Just a peek at iPhoneDevCamp:

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The iPhoneDevCamp opening reception is just about over, but iPhone news is coming out at record pace.  Check out the flickrstream here.  See you tomorrow at 9:30AM.  News?  The iPhoneInterface tool is out as well as reported by the iPhone Hacking News:

We have successfully written a tool named iPhoneInterface allowing for some basic manipulation of things on the phone, and are releasing it tonight. We are including source code so you can understand the techniques we have used so far. We will be expanding the functionality of this tool significantly tomorrow. The best news is that we have prototype code that allows the ability to:

• Run any desired application already residing on the phone.
• Control what processes run on the phone (currently implementation is very hackish)
• Move files around on the phone
• Enable viewing of verbose information during the restore process
• Activate the phone without iTunes and without a token

Note: Not all of the features listed above are necessarily included in tonight’s initial release.

We are continuing significant work on this tool and will probably have similarly worthwhile updates tomorrow.

The Big in Japan team was out in force at the World Series of Video Games at the Gaylord Texan.  Our involvement with gaming really started this year with our work with the LEGO MMOG (massively multiplayer online game).  It took us a while to figure out the how social communication and gaming could intersect, but very quickly it clicked.  Since then we have really ‘amp’d-up’ our involvement in the gaming arena.  If you are in the Dallas area we recommend stopping by the WSVG if you get a chance.  Check out the photos from the Flickr Stream or see a few below:

Much to our suprise, we learned that Tantek Çelik is no longer with Technorati. We are excited to see what Tantek has up his sleeve, I suspect it is going to be cool!  On a side note, the Wikipedia entry to Tantek was updated by Gary King minutes after this news became public.  Isn’t Wikipedia great?

Fox, the creators of the hit series, The Simpsons have engaged their fan base into an organized community in a matter of weeks.  They have engaged the community online using their Simpsons Social Network and enhanced that engagement by creating real world interconnection points (i.e. through the creation of the Kwik-E-Mart store concept).

Why?  To promote the launch of the ‘The Simpsons Movie” opening 7/27/07.  More than a million fans have visited the movie site and thousands have created Simpson-style versions of themselves (mine is to the upper-right).  Check out the Flickr group of Simpsons Self-portaits here.

Now 7-Eleven stores (12 of them throughout the US and Canada) have been transformed into Kwik-E-Marts. The Dallas location is located at 6833 Northwest Highway.  Check it out to the right.

The marketing concepts were the brainchild of Bobbi Merkel’s team from FreshWorks (Omnicom).  FreshWorks calls the idea ‘reverse product placement’, taking fake goods from the screen and making them reality.  Now you can go into Kwik-E-Mart and grab a Squishe, a Krusty’ or a Buzz Cola.  Sadly you can’t get a Duff beer (the movie is rated PG-13).

Apple and AT&T just identified 500,000 alpha geeks for marketers around the world.  What does that mean for  your brand? Piper Jaffray is reporting that Apple sold more than 500,000 iPhones this weekend according to Tom Krazit of Crave.  Here are the details:

• 95% of buyers in NYC and SFO bought the 8GB model (versus the 4GB)
• 50% of buyers were new customers for AT&T (Verizon’s CEO is kicking himself)

If you can engage the iPhone community it means you can have access to 500,000 early adopters.  How?  Start building tools specific to the needs of the ‘instant community’.  How?  Hire guys like us or come to the iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco this week.

Wikipedia is the best known collector of social information.  The site is more than six years old and as is known to most users as an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit.  It is really more than an encyclopedia as an article in the New York Times titled, “All the News That’s Fit to Print Out” explains,

For centuries, an encyclopedia was synonymous with a fixed, archival idea about the retrievability of information from the past. But Wikipedia’s notion of the past has enlarged to include things that haven’t even stopped happening yet. Increasingly, it has become a go-to source not just for reference material but for real-time breaking news — to the point where, following the mass murder at Virginia Tech, one newspaper in Virginia praised Wikipedia as a crucial source of detailed information.

Wikipedia is a representation of information that evolves as our understanding of that information evolves.  Interestingly, as Jonathan Dee points out, more than 6.8 million work together to create and edit more than 1.8 million articles.  This ‘social information’ is increasingly becoming more and more timely.  For the past six years users have been working on competing with existing encyclopedias like Britanica, but now Wikipedia has transcended that traditional model.  The internet and the social interaction it allows have created something all together different, and fundamentally better.