Atlantic Records recently announced the launch of two projects that we’ve been working on with them: Fanbase for iPhone, and the first Fanbase Connected Album.

We’ve been working with Atlantic for a little over a year now, originally on Fanbase Desktop. Fanbase is an AIR application, developed with Flex and Flash that connects music fans with each other and their favourite artists through chat, forums, news, photos, videos, music, events, and more. It’s been very successful, with 17 artists using it to date to communicate with thousands of fans, and many more coming. In order to facilitate this growth, we also built a custom AIR application to allow Atlantic’s designers to visually configure and skin the application for different artists. This generates an artist package, which can be installed into the shared Fanbase application via a custom AIR install badge.

Since it’s launch, Fanbase Desktop has won a number of awards, including the “NARM Outstanding Achievement Business Innovation Award“. Adobe did a customer success story on it here.

Until recently, Fanbase Desktop was only available to download online. Now, a special version that we built with Atlantic is also available on the new Rob Thomas album (CD), with bonus content and features. Pretty cool (and a little nerve wracking) to see your work on physical media that’s being mass-distributed. It’s likely there will be other CD versions for other artists in the future.

Perhaps most exciting for me, is the new iPhone version of Fanbase (available in the US iTunes store). This is our first publicly available iPhone application, and I’m very proud of the end result. We have been ramping up our iPhone capability internally for a while, but I’ve been waiting for a really great first project, and this was definitely it. I’m also really happy with the story it lets us tell, about taking a single property to multiple unrelated devices. I’m still waiting for some of the awesome new features of FlashLite and Flash on TV to become a reality so that its even easier to refactor and redeploy an experience to multiple devices.

A big thanks to Eric at Atlantic records for trusting this project to a previously untested iPhone development group! Also a huge thanks to my amazing team for pulling the extra hours to deliver such a solid end product on an insane timeline.

At the risk of ending on a sales pitch, gskinner.com is now officially accepting select iPhone development projects. We are particularly interested in innovative projects that also involve desktop or web integration.