I’ve been following the fortunes of Quirky for a while now – it’s an interesting website that takes the idea of community websites and applies it to product development. The community (which is free to join) collectively suggests new ideas for products, inputs design ideas and votes on them. Ones that are selected to move forward make it into pre-production.

The site owners work out a minimum quantity needed for a manufacturing run and people commit to buying – once the required number number of pre-orders has been taken the product is produced. Finally, as an incentive to get involved the top collaborators on each product receive a cut of the sales.

I still can’t work out if it’s genius or commercial suicide but they do have some interesting products. The latest is this power cord tidy designed specifically for Apple MagSafe power adapters (pictured).

Head on over to Quirky.com to place your pre-order for $7.25 and see what else they have on offer.

This week’s issue of the “New Yorker” magazine features a cover illustration painted on an iPhone. Jorge Columbo is the artist responsible and how he managed to do anything useful at all – never mind a magazine cover – on a 3.5” screen speaks volumes for his talent.

The image was sketched in an hour using finger-painting app Brushes (yours for the princely sum of £2.39).

You can see more of Jorge’s work here, or check out the CNET story for a cool video showing how the image was built up.

Apple took the wraps off the next iPhone software update today, at an invite-only event in Cupertino. We weren’t invited (sob) but luckily the Internet makes physical attendance at these events less of an issue than it used to be.

So, what’s new?

The number one requested feature for the iPhone finally makes it – yes that’s right folks, you can now copy information from one application and paste it into another one!

Sarcasm aside the update looks pretty good. Bluetooth support is beefed up to include p2p functions (i.e. connecting to a PC or other phone) and A2DP stereo support.

Also welcome is landscape support in all applications meaning you can finally flip the thing sideways to use a decently sized keyboard when composing an email.

European users get MMS support (apparently this was a big ask – do people really use them?).

Lastly there are 1000 new API calls for developers, enabling tons of under-the-hood features that can be exposed via third party applications. Expect to see in-application app store support (you can purchase content direct from within applications) and apps making more use of bluetooth, maps and other features that were previously only available to Apple.

If you’ve got 1.5 hours free you can watch the full presentation online at the Apple site.