I know that I’ve been very quiet since August, but I’m still working on an idea that came out of Project Red Stripe. I’m also back in my day job as CIO at The Economist Group and as a sort of close to the project, Project Red Stripe: A story of innovation is a whirlwind tour looking back over the six months of the project from January to August 2007.

Though you may not agree, it sets out to highlight seven tips that we think will make small scale innovation projects, like Project Red Stripe run well.

I know that Acrobat has become a huge piece of bloatware, but we actually printed some copies and the final edits are in Acrobat, so you’ll need a copy to read it (or you can use FoxIt Reader - which is a mere 2.1MB download).

Since Project Red Stripe officially ended, there’s been some discussion in the blogosphere about what we did and how we should have done things differently. As I mentioned, I’m writing up our experiences and you’ll be able to read about what did and didn’t work for us soon. But I thought that it was worth addressing some of the points that have been raised as I move into the next phase back at Economist towers.

And that’s the first point - I’m still here, working on the next steps, but more of that later.

Jeff Jarvis started off, following up on a piece on PaidContent.org, by saying that the need to focus on making a profit would now be a criteria that he would impose on his students for their News Innovation project at CUNY. Neil McIntosh had a different point to make, suggesting that innovation doesn’t have to take a big bang approach, but that results could be gotten from small, incremental building out of existing ideas. Both Suw Charman and Jeff then added that, to be successful, perhaps innovation projects needed to work on problems that the team had experienced. Then this week Jeff rounded some of these issues up in his Guardian column (reg. req’d.) saying that “We need new and innovative journalistic products and companies with sustainable (read profitable) business models. We need to pay for journalism” and wondering “whether and how innovation can spring from within.”

It’s not for nothing that providing advice on how to innovate is a massive business. I think that most people that have tried it will agree that there’s no silver bullet, but that you can do some things to help foster an innovative approach.

Taking Jeff’s point first, should one outcome from an innovation project be that the idea needs to make money? I disagree with Jeff on this. Of course it should in the long run, but focusing on this as an objective will cut short many ideas. When Page and Brin created their search engine it’s generally agreed that they didn’t have a business model in mind. And when they did get one, the idea of keyword advertising was not new. One commenter also raises the Xerox PARC connundrum - that great innovations came out of PARC but that Xerox didn’t use them. This is slightly unfair in that many of the computing innovations were secondary to what Xerox had set PARC up to do and that Xerox did benefit hugely from printing innovations such as the laser printer.

This leads to the another question. Can innovation come from within? I think that the answer to this one is two-fold. Organisations should try hard to put innovation into their DNA, but should also realise that it’s difficult to do when they’re successful. Individuals at high-performing companies will naturally gravitate towards making sure that they do all that they can to maximise their outcomes, whether these are revenues, articles written or number of customers. Despite what Google say about their engineers spending 20% of their time on their own ideas, priorities get in the way. For these reasons it can make sense to try and innovate outside of up-and-running business units with their attendent financial targets. However, this approach does not exlcude incremental (I dislike that word when used to describe innovation, but let’s leave it for now) development of ideas within business units - The Economist’s recent launch of an audio edition being a good example of this.

As to the question of to what extent innovators need to experience a problem, I’m pragmatic on this. All of us experience problems that we don’t necessarily fix through innovation and lots of the stories about how new products came about are just good stories that can be easily identified with. I don’t doubt that if our brief had been tighter that we would have saved ourselves some time, but what would it have been? In the end we postulated that The Econiomist Group was reliant on revenues from a print product that was pretty much unique in that it was growing in a declining market. Our problem was therefore how to get a high-end audience in the tens of millions to interact online. As part of our process we found that Lughenjo was probably not a starting point. Will a service like Lughenjo see the light of day in the next few years? Definitely.

Jeff’s last question about “whether … innovation can spring from within” has its roots in a different problem. His starting point was that innovative journalistic products are needed (for an audience). What if the starting point was that revenues from an audience are needed? It doesn’t necessarily follow that journalism is the best or only way to do this. eBay and Craigslist don’t do journalism, but between them they’ve undermined many newspapers’ business models. So yes, we need to find ways to pay for journalism but to find sustainable models we may need to widen our scope and maybe ask different questions.

The good news is that the one thing that pretty much everyone agreed on was that it’s essential for media companies to become more innovative and through Project Red Stripe we’ve got a head start. And that we’re continuing that through me working on the HiSpace idea.

I’ll keep you posted on developments as they happen.

During the course of Project Red Stripe we have come to realise that assessment, reassessment and change are natural parts of the innovation process. As part of this process – and with some regret – we have decided that we had to move on from Lughenjo.

We went public with Lughenjo four weeks ago, primarily to test our idea on a wider audience. Since then we have continued our conversations with social entrepreneurs and NGOs and worked on producing a business plan.

The feedback that we received was overwhelmingly that Lughenjo was a good thing for us to do. There were, however, two problems. Firstly it was not obviously something that The Economist Group should do. Secondly, and more importantly, it became clear that there was not an immediate demand for a knowledge network from NGOs and social entrepreneurs.

The upshot was that we would have had to force the creation of the network from a demand point of view as well as marketing it to potential donors. This would have put a barrier in the way of us being able to grow the community quickly and therefore monetising it. And the one thing that pretty much all the people in the NGO community that we spoke to said, was that they expected us to run Lughenjo as a profitable business, because that would be our motivation to stick with it.

Lughenjo had already gone through several iterations before being made public, each time being refined into a simpler proposition. It had its roots in us wanting to make a ‘major difference’ and originally deciding to help achieve one of the UN’s millennium development goals – that of universal primary education by 2015. The idea that we came up with was to create a platform for digital donations with a novel map interface. It then became a skills exchange to help achieve universal primary education, before ultimately seeing the light of day as Lughenjo, aimed at helping anyone working on projects involving international development.

With Lughenjo we had always thought that after philanthropy we would be able to roll out other “verticals” that would be of value to The Economist Group’s high-end audience, but we hadn’t focused on that wider goal. The feedback that we got made us see the need to put the wider goal of a knowledge network at the front of our idea.

Maybe think of it as a for the Economist Group’s audience (let’s call it HiSpace).

For it to be engaging for a time-poor audience, it would need to deliver something that couldn’t easily be found elsewhere. Maybe a starting point would be to allow members to engage with each other to create knowledge repositories like a deeper, more targeted or Naver (the answers site that ranks above Google in South Korea) within closed or self-selecting groups of members.

You can see how the relationship between a HiSpace site and its members would be substantially different to that enjoyed by most readers of mainstream media – not only would members of HiSpace consume information but they would also be the principal generators of such information. Certainly the ability to manage this “3D journalism” will become increasingly important for mainstream media companies.

So, what’s next?

Well, Project Red Stripe ends on 27th July. Going forward, though, I will explore the issues around starting a HiSpace with the intention of coming up with what the next steps should be in November.

So, as Project Red Stripe ends, we hope that our legacy will be felt both in HiSpace, and in The Economist Group continuing to encourage this kind of innovation. We also hope to publish some feedback on what has and hasn’t worked for us during the process, as a practical guide for you to follow or dissect and to tell you how, with “So many good ideas to review! So little time!“, we came up with HiSpace.

Last, but not least we want to thank you for your ideas, feedback and support over the last six months, especially those of you in the NGO and social entrepreneur community who have given us your valuable time.

Farewell and maybe see you in HiSpace soon.

People may get ever busier, but they also appear to find more time to volunteer. Witness the plethora of studies that saw the numbers of people donating their time reaching record numbers, particularly in the US. To most experts this is the result of the terrorist attacks of 2001. Not since the attack on Pearl Harbor has the country seen this kind of lasting increase in volunteering.

But press coverage of these studies often omits to mention one key fact: While the absolute numbers of volunteers are certainly up, for many this translates only to a one-time experience. Of the 65.4m American adults who volunteered in 2005, nearly one third did not do so in 2006, according to a report by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

It is certainly possible that many volunteers have simply lost interest and want to spend their free time on less socially-correct activities. But it is also true that most charities focus mainly on motivating people to volunteer, instead of putting resources into making volunteering a rewarding experience and offering appealing opportunities to do it again. Many US organisations do not even have a paid person in charge of volunteer coordination, according to a 2004 study by the Urban Institute. And if they do have such an employee, it is unlikely that this person has received proper training for the job.

It is safe to assume that the situation is not much better among the majority of organisations dedicated to solving development problems, particularly those based in developing countries. Worse, they are probably even less set up to work with online volunteers. Jayne Cravens, one of the rare experts in the matter, as the manager of the UN’s online volunteering site until 2004, argues that “the biggest obstacle in online volunteering is the lack of an organisation’s capacity to involve any volunteers effectively.”

This looks like bad news for Lughenjo. What use is a skills and knowledge exchange if there is no real demand? Yet only where there is a major challenge can a major opportunity arise and we believe that there are ways to stimulate demand.

- One, of course, is to make it as easy as possible to post “help” requests. The existing online volunteering sites tend to be hard to use – for both donors and those asking for help.

- Another way of creating demand is working with major international and local NGOs to get them to serve as a kind of aggregator of such requests. In recent weeks, we have been talking to more than a dozen organisations to get them on board.

- But most importantly, we will need to identify a “killer application” for Lughenjo to take off – in the same way that Pez Dispensers, Beanie Babies and other collectibles helped eBay to get traction.

Any suggestions for what THE task could be? Is it copywriting, help with accounting or just answering questions?

One place to start gauging the supply for our skills exchange – meaning volunteers who offer services – is to look at offline volunteering. In recent years, particularly in the US and the UK, this has reached record levels. In both countries, nearly 30% of adults volunteer. In the US, this represents an increase of almost 10% since the late 1980s, bringing the number of volunteers in 2006 to 61.2m, according to a recent volunteering study by the Corporation of National and Community Service. Across the world, the average volunteer rate is at 10%, according to the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Policy Studies (see table below).

With some back-of-the-envelope calculations, one should be able to estimate Lughenjo’s potential market. If the share of volunteers is the same online as offline, there are 40m potential online volunteers in the US alone (in 2005, the country’s internet population reached 140m). Globally, if indeed more than one billion people worldwide now use the internet, the number of potential online volunteers should be around 100m. If only 1% became regular Lughenjo users, we’d be set.

Of course, things are not that simple. For one, many people still see the internet as a medium to consume information rather than a new way to get involved. Also, volunteers may be more hesitant do give time online because they cherish being among people and want direct feedback. And only a small minority of those volunteering offline do so for organisations that focus on development issues.

Yet we see even more (and better) reasons to be optimistic:

- As people get used to doing more and more things on the internet, volunteering will not remain an offline phenomenon. VolunteerMatch, the biggest volunteer-matching site, lists more than 5,000 virtual volunteering jobs - about 13% of all opportunities. What is more, the generation that has grown up with the internet, those 20-somethings known as “digital natives”, will find it perfectly normal to help others online.

- The internet makes it easier to volunteer. One can do it from home, the office (many companies encourage volunteering) and whenever one has a few minutes, for instance during a lunch break. In fact, a majority of those in the UK who do not volunteer said that it isn’t compatible with work commitments, according to a study by the Home Office.

- The internet also allows people to pick the volunteering opportunity best suited to them. What keeps many professionals from donating their time is the fact that they are rarely given the opportunity to use their workplace skills to help charities to tackle business issues, according to 2006 study by Deloitte, an accountancy firm.

- Baby boomers, many of whom will retire in the next few years, want to do something meaningful in the next stage of their lives, according to a study by Denver-based The Rose Community Foundation. More than half already volunteer and nearly as many intend to do so in the future.

- There is a growing awareness that the world’s challenges – infectious disease, international terrorism and environmental degradation, for example – are indeed global. Experts are already talking of a “globalisation of philanthropy”.

- Last but not least, people already spend an amazing amount of time online participating in projects without pay. One example is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, another TripAdvisor, the largest travel review site. In fact, one might even describe much of user-generated content as a form of online volunteerism (off which a lot of money is made, for instance on social networks such as and MySpace).

To jump-start Lughenjo, we will try to get readers of the Economist, Economist.com and other Economist Group publications to sign up. Whether they and others will stick around, of course, depends on how compelling an experience the site that we build will be. It also depends on us attracting enough charities, NGOs and other organisations who ask for help - the topic of the next post.

If you live in the US or the UK, it feels like the answer should be “no”. In these countries, it feels as if there are now as many of them as pet food-selling start-ups during the dotcom boom. To mention only a few: VolunteerMatch, NetworkForGood, Idealist and TimeBank. The biggest is San-Francisco-based VolunteerMatch. In 2006, it averaged more than 38,000 active volunteer opportunities a day

Yet when it comes to sites listing opportunities in international volunteering, the field is much less crowded. And international online volunteering, although it has been around for quite a few years, is an even more open space. The UN, for instance, has pioneered the concept with a site called OnlineVolunteering. But the more relevant example for Lughenjo’s purposes is Nabuur, a Dutch site, whose name is an old Dutch word meaning “neighbour”.

Nabuur selects local communities (“villages”) that then can ask for help with projects such as a new computer training centre and a library. Specially trained volunteers (“facilitators”) split up the projects into tasks, which registered users (“neighbours”) can do on their computer within two to eight hours. In 2006, Nabuur had 150 villages and 8,000 neighbours, who completed 150 tasks and seven projects. OnlineVolunteering, for its part, had some 70,000 registered users last year, who among them completed 2,800 assignments.

Nabuur and OnlineVolunteering clearly show that online volunteering has a future. But they also underline what is missing for it to really take off, particularly at a global level. In many ways, it is in the state that online music was before Apple introduced the iPod and its iTunes service. Digital music players, tiny hard drives, downloading sites and rights management systems all existed before Steve Jobs combined his determination with a thick layer of marketing glue to create a set of blockbuster products.

As was the case with online music before the iPod, a trigger is needed for online volunteering: one powerful player with a highly trusted brand who dares to put it all together in order to create a global platform.

To see the potential of knowledge-and-skills-exchanges online, one need only take a closer look at for-profit firms in this space. On Elance, for instance, tens of thousands of small businesses post projects such as building a website and designing a logo. Freelancers around the world then bid for these projects. Elance facilitates these exchanges and takes a cut. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for its part, shows that even small jobs - which the service calls “human intelligence tasks” (or HITs) - are tradable online.

A similar site to exchange skills and knowledge to solve development problems could make a huge difference. International and local development organisations need money of course. But skills and knowledge are often the true bottleneck. And even if both are available locally, the networks to spread them are often missing. We believe that Lughenjo will not only be a partial substitute for such networks, but also help build them.

Great idea, you may think, but can Lughenjo attract a critical mass of volunteers and organisations to this skills exchange to give it enough liquidity? This certainly is a crucial issue, and we’ll cover it in our next post.

After four and a half months of sweat and toil we are pleased to announce our idea:

We are developing a web service that harnesses the collective intelligence of The Economist Group’s community, enabling them to contribute their skills and knowledge to international and local development organisations. These business minds will help find solutions to the world’s most important development problems.

It will be a global platform that helps to offset the brain drain, by making expertise flow back into the developing world. We’ve codenamed the service “Lughenjo”, an Tuvetan word meaning gift.

So how does it work?

In a nutshell, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), charities and other organisations - as well as entrepreneurs active in developing countries - will be able to post tasks on Lughenjo asking for help in solving problems. Qualified individuals can then provide such help by donating their knowledge and skills. By connecting these two groups Lughenjo will create a marketplace for good and a new channel for skills and knowledge transfer.

So what difference can it make? We can’t help but think that if we allow The Economist Group’s community to give their time and expertise online - quickly and easily - then something great will happen. Initially we’ll start small. Lughenjo users will be able to answer questions that are posed by accredited international development organisations. Think Yahoo! Answers for good.

The key will be what happens later, when tasks become more complex. Imagine a CEO examining a business plan for a developing world social enterprise. Or when one of the 450 000 finance and accounting professionals of CFO and Economist.com can look over the books of an NGO in Nairobi. The possibilities are endless. What’s more, by allowing skilled, smart, professionals to help development organisations, they will help solve development problems with market-based solutions.

But what’s the business model? Lughenjo will be a social business enterprise. A business that does good, and returns a profit. To do this we’ll do what media companies do best and put ads in front of eyeballs.

Time for questions

There are many questions, which we have thought long and hard over. Does the world need another volunteer-matching site? Will time-poor professionals donate their time? Do NGOs and other organisations actually need such a site? Can you make money on the back of charity?

In the next few weeks we’ll be dealing with these issues on our blog (starting with the question of making money from philanthopy, below) and at the same time putting together a great pitch for the Group’s management team.

So there it is. We’d love to get your feedback on the idea - feel free to post a comment.

And if you work at an NGO or are a social entrepreneur who would use Lughenjo for getting help, then please e-mail us on:

When you receive a generous gift, you don’t usually turn around and sell it.

So why, then, would we want to make money from a website on which people are supposed to donate their time to solve development problems? Such an approach, one might argue, is bound to fail because volunteers would feel taken advantage of. This “smacks of cynical exploitation and a values clash”, was an initial reaction of one of my Economist colleagues.

You can be sure that we have had more than one heated debate about this question. Initially, we wanted Lughenjo to be not-for-profit, with revenues to finance the programme coming from The Economist Group as well as long-term sponsors and grants.

Yet this would have been an all too easy way out, not very innovative – and would likely have led us into a dead end. A business model mainly based on the financial support of others has serious drawbacks that would limit Lughenjo’s growth and sustainability. For starters, sponsors and grant givers may jump ship if their priorities and thinking change. At The Economist Group, for instance, many think that shareholder money should not be spent on charitable causes: if shareholders want to do good, they can do it themselves.

What is more, not-for-profits often don’t raise enough funds, and thus cannot fully achieve their mission. Witness the several interesting online volunteering sites such as OnlineVolunteering, run by the UN, and Nabuur, a Dutch site. Although they have pioneered international online volunteering, both have problems getting real traction.

Most importantly, by making its brand and readers available to the site, The Economist Group will be taking a considerable risk, which should be compensated. This will give the Group a strong interest in making Lughenjo a success – which, in turn, will help achieve the site’s mission.

We are not the only ones who have begun to rethink the divide between profit and social goal. There is a growing “social enterprise” movement. One of its leaders is Muhammad Yunus, who – along with the Grameen Bank he founded – won last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social benefit from below, notably by pioneering microcredits. He is now promoting another idea that he calls “social business enterprise”. This is an enterprise that has an overarching social goal, but is run like a business – which can include making a profit.

“Once a social entrepreneur operates at 100% or beyond the cost recovery point he has entered the business world with limitless possibilities”, Yunus writes in an article on Grameen Bank’s website. “This is a moment worth celebrating. He has over-come the gravitational force of financial dependence and now is ready for space flight! This is the critical moment of significant institutional transformation. He has moved from the world of philanthropy to the world of business.”

Grameen Bank itself is the best example so far. Although it lends small sums of money mostly to poor women, it is a for-profit company. In 2006, in made a profit of $20m (which was transferred to a local not-for-profit created to cope with disaster situations – to exempt Grameen Bank from paying corporate income tax). Recently, Yunus launched another social enterprise – a yogurt factory. Built by the French food company Danone, it produces fortified yogurt at an affordable price. Profits will be reinvested, with Danone getting back its initial cost of capital. If the setup is a success, the new company intends to build dozens of such factories.

On the other side of the political spectrum, Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago Law School and son of the prominent federal appellate judge Richard Posner, has recently co-published a paper making the case for “for-profit charities”. If there currently are hardly any, he argues, it’s because tax benefits are linked to not-for-profits.

The internet has already given birth to a number of pro bono/for-profit hybrids, notably open-source software communities, such as the one that gave birth to Linux, the computer operating system. It is developed by volunteers across the world, but it is accepted that for-profit companies make money off it by selling services and other add-on products as long as they also contribute to the community and “don’t do evil”, to quote Google’s corporate mantra. (By the way: , the online giant’s philanthropic arm, is a “for-profit charity” because this gives it more flexibility.)

In digital philanthropy (meaning websites that allow people to make donations, be they money or time), too, one can also find a few hybrids. GlobalGiving, for instance, a sort of eBay for international philanthropy, that matches donors to projects in developing countries, cooperates with a for-profit partner, which also pays the CEO’s salary. JustGiving, a UK-based private company that enables charities to raise money online, take a slice of the tax refund. And if discussions on SocialEdge, a website for social entrepreneurs, is any guide, there is much interest among charities and NGOs in going “hybrid”.

It is easy to dismiss these efforts as vain attempts to mix oil with water. And admittedly, with Lughenjo, we’re pushing the idea further, by not reinvesting the profit. But we strongly believe that all these examples are just the beginning of a larger trend that will spawn many hybrid organisations that will both do good AND make money. Just as the internet has enabled new business models in the for-profit space, it can do so for charitable organisations. And we hope that Lughenjo will become one of the foremost examples.

Daft question, eh?

Not really. I have a Nokia N73 and I got it mainly because I needed a new phone (my Treo having been superceded by a Blackberry).

The problem is that as a phone it’s merely ok, which is a pretty damning. My first mobile was an Ericsson GH788 and the comparison is interesting (the photos aren’t to the same scale!).

Released	1995	2007
Weight	170g	116g
Dimensions	H: 130mm	H: 110mm
	W: 49mm	W: 49mm
	D: 23 mm	D: 19mm
Talktime	2h	6h
Standby	33h	350h
Features	Calculator,	Calculator, Calendar, Browser, Bluetooth,
	SMS	SMS, Camera, Music player, Radio

Ok, so you get a bit more talktime and a bit more standby time nowadays (down to better battery technology), but other than a passable address book (with clunky synchronisation) what’s the difference?

It’s in all that other stuff - a camera (3 megapixels, but the picture gets taken aboput two seconds after you press the shutter), a browser (decent), a calendar (painful), a music player (it’s no iPod) and a radio (good).

On top of that with the Nokia N73 (even with the latest firmware) there are noticeable delays when pressing keys and if you want the keypad to lock automatically you have to use a bit of software written by Petteri Muili (Nokia seemingly believe that you’d prefer to unlock it with a five digit PIN every time).

Now, in my book that’s not a huge amount of progress in 12 years for the mobile phone.

One plausible reason for this lack of progress, is that manufacturers of consumer electronics don’t know what we want and so pack in additional features just to get us to buy new stuff. Mark Hurst of Creative Good writes about this, referring to an article that appeared in the New Yorker this week.

And you know what? That’s why I got the Nokia N73. It wan’t that I needed a camera or a music player or a browser, it was just that I thought they might come in useful (admittedly the browser does). The other stuff, I don’t need. What I would like, though is a phone that works how a phone should - without the horrible lag I get when I want to go from the messaging menu to the calling menu, for example.

The important message here is succinctly put by Mark Hurst so I won’t mess with his words:

A company’s best bet, in the long run, is to deliver what customers really want: and that often isn’t an endless list of features, but a genuine benefit - like productivity - or better communications - or some new skill. Delivering on the long-term value might require more disciplined product development, but it pays out in the end.

As we move forward with Project Red Stripe, we’ll need to keep this top of mind.

I was trying to think of a smart title for this post, but gave up because it doesn’t need one - Google Maps is already smart enough.

Earlier on in our project I asked each of the team to create a map showing where we’d been as a team since the project had started. My aim was to show that there were different ways of describing the same thing and that there wasn’t necessarily a right or wrong way.

The first suprise I got was that half of the team interpreted the exercise as needing to show where we had been geographically and the other half as where we had been mentally as a team. Anyway.

Stew created a map showing the physical places that we had visited using Google Maps. And although Stew is always very enthusiastic about how easy technology is (”It’ll take me a day to do that”), I reckon he took longer to make his map (get an API, create a web page, write some HTML, re-write some HTML, upload the web page etc., etc.) than I did to create this morning. It took me 10 minutes (yes, really) to create four markers with a bit of HTML and to create a line from our offices to the cafe in the nearby park.

This was made possible (not that I haven’t gone through the whole rigmarole of creating one before!) by the release of the functionality on Goole Maps at the beginning of April. Included in My Maps is the ability to add create a KML file from any data that you’ve added using My Maps. What this means is that in one step any map that you create using My Maps is available as an overlay on Google Earth (you just need somewhere to store the KML file so that other people can use it). What Google has done here is, at a stroke, made is so simple to create maps that anyone can do it and so add another raft of customers that they can monetise.

Even before My Maps was released, Google has been slowly adding features to Google Maps. In February, outlines of buildings appeared on maps for some cities in the US and in April these became nearly three dimensional (click on The Economist Group (New York) on the ), as reported by Google Maps Mania. At the same time, some buildings got names and train and subway stops appeared (I have to say that the previous lack of these on UK maps makes Google Maps far inferior to StreetMap as a way of finding your way around and they still don’t show up outside central London).

I guess the question now is, how far will Google go? Will they risk incurring the wrath of other commercial organisations by adding data at a more granular level or leave it to people to do their own thing, like the excellent subway map on onNYTurf (go to the highest zoom level on a station in Manhattan to see what I mean)?

Way out! I can see the exits (they’re the small red steps)

In the background, meanwhile, some other neat things have started to creep in, such as the undocumented ability to zoom in a bit more when at the highest zoom level when in Satellite View as noted by Google Blogscoped.

I guess that only time will tell whether Google will someday own the Earth (or at least a virtual representation of it)….