I followed a live blog on USA Today during the presentation by Apple's CEO Steve Jobs, who unveiled the latest iPhone at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco earlier this week. The basic specs for the iPhone 4 is it is available in two colours, will sell for $199 (16 GB) and $299 (32 GB) with a two-year service contract.

So far, it looks like just another updated iPhone. However, the part of the live blog that really woke me up was when Jobs talked about iAds, an advertising app designed to help developers earn additional revenues from their apps. Here is the part that indicates Apple has ambitions on leaping over Google as a leading Internet advertiser.

"Apple will sell and hosts the ads, and developers get 60 percent of revenues. Apple has only been selling ads for eight weeks, and will feature ads from companies including Nissan, Citi, AT&T, State Farm, Geico and Target during the second half of the year," the USA Today blogger writes.

Ok. With the new iPhone 4, and presumably the iPad, Apple has transformed itself into an advertiser, using the successful apps store to branch into a new potentially very lucrative business. In fact, looking at all the features packed into the iPhone 4, Apple has placed a lot of its bets on a mobile platform.

For example, the positioning of the 5MB video camera and the use of the FaceTime app will allow mobile video conferencing, or at least video phone calls, to be made on the fly. With that kind of ability, expect video conferencing to go mainstream.

An included movie editing app means we will see a lot more on iTube, or even on regular news channels as users immediately become citizen journalists.

The camera records HD video at 720p at 30 frames-per-second, impressive as the iPhone 4 is 24 percent thinner than iPhone 3GS. For gamers, Apple has added a three-axis gyroscope to allow full three way motion (important if you are flying a virtual plane).

Apple has also put its iBooks store on the iPhone, along with the regular iTunes and App stores. It is already encroaching on Amazon.com's space. Since the launch of the iPad not so long ago, users have downloaded five million e-books, about 2.5 per iPad, Jobs revealed.

This is another game changer bundled into the iPhone. With iBooks you will soon be able to make notes, bookmark pages and read PDFs, Jobs said.

To show it all off is a new high-resolution (relatively) screen. With all these goodies, I expect the lines are already forming at the stores. It is no wonder that last month Apple's market capitalisation (what all its shares are collectively worth) surpassed that of Microsoft's. Gee I wish I had bought some of those shares before Jobs jumped back on the ship and drove their price up from $4 to $275.

Still, as other commentators have noted, nothing beats what happened to the third founder of Apple, Ron Wayne. He was brought into a partnership with Jobs and Steve Wozniak to found Apple in 1976, but sold his 10 percent stake within a few weeks, fearing that as the only person with assets, he would loose what he had if the new company went bust.

Jobs and Wozniak had nothing to lose. Analysts have calculated that Wayne, who now lives on a social security cheque, would have been holding on to shares worth $22 billion today if he had kept his stake. A nice history of Apple (and Steve Jobs) from the start is available here: http://applemuseum.bott.org/

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Science teachers who need to upgrade their lesson plans can access Scientix, a new web-based community created by the European Commission to foster science education.

The site provides access to teaching materials, research results and policy documents from science education projects financed by the European Union and its member states. The lessons seem quite good.

There are also online resources to help children play their way into science. For example, the Virtual Frog Dissection Kit allows students to identify and assemble a frog online using its virtual body parts.

Another animation shows the lifecycle of the malaria parasite.

The animations have suggestions on how to integrate them into a lesson. You can search for lessons by inputting the average age of the class and in the community section link up with your peers for advice. Scientix seems like a good way to find online tools at a central source. The link is: http://scientix.eu.

Send any comments to Ahmed at elamin.ahmed@gmail.com