Council Post: AI's 'App For That' Moment

The smartphone has transformed the way we communicate, shop and even meet "the one," but early smartphones were a far cry from the slick, optimized devices we carry today. In 2007, a formerly slow crawl toward smartphone technology was turbocharged by the launch of Apple's first iPhone. With the help of a simple yet ingenious advertising campaign (remember "there's an app for that"?), Apple's App Store debuted with 500 apps in 2008. That's pretty impressive, but about one year later the app market exploded, with Apple hosting over 65,000 apps on its store and boasting 1.5 billion app downloads. It wasn't just users who were benefiting, either; today, the App Store supports more than 2.2 million jobs in the U.S. The technology in the iPhone was certainly impressive, and the design was beautiful, but that wasn't the secret to the iPhone's success.