, and real estate functions. He also becomes a part of the company’s executive management team, which directs all aspects of company strategy, planning and operations. Ebersman will formally start in September 2009.

“We received a lot of interest in the CFO position and had the opportunity to meet with many impressive candidates,” said Mark Zuckerberg. “We quickly recognized that David was the right person for Facebook. He was Genentech’s CFO while revenue tripled, and his success in scaling the finance organization of a fast growing company will be important to Facebook.”

“After meeting with Mark and the rest of the team, I was thoroughly impressed with everyone’s drive and sense of purpose to help people connect and share,“ noted Ebersman. “Mark is constantly pushing the company forward and he’s assembled a world-class team that is achieving remarkable results both for its users and as a business. I’m excited to join this effort and this new industry.”

Ebersman worked at Genentech for nearly 15 years. He served as the firm’s executive vice president and CFO from 2006 through April 2009, when Roche Group acquired the company. Prior to joining the company’s finance organization, he was senior vice president of Product Operations. He joined Genentech as a business development analyst. Previously, he was a research analyst at Oppenheimer & Company Inc.

Moving on now to the Q&A with Google (GOOG) enterprise head Dave Girouard:

• Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft (MSFT) and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel Group rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “‘don’t be evil’ is one of Google’s core values. “We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech (DNA) rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that. We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.

Moving on now to the Q&A with Google (GOOG) enterprise head Dave Girouard:

• Q: How much revenue flows through this (Apps)?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’re going to get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft (MSFT) and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel Group rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “‘don’t be evil’ is one of Google’s core values. “We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech (DNA) rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that. We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook, for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps, just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

Pretty slick. Google (GOOG) has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seamless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

Google Apps Sync for Microsoft (MSFT) Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only.

A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech (DNA) rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”

Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”

At an event in San Francisco, Google is expected to discuss the future of its productivity suite and some enhancements that may begin to close the gap with Microsoft (MSFT) Office, something the company desperately needs to do if it wants to make deeper inroads in the enterprise area.

As Girouard himself admitted last week, Apps still has a ways to go. “Gmail is really the best email application in the world for consumers or business users, and we can prove that very well,” he said. “Calendar is also very good, and probably almost at the level of Gmail. But the word processing, spreadsheets and other products are much less mature. They’re a couple of years old at the most, and we still have a lot of work to do.”

In a few hours we’ll learn just how much work has been done and how much is left. Join us for live coverage beginning at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EDT).

• The title of this morning’s presentation is “Google Apps: The Enterprise Cloud.” Presiding over it, Andrew Kovaks from Google’s cloud computing team and Dave Girouard, president of Google’s Enterprise division. According to the schedule provided, it will feature a CIO roundtable discussion as well as some new product demos.
• Girouard kicks things off with a quick overview of the business. Google is a 10-and-a-half-year-old company, he says, adding that Google Apps is about half as old as that. “We’re about five, five-and-a-half years into this initiative.”
• Girouard says the current recession has made cloud computing more urgent, more necessary. “This has been a really difficult environment. Everyone is feeling it and we need to respond…It’s important to invest in difficult times, especially during times when everything is telling you to cut back.” Great companies thrive during downturns, he notes, adding that Google is investing in Apps, because the company views it as an area the company can grow into for quite some time to come.
• Looking backwords for a moment, Girouard notes that this particular side of Google’s business was born out the company’s search app and then Gmail. Gmail, he adds, was initially conceived as an internal app before it was rolled out to the consumer market.
• A few interesting data points:

  –70 percent of the universities in the U.S. are in the process of outsourcing or moving their email to a cloud computing solution.

  –Google now has 1.75 million businesses on Google Apps.

  –It has more than 15 million active ursers.

  –Dozens of Apps customers with more than 1,000 employees.

• Increasingly, larger companies are moving to Google Apps. Among them, Genentech (DNA), the first large business to “go Google.” A Genentech rep is on hand to talk up the company’s experience which, obviously, was a positive one.

  Also, a recent advocate of Google Apps, Avago–the first company with over $1.5 billion in revenue to use Google Apps as a suite. “We save over $1.6 million a year using Google Apps,” says the Avago rep.

  Another recent Google App convert, Morgans Hotel Group, the proprietor of the Clift Hotel, at which this event is being held. The Clift rep says the platform has had a tremendous impact on the company already and it’s only just made the switch.

• So, why are companies adopting Google Apps? A few reasons: Radically lower costs, obviously. But also a steady stream of innovation. We haven’t exactly seen that from Google yet as I noted in the introduction, but presumably there will be some evidence of it on display later this morning.

  To be fair, Google did make a few additions to Apps last year–APIs and whatnot. Girouard offers Gmail offline and Secure Data Connector as examples of this. The company has made other smaller enhancements as well, such as extensibility features and enterprise Interoperability features.

• Interesting. Girouard says Google Apps often provides a 3X cost savings over other non-cloud solutions. He also says Google believes it has a more reliable product than most. The company is holding itself to that claim by being more transparent about downtime and service incidents. He notes the Apps Status Dashboard, which tracks up and downtime, as a move in this direction.
• “Failure is not an option,” says Girouard. His mandate to his team: There can be no failed deployments. Enterprise deployment and support must be streamlined and easy.
• All this is wonderful, but what’s the company got that is new today? Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook for one thing. The App allows users to sync Outlook with Apps just like Outlook natively syncs with Exchange. Offers fast email sync with Google-native protocol, full calendar and contact sync, as well as global address autocomplete and search and free/busy information support.

  Google has essentially recreated the Outlook GUI within Apps. Seemless integration. Works offline. Same familiar Outlook experience. Use Gmail and outlook simultaneously. Everything is supported natively and, as the demoer notes, “your data is safe, it’s with Google.” Well, that’s one way to look at it.

  Google Apps Sync for Microsoft Outlook is available today as part of the company’s Premiere Apps. It’s available for Windows only and it is an enterprise-only service. It is, however, available for free to non-profits and educational institutions.

• A few quick case studies: Avago rep says this represents the “last hurdle” for users to get over migrating away form Exchange. The feedback we’ve gotten is that this looks “exactly the same” as Exchange. Genentech rep relates a similar experience. “It looks like a native Outlook experience. The average has no idea we switched out the back-end…We anticipate widepsread adoption.”
• Girouard: “I bet you never imagined you’d see Google demonstrating Outlook for you all, so this is a first.”
• Moving on now to the Q&A:
• Question: How much revenue flows through this?

  Girouard: Hundreds of millions of dollars…that’s as explicit as we’ll get.

• Q: How is the company dealing with Microsoft and its entrenchment in this particular sector?

  Long meandering answer that ends with this: The company has a new App Reseller program that it debuted in April. It will give it more feet on the street and expand the ecosystem. That’s a start, I suppose.

• Q: Is Outlook the only app that makes sense for this sort of sync, or is the company considering doing something similar with Excel and PowerPoint as well?

  Google’s clearly already put a lot of thought into this and expects to pursue it. That said, says Girouard: “We don’t view the world as you’ve got to get rid of Office and use Google Apps instead. We see it as more nuanced than that.”

• Q: Did the IT folks in the room have any concerns about Google’s commitment to these services?

  Apparently not. The Morgans Hotel rep says has has “no reservations about the future viability of the product.” Gmail’s been around for a while now, hasn’t it? Also, notes Avago guy: “Don’t be evil is one of Google’s core values…We’re taking them at their word.”

Interesting comment from Genentech rep amid remarks out mobile needs: “I can’t get Android phones fast enough for our folks.”

• Q: What areas are showstoppers for CIOs considering a migration to Google Apps? What services and apps do they absolutely need to retain control over?

  The Morgans Hotel rep says none. “We’re looking to move everything to the cloud.” The Avago and Genentech reps say pretty much the same thing. The Genentech rep: “Anything in the cloud is fine by us.”

• Q: What areas can developers play in without being crushed by Google?

  Giouard says there are many. “We’re going to have a very large installed base of Google Apps users and there’s a great opportunity here for developers to sell into that…We are really opening up the stack to the developer world and that’s going to be great for our business customers.”

• Q for Genentech rep: At what point will you shut down Outlook?

  “I don’t see us shutting it down any time in the near future, but we hope that the number of Outlook users shrinks as our employees see the benefits of the Web and Google Apps.”

• Asked for his feelings on companies that use the term “cloud computing” to peddle non-cloud computing services, Giouard replies: IT giants have co-opted the cloud computing term.

Indeed it could. Good luck proving it, though. Finding hard evidence that some of the nation’s largest tech firms have secretly negotiated agreements not to hire away each other’s top talent isn’t going to be easy. I can’t imagine there’s a paper trail of collusive memos between Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Carol Bartz and Arthur Levinson. Then again, there’s no telling what a DOJ fishing expedition might turn up.

Ironic, yeah?

It’s not certain why WSGR prepared the presentation, but the document obviously applies to the close ties between Apple (AAPL) and Google (GOOG) and, if nothing else, offers insight into the “interlocking directorates” provision of the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and just why the FTC might be concerned that the companies may be in violation of antitrust law by sharing four board members and advisers between them: Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Genentech (DNA) CEO Art Levinson, Intuit (INTU) chairman Bill Campbell and former vice president Al Gore.

According to the WSGR presentation, the Clayton Act stipulates that a person cannot serve as director or officer of two or more competing companies when the two are engaged in U.S. or foreign competition; each has $25,319,000 in aggregate capital, surplus, and undivided profits; and at least one has two percent in overlapping sales (note: while that $25 million figure was correct at the time the deck was prepared, it has since risen to $26,161,000). Now, Apple and Google clearly both meet the “aggregate capital, surplus, and undivided profits” condition. They probably don’t meet the second, but it’s conceivable that they might in the future as Google’s Android platform rises to challenge Apple’s iPhone in the mobile phone software and services market.

And if and when they should? Well, that leads to what WSGR describes as “occasion of sin”– a theological term that refers to circumstances that by their very nature lead to sin.

In other words, inevitable sin. And competition between the two companies is no absolution, either. As the presentation explains, there is “no safe harbor for de minimus competition.” Given the obvious overlaps between Google and Apple–between both products and directors–the two companies would seem to be heading for some sort of confrontation with the FTC. Especially if, as sources say, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has no intention of resigning from Apple’s board–even in the face of increasing government scrutiny of the company.

UPDATE: WSGR tells me the document was prepared for an internal training session. It had no explanation for why the firm published it on the Web.

UPDATE: As Danny Sullivan notes in the comments, Google has removed the cached version of the document — rather expeditiously. However, there’s still a cached version available over at Microsoft.

Clayton Act Section 8 Interlocking Directorates – Free Legal Forms

And for Apple’s (AAPL) sake, I hope he does. Because with expectations running this high, I’d hate to see what happens if he doesn’t. Although the new Apple Store housed in a life-size replica of the Golden Gate Bridge pictured in the invite would certainly take some of the heat off …

Anyway, I’ll be live-blogging from inside Moscone West in San Francisco starting at 10 a.m. PDT. Here’s something to read while you wait …

• From Moscone West: This is crazy. They just opened a single door to let cameras in and the media rushed the gate. Its like that 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati.



• The hall in Moscone West is filling quickly to the sounds of Jerry Lee Lewis. From the looks of it media and developers are here in equal numbers.
• Jobs takes the stage. I’m sitting about 20 rows back, but even I can see he’s looking pretty thin from here. He gets right into it, pulls up a slide of a stool and describes Apple as a three-legged company. Macs, music and the iPhone.
• Jobs will spend the morning talking about the iPhone. This afternoon Apple will discuss OS X “Snow Leopard.”
• Talking about iPhone SDK: In the past 96 days, 25,000 people have applied to Apple’s paid developer program. It’s had 250,000 downloads of the iPhone 2.0 software SDK.
• Three parts to iPhone 2.0: enterprise, SDK, “new features.”
• Apple has built exchange support into iPhone 2.0: push email, push contacts, push calendar, auto-discovery, global address lookup, remote wipe. Also supports Cisco VPN security.
• Everything enterprise has told us they’ve wanted in the iPhone, we’ve built into it right out of the box, he says.
• 35% of Fortune 500 companies have participated in iPhone 2.0 beta: top five banks, securities firms, 8 of 10 top pharma companies, 6 of 7 leading airlines. Lots of support from higher-ed market as well.
• Cutting to video now: Execs from Disney (DIS), Genentech, U.S. Army discussing iPhone 2.0 beta: all of them talking about the extraordinary demand for the iPhone among their employees.
• “iPhone 2.0 is extraordinarily well-integrated with Microsoft (MSFT) Exchange.”
• Video goes on: Talking about security now. Army rep talking about how important remote wipe is. Disney exec describes iPhone as “an enterprise-level device that packs the power of a laptop into a device the size of a phone.” Video ends.
• Moving on to iPhone SDK. Jobs welcomes Scott Forstall to the stage to discuss the SDK. “We’re opening up the same developer tools we use internally,” he says. “Developers will create applications in exactly the same way we do.”
• Core OS: Core operating system of iPhone uses the same elements as OS X. Offers a quick overview of Cocoa Touch, Xcode, Interface Builder, Tethered Debugging, Instruments and other developer tools, before moving on to a quick demo of Interface Builder.
• Launches Xcode and creates a new project in Xcode. App will use built-in address APIs as well as core location APIs to locate contacts within a 10-mile radius of the iPhone.
• He opens Interface Builder and drags and drops some buttons and fields onto an iPhone test screen on his desktop.
• The UI finished, he opens the iPhone simulator to test it out. It works.
• He links the UI features up to the code he’s written and bang, it’s linked up and ready to go. That’s it.
• Forstall says developer response to the iPhone SDK has been enormously positive. He refers to a number of developer quotes that really lionize the platform: “It blows away anything we’ve seen from RIM” says one.
• Forstall invites a Sega rep up to the stage to demo some of their work for the iPhone. Sega’s Ethan Einhorn offers a bit of background on their Super Monkey Ball project. He notes that the company was able to demo an early version of the game after just a few weeks of work at the iPhone SDK launch announcement. Now, after a few more months of work, they’ve managed to create a full-featured version of the game.
• Super Monkey Ball will be available at the launch of the App Store for $9.99.
• Up next: eBay’s Ken Sun. The iPhone has become the No. 1 mobile device for accessing eBay, Sun says.
• Six weeks ago, eBay began developing a new interface for the iPhone and was able to quickly pull one together.
• The application supports auction watching and bidding. Bids placed on an iPhone are instantly registered in eBay’s system. The eBay app will be available for free when the App Store launches.
• Loopt’s Sam Altman takes the stage to talk about the company’s location-based social-networking app: “We make serendipity happen.” Pffft. He pulls up the app and uses it to locate a friend and a list of the thing’s she’s done today. He notes that the friend is close by at a cafe and sends her a quick message asking if she’s available for lunch.
• Next up: TypePad and its mobile blogging application. Michael Sippey takes the stage and after talking up TypePad as a blogging platform, he moves on to the company’s new iPhone app.
• Demo will focus on photoblogging. He browses the photos on his iPhone, selects a picture, crops it, adds it to a blog post, publishes it to his blog, taps view and Safari launches and displays his new post. Very fast, very slick. Oddly, no mention of a cut-and-paste feature.
• This app will also be available at the launch of the App Store for free.
• Associated Press follows TypePad. AP’s Benjamin Mosse describes AP’s Mobile News Network, which uses the device’s location API to provide location-based local news, photos and video.
• The app also supports citizen journalism and permits AP readers to send the news agency their own photos and news reports. This app will also be available for free at the launch of the App Store.
• Next up: Brian Greenstone from Pangea software. The company has ported two of its games from OS X to the iPhone.
• The first is Enigmo. The second is Cromag Rally–a 3D caveman racing game. The graphics in both games look great. Greenstone notes that in this particular game, the iPhone itself is the controller–in this case, the steering wheel.
• Greenstone really talking up the SDK, says porting the game was almost a no-brainer.
• Forstall welcomes Moo-Cow-Music’s Mark Terry to the stage to demo Band. It’s a collection of virtual instruments that allows users to create music on the iPhone. He pulls up a keyboard and plays the first few bars of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
• He moves on to a drum kit, and then to a “blues interface” that includes all the instruments you need to play the blues. And now the bass; he plays a few bars of Pink Floyd’s “Money.” He notes that tracks can be recorded and mixed together to create songs individually or collaboratively.
• Onstage now is Jeremy Schoenherr from MLB.com to demo an app developed exclusively for the iPhone. The app offers real-time updates of game info and also nearly real-time video highlights. Videos will reportedly be uploaded minutes after a play is made.
• Next: Modality, which will demo the first of two apps designed for the medical industry. S. Mark Williams takes the stage to talk about a learning application for med students. Looks like they’ve created an iPhone version of “Netter’s Anatomy.” All the graphics have been ported to the iPhone, and you can zoom in and out, and use touch to locate different areas of the body, the same way you use the Google maps application. Modality says that within weeks of the App Store launching, it will be offering this application as well as others for different education markets.
• Mark Cain from MIMvista onstage now. Looks like we’ve got a medical imaging application. Onscreen now is a CT scan and a PET scan overlaid on an iPhone screen. (My god, this is really cool.)
• The application relies on the iPhone’s pinch, slide, touch and drag to navigate images. You can also toggle to a planar view as well. Whoa–it supports movies as well. Cain stresses that this is a highly complex and computing-intensive application that’s been ported to the iPhone. And his company was able to do it with relative ease.
• Up now: Digital Legends to demo another game. They’ve developed Krull, a fantasy action game, on the iPhone. Accelerometer is used to move the character, to jump, swing weapons, etc. The graphics are very impressive.
• The person demoing notes that in some cases they’re better than those of handheld gaming platforms. The app will be available later this year. What we were just shown–which was damn impressive–was pulled together in just two weeks.
• Forstall back onstage. He’s talking about one feature that developers have requested that wasn’t included in the SDK: The ability to run applications in the background as well as the foreground.
• He pulls up a Windows Mobile task manager to demonstrate the wrong way to address that request. “This is nuts,” he says. Apple has come up with a far better solution: We’ve developed a push notification service.
• Apple will maintain a persistent IP connection to the iPhone through which third-party applications can push notifications to the device. These can be badges, text notifications and audio notifications. There is also a unified push notification service for all developers that preserves battery life, maintains performance and works over the air. This will be available in September, but Apple will begin seeding it soon.
• Jobs strolls back onstage to discuss some new features.
• The first: Contact Search. Your standard contact search.
• Second: Full iWork document support: pages, keynote. MS office support as well: Word, PowerPoint. (Cut-and-paste support?)
• Third: Bulk delete and move.
• Fourth: Save images from email.
• Fifth: A landscape view of the calculator.
• Sixth: Parental controls.
• Seventh: Languages: there are two forms for Japanese, two forms for Chinese (simplified and traditional) including one that allows you to draw the characters with your finger. “One of the great advantages of not having a bunch of plastic keys on your keyboard,” says Jobs.
• What about 8, 9 and 10? Cut-and-paste, chat and a better camera? No? Damn.
• “iPhone 2.0 raises us to a whole new level,” says Jobs. “We’ll release it in July. It will be free to all iPhone owners, and $9.95 for iPod Touch users.
• Moving on to the App Store. It will be on every iPhone, and it supports wireless downloads, automatic installs and automatic updates. Developers can set the price of their apps. Developers take 70%. No credit card or hosting fees. Apps will be DRM’d for FairPlay.
• If a developer chooses to offer their app for free, Apple won’t charge them anything. Apps under 10 MG can be downloaded over the air. Apps above that size can be downloaded over iTunes or via Wi-Fi.
• Apple has also developed an enterprise version of the apps store that will allow companies to distribute their custom applications only to their employees on their phones.
  There’s another distribution method as well: Ad Hoc. Developers can mail apps to up to 100 users.
• Now we’ve got something entirely new: It’s called MobileMe. Phil Schiller takes the stage to talk about it. What’s MobileMe? “It’s like Exchange for the rest of us.”
  (Haha.) He just slipped up and called active sync “active stink.”
• With MobileMe, iPhone users can have mail, calendar, etc. pushed to their phones. Information is stored in the cloud and then pushed to all a user’s Apple devices. Change a meeting on your phone, the update is pushed to MobileMe, which then pushes that update to your laptop and the machines of the people who are scheduled to attend it.
• All this is done over the air. MobileMe works directly with Apple apps. It also works with Outlook for PC users. Apple has also built a suite of Web-based applications. You’ll find them at me.com. The applications look pretty robust. More like those you’d see on the desktop than on the Web.
• Mail, contacts, calendar, photos–which can be sent directly to MobileMe from the phone–iDisk for storage.
• He’s demoing it now: supports drag and drop. Also supports real-time contact search with links to Google (GOOG) maps for directions.
• Calendar supports drag and drop as well. Want to reschedule a meeting? Drag it to another date and time.
• Moves on to iDisk, which has a new interface. All this is tightly integrated with the iPhone. He checks a push email on his phone, saves the sender as a contact. Now he checks his MobileMe account online. The email and new contact are already there.
• Now he creates a new calendar entry on his laptop. He check his phone and there it is. Now he leaves the iPhone view up on the screen behind him, walks back over to the laptop and adds another meeting to his calendar. A few seconds later, the iPhone screen updates with that new meeting. He demonstrates the same thing with a photo.
• MobileMe will be available for $99 a year, with 20 gigabytes of storage. It will be available in July. And yes, MobileMe does replace .mac. Mac users will be automatically upgraded.
• And what about that cut-and-paste support? No? Anyone? Bueller?
• Jobs back onstage. In a few weeks, it will be the iPhone’s first birthday, he says.
  He shows some photos of the crowds outside the Manhattan Apple store.
• Jobs: “This is the phone that has changed phones forever.” He says the iPhone has 90% customer satisfaction; 98% of iPhone users are mobile browsing; 94% are using email; 90% are text messaging; 80% are using 10 features or more. “You can’t even find 10 features on other phones,” he adds.
• Apple has sold 6 million phones so far, Jobs says. Now we need to address our next challenges:
• 1. 3G
• 2. enterprise support
• 3. Third party applications
• 4. more countries
• 5. more affordable.
• Jobs notes that everyone wants one, but 56% of consumers Apple surveyed said it was too expensive.
• iPhone 3G announced to roar of applause, camera flashes.
• iPhone 3g is thinner, full plastic back, solid metal buttons, but same display, camera, a flush headphone jack, dramatically improved audio. “Feels even better in your hand, if you can believe that,” Jobs says.
• How does the iPhone 3G tackle the challenges I just mentioned?
• Video of EDGE vs. 3G pageload on Safari: 3G takes 21 seconds, EDGE still grinding away. Web site is National Geographic, very image heavy. EDGE still grinding; audience begins laughing. EDGE takes 59 seconds; 3G is 2.8 times faster than EDGE.
• Jobs notes that 3G speeds approach those of Wi-Fi. Apple compared the iPhone 3G to two other state-of-the-art 3g phones, and the iPhone is 36% faster than Nokia N95 and Treo 750.
• Video of same comparison with an email attachment: 3G downloads it in five seconds; EDGE takes 18 seconds. 3G is 3.6 times faster.
• Talking about battery life now: iPhone 3G has 300 hours standby. 2G talk time: 10 hours; 3G talk time: five hours–that’s an industry-leading metric.
• Five to six hours of browsing. Seven hours of video. Twenty-four hours of audio.
  One other thing that benefits from fast data is GPS, and we’ve built that into the iPhone 3G, Jobs notes
• Jobs talking about how location based services for the iPhone are about to explode. He’s demoing GPS tracking now. Jobs tracks a car driving down San Francisco’s Lombard Street.
• Now, he circles back to enterprise support, third-party apps, and international distribution. Apple hoped to put the iPhone in 25 countries. World map appears on screen. Theme from “It’s a Small World” plays as countries in which the iPhone is distributed are quickly colored in. Half-hearted “Small World” sing-along fades after a few verses.
• Lots of applause for this: “We’ll be rolling out the iPhone 3G in 70 countries over the next few months.” The next time you’re in Malta and you need an iPhone, it’ll be there.
  Deals for all these countries are signed, sealed and delivered, according to Jobs.
• Moving on to price: iPhone 3G will sell for $199 for 8GB version. Huge applause.
  “With think at that price point it will be affordable for everyone,” Jobs says. The 16GB model will be $299 and will be available in black and white. Apple will start rolling the iPhone out in 22 of the largest countries on July 11.
• on to a new ad: “It’s finally here. The new phone that beats the iPhone–it’s the iPhone 3G.”
• The ad’s tagline: “Twice as fast. Half the price.” You can almost feel the early adopters in the audience wincing.
• Jobs after ad ends: “Isn’t that nice? Would you like to see it again?” Audience roars; Jobs plays the ad again. “Just like the first iPhone, this new iPhone is one of the most amazing products I’ve ever had the pleasure of being associated with.” Jobs asks iPhone team to stand. Lots of audience applause.
• Looks like that’s it. “Take advantage of the great sessions and go make some great products,” says Jobs. And the keynote ends. Sadly, there’s no “one more thing” moment today — no video-chat support, no chat support, no cut-and-paste.
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