The iPhone's Extraordinary Impact, And Why It Matters

We all know the iPhone's been a huge success, right? Well, a Kleiner Perkins presentation about its $100,000,000 iFund offers some jaw-dropping statistics that will force you to re-evaluate - upward - all of your perspectives about the iPhone's impact on mobile technology, mobile business, and the interplay between people and the tools they use to experience the world around them.Calling the presentation "unbelievable," venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg of Benchmark Capital writes that a company he's funded, called Tunewiki, experienced "3+X growth in 30 days from the moment it launched on the AppStore."

The Kleiner Perkins iFund presentation by partner Chi-Hua Chien at iPhoneDevCamp3 notes that while Apple's iPod became a cultural phenomenon when it was introduced and experienced soaring sales for two years, the iPhone's performance in the market absolutely dwarfs the success of the iPod. There's a great slide showing the 10:1 unit-sales differential between the two products.

Another breathtaking slide, called "iPhone Is Changing Behavior, shows the enormous gaps between iPhone users and other users in the frequency of browsing news, viewing mobile video, doing mobile search, using social networks, listening to music, and playing games.

And as with the iPod's great early success versus the iPhone's explosive success a couple of years later, the very admirable performance of the groundbreaking iTunes site is just about buried when compared to that of the AppStore - again, by about a 10:1 ratio.

Yes, Kleiner Perkins is deeply vested in the success of the iPhone as evidenced by its own $100 million iFund, and so of course it's going to try to present a rosy picture. But bring all the skepticism you want as you view this presentation about the jarring impact that the iPhone has had and will continue to have - and if you think it's all a bunch of sales-talk phony-baloney, drop me a line at [email protected] and I'll publish all rationale comments.

Oh, I almost forgot: you can view the presentation here.