iAd. A big deal.

Reading these Apple announcements last week….

Apple blows me away.  Everyone’s talking about iPad, and to a lesser extent, iPhone OS4 multi-tasking.

But its iAd that seems like the huge deal to me.

If you’d me asked two weeks ago, I would have said that Google pretty much owns the future of advertising.  People just don’t watch TV or read paper media like they once did, and Google seemed to be the only one that had figured out how to make ad money.

And then Apple comes along, and I suspect will deliver a really great solution for mobile, presumably context aware (these devices have location, person, and time ) ads.  A side note here: I don’t actually know that iAds are context aware - but if they are not now, I suspect they will be.

I can see this kind of working like iTunes.  iPods initially came with a firewire jack and worked with iTunes for Mac folk -  now they’re everywhere.

So if Google can make tons of money from the time people spend in front of their PCs, imagine how much money Apple can make from the time people spend with their phones.  And if Google can charge a premium for placing ads in context with the content on a loaded web page - imagine what Apple can do with your “life” context (its 9 AM and you’re within a 3 minute walk of a Starbucks - what ad do you think you’ll see on your phone when you’re checking the mail before walking into the office).

And, once they have an established advertising network, why wouldn’t Apple port this to Windows Mobile, Android, Meego…  whatever?

Also cool - by sharing revenue with iPhone developers, they’re not even having to come up with ways to draw eyeballs to the platform - iPhone developers will take care of that.

If Apple doesn’t get this formula right with iAd, it will be interesting to see who does.  Because I think it will happen.