Wikimedia chooses iPedia as the official iPhone application!
posted by pete on November 12th, 2008
This will be new to some and old dirt to others, but we have some exciting news!
As you may know, our man in Florida, Hampton Catlin, has been working on an iPhone application called iPedia (formerly iWik) which takes your Wikipedia queries and makes the results look downright beautiful compared to the the markup that Wikipedia serves to iPhone users. This started off as a fun personal project that Hampton built in about three days on a dare from his friend, but it has become a runaway success as we’ve watched it sell over 70,000 copies for $1 apiece on the Apple iTunes Application Store.
You can listen to Hampton discuss some of the backstory behind its development over on MobileOrchard.
Hampton alluded to some ongoing conversations with Wikimedia, the organization which oversees the development of Wikipedia and its associated projects. The outcome of these meetings is totally awesome: Wikimedia have agreed to acquire iPedia and rebrand it as simply “Wikipedia”, making it the new official Wikipedia iPhone application.
There’s more! Hampton has been retained by Wikimedia to provide support for application users over the next year and beyond, in the capacity of their new Mobile Development Lead. What this means is that Hampton is going to be playing a major role in Wikimedia’s future mobile strategy. He’ll be building an open source community around this project, which will hopefully spawn similar developments for platforms like Google Android, Blackberry, Symbian and others.
Never fear, Hampton is still part of the Unspace team. We’re on board to help out however we can, and we’ll let you know more details as we find out ourselves. This is all a dream come true for Hampton, who has always been a huge Wikipedia fan. We are really proud.
Congratulations, Hampton!
Another long-term goal realized (sort of)
posted by pete on November 7th, 2008
I feel like death warmed over today, so it's nice to have something awesome to report on. I've been published in an O'Reilly book. You know, the ones with the cute animal covers.
There is little question that O'Reilly are still the authority on technical publishing. Sure, there are highly respected imprints like Pragmatic Programmers (who probably bought several ranches after releasing several versions of Agile Web Development with Rails) and companies like Apress that tend to stand well above the mediocre Que/Wrox/Sams/Norton/Dummies/Ziff-Davis/Pearson crowd. I suppose I should mention that Microsoft Press has had some major wins over the years as well.
Every young geek dreams of having an O'Reilly title with their name on it, due to the nerd cred that comes with it. Well, my buddy Jay Goldman just joined the club with the availability of Facebook Cookbook.
Back at MeshU, Jay asked me if I would write a recipe on advanced database optimization. This is amusing, as I can think of fewer topics that intimidate me more. Wanting to make sure that I had some expert input, I tapped Rowan Hick for review and input. He ended up contributing tons to the recipe, which spans several pages in a book full of page long topics.
Jay also wrote a very flattering bio for us, and seems to have really worked hard to make sure that he has a variety of people (such as Daniel Burka, of Digg/Pownce fame) chime in so it's not just a few hundred pages of Jay says this, Jay says that.
Congratulations, Jay!