Since the iPhone was first released, early adopters haven't stopped talking about what they think of the device. While the free promotion can be a great marketing tool for wireless carriers, it can be crippling if users have issues with session and network quality.

This is the background to the iPhone Developer Summit session "Early Adopters: The Key to Free Publicity or the Fall of a Technology," to be given in March by Mark McIlvane, President & COO of Velocent Systems.

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"Verizon's Voyager and Nokia's N810 must isolate and prioritize network problems to ensure that customer issues are addressed as quickly as possible," notes McIlvane. "Ensuring that these early adopters have a positive experience is essential for having any chance at the viral adoption the iPhone experienced, along with a low customer churn rate."

McIlvane is a "startup specialist" who  firmly believes that startup companies are a science, and that they will succeed if managed properly. He joined Velocent from Personeta, Inc., where he was President, and CEO. Prior to Personeta, he was Senior Vice President of Sales at IP Unity, and he held several positions at Clarent Corporation, most recently as Executive Vice President, Business Operations. Before Clarent, Mark was Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Comverse Technology, a leading provider of network-based multimedia enhanced communications services.

iPhone Developer Summit - March 18-20, 2008 New York City
Could Apple iPhone become a viable portable gaming solution (like PSP or NDS) one day? If the iPhone does as expected and takes a decent chunk of the growing smartphone market then will malware writers start to give OS X some serious attention as the overall penetration of OS X skyrockets? How does a developer decide whether to create a web app or an iPhone native application using the iPhone SDK?  How does the iPhone SDK stack up against Windows Mobile 6.0/.NET Compact Framework 3.5?

These are among the dozens of questions to be asked and answered at the iPhone Developer Summit being held in New York City in March - an intensive and content-rich two-day program designed to satisfy the growing hunger among software developers and IT professionals for a broad spectrum of sessions informing developers what kinds of development options and opportunities the iPhone provides.

The Technical Chair of the event is Kevin Hoffman, editor-in-chief of iPhone Developer's Journal.

In the two-day Summit, to be held March 18-20 at The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, developers will hear from industry experts about the impact the iPhone is having on delivery of rich content to mobile users. Technical sessions will explore a world of web development opportunities on the iPhone including building applications using the new ASP.NET MVC framework, building social applications, and developing high-quality, iPhone-style web-based GUIs for your applications. Additionally, more than a dozen expert faculty speakers will help delegates learn about issues such as when to use the iPhone SDK and when to develop web applications, and how Google's Android differs from the iPhone SDK and iPhone safari development?

Attending delegates will leave the iPhone Developer Summit with resources, ideas and examples they can apply immediately.