At Pinch Media, we make sure everything we do takes into account the incredible iPhone and iPod Touch platform our products run on. Usually we’re taking advantage of additional features, like the iPhone’s incredible location-aware frameworks, but sometimes we’re dealing with limitations. The iPhone is powerful, but like all mobile devices, the iPhone is much less powerful than a desktop computer, and like all mobile devices, the cellular connection is often imperfect. On the subway, in the dead spot on your freeway commute, while out enjoying nature somewhere remote – your connection isn’t always going to be at full strength 100% of the time.

Today I want to point out one of the advanced features of Pinch Analytics we’re especially proud of: client-side event caching. We built this to accommodate non-existent and low-strength connections on the iPhone, as well as the uncertain connectivity of the wifi-only iPod Touch. Whenever an event occurs but there’s not a speedy connection, it’s written into storage on the iPhone / iPod Touch and remains there in a compressed format until connectivity is present at a later date. As far as the reporting’s concerned, it’s as if the iPhone’s connection was always strong. I was in South America recently, with my iPhone in airplane mode to avoid obscene data charges, and used applications with Pinch Analytics installed the whole time. When I returned – the reporting was complete.

Working with intermittent connectivity is essential for accurate analytics and advertising reporting, and I believe we’re the only iPhone-dedicated product to do this right. But this feature is only one small piece of what’s necessary to fully optimize for the iPhone. Our development team has years of experience building and optimizing applications for the Mac, and we’re confident we’ve got the best product with the best performance – to try it for yourself, register now.

I had the opportunity to speak at The Media Kitchen’s Digital Media Venture Capital conference last week, and took the opportunity to present on some emerging trends in mobile (and where I think the future of mobile lies.) Thanks to Barry Lowenthal & Darren Herman for organizing and hosting such a great event, First Round Capital for inviting Pinch Media to speak as one of their portfolio companies, and Allen Stern from Center Networks for being kind enough to take and post a video of my presentation, which I’m embedding below:

I’m convinced mobile’s reaching a tipping point and will become as important as the desktop very quickly, but the exact path still isn’t perfectly clear – I’d love thoughts from Pinch Media’s users.

I was at Apple’s WWDC keynote this morning, which has been covered extensively elsewhere – see TechCrunch for an example. The event and the application demonstrations there only confirmed my belief that the iPhone SDK is transformative, shifting the iPhone from a nifty smartphone to a full-fledged computing platform. Particularly interesting (to me) were the applications that could’ve been done within the iPhone’s Safari browser, but weren’t – applications by eBay, TypePad, and the Associated Press. All of these were written in Objective-C to take advantage of the iPhone SDK’s advanced features. All of them will be available for free. I expect all of them will be ridiculously popular – the eBay and TypePad applications are a must-use for iPhone owners that use their existing web-based services, and the Associated Press applications presents intuitive new ways to access information on the fly.

I expect many more web applications to follow, creating web-plus-SDK applications that combine online content with the iPhone’s advanced features. As these web-plus-SDK applications grow, they’re going to want to optimize, and to optimize they’re going to need good analytics. That’s where Pinch Media can help. Just like an SDK application can do more than a web application, Pinch Media’s SDK-based analytics can do more than web analytics. (Sign up to get started today.)

I also expect many of these web-plus-SDK applications to be as dependent on network effects as their desktop-browser-based parents. For social networking, reviews, messaging – for any application that depends on the contributions of its userbase – the only sane price point is ‘free’. The same goes for applications built solely for mobile. Loopt, a social network for mobile users, also presented its upcoming iPhone application today – and just like the others, it will also be available for free.

As these applications grow, they’re also going to need revenue models – revenue models that go beyond the paid download. There are many possibilities here, but I suspect many will learn from more traditional web applications, and offer free content accompanied by advertising. Just like web-plus-SDK applications, web-plus-SDK advertising has the potential to be so much more than solely web-based advertising. Here, Pinch Media can also help – contact us today to discuss our advertising beta program, developed specifically for the iPhone SDK.