Top incentive for Abilene freshmen with free iPhone gigs

The iPhone and iPod Touch are the most wanted devices among young people and and seeing the young crowd at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2008, I knew a free iPhone was coming at an university. They had mentioned about this Texas university developing around 15 web applications for these iPhone and iPod to help students receive homework alerts, answer in-class surveys and quizzes, get directions to their professors' offices, and check their meal and account balances among other things. These apps are based on highly specialized version of the Cocoa framework tweaked just for the iPhone and rechristened as Cocoa Touch, and it looks like the iPhone's just-announced SDK sounds like a winner. If you are the lucky freshmen attending Abilene Christian University this fall, a free iPhone or iPod Touch will be given to you as part of their learning experience. If you develop a commercial app you get to keep 70% of the revenues from the sales and 30% is Apple revenue share, also note that free apps are allowable. The part I liked the most was bashing of Microsoft Task Manager and showcasing their promising push notification service for the iPhone that'll provide a scalable alternative to multitasking. It'll maintain a persistent IP connection to the phone and let a 3rd party server ping Apple's notification service in order to push out notifications your device, which can be in the form of badges, sounds or custom textual alerts. According to Apple, the service will preserve battery life and maintain performance, not to mention work over WiFi or cellular. I am really looking for some cool apps to roll out next month in September, as the seeding to developers has been started already.