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 I have a Nokia N73 and I got it mainly because I needed a new phone (my Treo having been superceded by a Blackberry).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.

With all the Web 2.0 goodness out there and what The Economist is telling us you may be forgiven for thinking that it’d be trivial to equip a team of six with the tools needed to become TNBT*

Wrong.

Let’s start with the basic stuff (I’ll leave the best ’til last). We have a BT ADSL line which gives us an office phone too and we connect our Dell Lattitude D620s wirelessly to the web via a NetGear DG834GT.

We also installed an old Axis 2100 webcam (it runs Linux and is it’s own web server). As our BT ADSL line doesn’t give us a fixed IP address we used DynDNS dynamic DNS service to allow access from the web. Although the router works out of the box with DynDNS, port 80 didn’t seem to work so we’re using port 8000. It is supposedly possible to embed the feed into a page but after trying for what was too long I gave up and stuck with the native web page that the Axis provides.

For office apps we’re using, well, Office. After using Writely and EditGrid I decided that it wasn’t worth the hassle of trying to use something else because of the time to get up to speed.

What about Google Apps, I hear? Well I did plump for (which recently got a nice look and feel overhaul) for e-mail and calendaring. Since I signed up Google has started offering Google Apps with phone support, 10Gb of email storage and a 99.9% uptime guarantee for $50 per user per year but I’d rather they sorted the Apps (specifically Gmail and Calendar) out first.

I suppose that the fact that these products are still in beta should be a warning for potential users. The calendar is far from complete with the inability to restrict the view to the hours in a working day being the first annoyance. It can also be clunky with appointments becoming unmovable without logging in and out again. The inability to scroll across days or to effectively print from the Agenda view are also usability defects. Then there is the Google Apps for Domains “feature” than prevents recreation of a deleted account for five working days (I wanted to change the way a name appeared in the address book).

Doh!

Speaking of address books, the shared address book only exists for users of the domain (i.e. external contacts cannot be added and shared).

We’re also using CentralDesktop as a collaboration tool. It out-wikis SocialText if you ask me and versions all documents automatically just like a wiki. It’s proved great for agreeing changes to documents - changes made by one person appear nearly instantly for anyone else viewing the document. As an added bonus EditGrid embedded spreadsheets appeared as a feature last week.

On the hosting front, I set up a Yahoo! Small Business Hosting account. For around £12 a month this gives you a domain (including registration), multiple blogs (WordPress or Movable Type) as well as access to MySQL and PHP. PHP was useful for being able to make the blog appear as the homepage, but utilising MySQL to collect ideas became problematic. Try as Stew might, he couldn’t get INSERT access to the database that he created. So, we decided to move to 1and1; and although the transfer was a bit scary (being right before we’re due to go a bit more public) it all worked very smoothly.

So what’s the message here? If your needs are really basic and you’re willing to put up with unfinished applications, then you can probably get away comfortably with Google Apps for Domains and a hosting service like Yahoo Small Business. However, if you need just one additional little thing, then you’re stuck and will need to resort to something more flexible (or just familiar).

Corporate IT departments have some time left still and if they’re smart they’ll be speaking to the likes of Google about what they’d need to do to make chosing their services a no-brainer.

So what’s been the best bit of kit we’ve used?

Without a doubt it’s been the stands for our laptops.

*The Next Big Thing

Laughter and wonderment, peering around the room in the half darkness, crawling under the table to follow the path to “the inferno”. Not in my wildest dreams did I think that this would be part of my work at Project Red Stripe. But it happened during one of our team-building exercises, for which Mike had asked us to make and present a map showing “where we’ve been last week”. Later, he added that we will get to vote to pick the best map — apparently to motivate us and to simulate decision making.

Three of our team (Mike, Stew and Steve) produced variations on the more traditional geographic solution, tracing on paper or digitally where we had been in London, for instance during our pub crawl. Steve showed to full effect the use of (this nifty piece of software which lets you surf high-resolution satellite images). He took us on a digital flight around the earth, for instance showing us Canada, where he was born, and his home in Beijing.

The others interpreted the task at hand more metaphorically. Ludwig provided a rather cerebral response. Using a mind-mapping program called The Brain, he showed the links between the various ideas and concepts discussed over the past week. Ludwig would like to use the software to keep track of our future discussions, thus developing the Red Stripe brain.

Mine was a more feely-touchy map (maybe it was the ‘F’ in my MBTI profile coming out). It detailed the emotional highs and lows over the past week, the trepidation, the excitement, the doubt and the effort. I see it as the landscape of the project thus far, which we have probably all traversed.

And finally, it was Tom who had us crawling under the table, stepping over a river of water glasses perilously balanced on the spiral staircase in our office, and marveling at his post-it note mobiles. Tom’s map was a 3D experience of our ideas, people, emotions and experiences so far.

So it was a very illustrative and fascinating exercise, demonstrating how differently people can both view the world and portray it. I hope we’ll be as creative when it comes to developing the real thing. By the way, the winner of our map competition was Steven.

Over at Economist.com, we’re using Movable Type to power our blogs, the first of which is Free exchange. We did a comparison of the features of the two foremost blogging products (the other being WordPress) and plumped for MT. I started out with MT here, but changed to WordPress (Yahoo! Small Business has both available and it’s pretty easy to trash one and start again). The main reason has been lost in the mists of time, but as I type this into the WordPress GUI editor, I realise just how clunky these editors are.

I had to edit some HTML yesterday and boy oh boy does it mess up when you try and do a mixture of  HTML and GUI editor. Tags get put in all over the place, non-standard HTML gets created and you just end up with a mess. I started to clean it up but in the end I just parked it for now.

The lesson: don’t edit the same post with the GUI editor and in plain HTML.

I had to hack up some PHP so that this blog at https://projectredstripe.com/blog could be browsed to via the domain name (i.e. without the directory). Not too hard in the end, but (as you may know) I’m no PHP guru, so how did I do it?

Well, Tim O’Reilly, who spoke at the AOP conference last week, could tell you (if you had the chance to ask him). He talked about the way that his company did not have the competitors one might have expected if you’d have looked into the future a few years back.

So who’s his competition?

Google.

And that’s how I learned enough PHP to put in a redirect to a directory. You can view Tim’s keynote (courtesy of Savvis) in full here.