Surge of New Software for the iPhone

Aiming to capitalize on the new features of Apple's iPhone 3G, developers are planning an array of applications, including several for business

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By Jay Yarow

June 30, 2008 at 9:01 AM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

Mark Cain felt like a rock star. The chief technology officer of medical imaging software company MIMvista got that sensation as he stepped onto the stage at Apple's (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference on June 9 to demonstrate a new program that delivers medical scans to an iPhone. Suddenly he was in front of an auditorium packed with thousands of Apple faithful, reporters, and bloggers, all eager for news of the latest iteration of Apple's music-playing cell phone and the software applications designed to run on it. "We went from thousands of people knowing about our company to millions, in just a moment," he says.

MIMvista's application is just one of the 4,000 applications being developed specifically to run on the iPhone (BusinessWeek.com, 6/9/08). These are part of a wave of so-called native applications, meaning they're designed to run directly on the phone, as opposed to being downloaded onto the phone from a Web browser. The first of these programs becomes available by mid-July, around the time the new iPhone 3G hits store shelves.