The New York Times has a report today on the so-called iFund, a $100 million venture capital project whose goal is to invest in start-ups that make applications for Apple's immensely popular iPhone.

The idea is to invest somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 million in nascent companies that devise software for sale on Apple's Application Store, from which consumers have already made 60 million downloads in a little over a month. This trend of bigger companies serving as an opportunity for smaller companies to begin and thrive will become only more pronounced as the T-Mobile Dream, powered by Google's Android operating system, is released in the next couple months, the article notes.

So, are there any tips in the article for the entrepreneur looking to make it with a smartphone app--or with some other small but potentially explosive product?

Matt Murphy, who runs the iFund, said that his advice is to keep your idea neat and specific. “If you focus on a really simple consumer product, that’s better than worrying about what everyone else is doing,” he said.

Referring to an earlier tech start-up in which he had helped to invest venture capital, he added, “They could have said, ‘Let’s be like Yahoo.’ Instead they just focused on search as the killer app, saying ‘Let’s be the best at that.’"

You may already know the punch-line: the earlier start-up was Google.

UPDATE: via Gizmodo, Business Week quotes an unnamed source at Apple asserting that the company plans to manufacture 40 to 45 million iPhones by this time next year. That's a lot of phone to make even more downloads.