I just recieved an email from Open Tech’s Vice President of online sales and PR that states the following sentence as the sole line in the email:

“Open Tech is For sale. This includes all trade secrets and brand equity. Thank you for tour time.”

For those who have not followed the Open Tech story, they are/were a company that created a line of computers able to install and run Mac OS X.

Apple filed lawsuit after lawsuit trying to drive the small company under. It seems the house that Steve built finally dealt the crushing blow.

Apple’s much anticipated iPhone 2 was released in the US today. As previously reported, the phone is on a 3G network and is half the price of the original iPhone. The iPhone 2 firmware is also available to download from Apple to install on the original iPhone for via the Apps Store. The firmware will.

In related news, Apple’s new MobileMe service went live on July 10th. MobileMe, which replaces .Mac offers email, calendar, and other services.

Today is the first day of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. With over 5,000 people in attendance, this is one of the largest WWDC’s yet.

The House That Steve Built has some exciting announcements that have been coming seemingly every minute. Among the highlights are for the first half of the day are:

- Not only is iPhone 2.0 in beta with over 4,000 people in the beta program, but that there will be three parts to the SDK: Enterprise, SDK, as well as new features for the end users.

- Several demos from SEGA, Apple, eBay, Pangea Software, MIMVista, among others.

- SEGA shows off a video of Super Monkey Ball, which will be a launch title in the new App Store for $9.99 USD.

- MIMVista shows off a program designed to help medical students study and learn various parts of the body with almost realistic images.

- Steve anounces new iPhone 2.0 features, including contact search, support for Microsoft Office documents, and support for Asian languages. The iPhone is set to be released July 11th.

- Mobile.Me is the replacement for .mac, current .mac subscribers will be automatically updated to the new service. A 60-day trial of Mobile.Me will be included with the iPhone 2.0.

- The new iPhone will be thiner, sexier, include support for a 3G network, Enterprise support, more affordable, available in more countries, and have advanced GPS support.

- Target price for an 8GB iPhone 2.0 will be $199, a savings of $200 over the current price of the iPhone.

- Later in the day, Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard was announced, but would feature no new features, only improvements over older ones.

So we arrived and are waiting in line. The queue is rather long and we’re not sure if we managed to catch a good position for the Keynote. That is, a position that prevents us from having to enter one of the overflow rooms. There’re definately lots of people here. 

One of the lab areas in the lab room still had it’s label coverted. That may be a cue by that there’ll be something new which enforces a new lab in order to understand it.

More news as we continue our approaching the main floor.

So tomorrow our journey to WWDC will begin. We’ll fly from Amsterdam to London, from London to L.A. and from there by car to San Francisco. So it’ll be a rather eventfull journey: An interesting ride from L.A to SF, a (hopefully) equally interesting KeyNote (Please no ‘Worst Keynote Ever’ shirts for sale afterwards, like last year) and lots of informative sessions.

I got a new battery for my 15″ MBP in order to be able to hack away on some projects while on plane, I updated my harddive to 200MB 7200rpm so it is faster and I have more storage for a plethora of data (maybe even a Snow Leopard Install?) and I collected lots of documents to read while on plane too.

I’m really looking forward to it. If you happen to visit WWDC and’d love to meet up, be sure to contact us. Especially if you’re german too, and’d love to meet some other german MacHeads / Cococa Hackers.