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 I have a Nokia N73 and I got it mainly because I needed a new phone (my Treo having been superceded by a Blackberry).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

Let’s start with the good news: We’re pretty close to making a decision about what service to bring to market. It took many long, sometimes heated debates, and in the end, Javier, our team coach had to play tiebreaker.

The bad news is that we have also decided, for the moment, not to make the choice public. We are aware, of course, that we are thereby going back on our promise to be open. But going public now would almost certainly kill our idea. The concept will not be easy to pull off in any case, in terms of developing an impressive website. But it also involves building relationships with several constituencies, both within The Economist Group and outside it.

What we can say, however, is that the core of our product will be a social network. It will also feature aspects of other ideas, such as data visualization, mash-ups and, perhaps, some user-generated content. Essentially, we’re bundling several web technologies into an online service that we hope you want to part of.

While we develop something that is presentable, we will blog about the ideas that we considered implementing, but ultimately chose not to (which doesn’t mean that other units of The Economist Group may not themselves decide to take them up). So stay tuned.

I suspect that this is a one day only offer.

There are some pre-requisites:

• Windows XP/Vista (Mac and Linux support coming soon)
• Internet Explorer 6.0+ or Firefox 1.5+ with the Google Toolbar
• Round-front or elongated toilet providing at least 1.0 gallons per flush
• Use of automatic toilet bowl cleaners is not recommended

Here are some screen shots, (just in case it’s not there tomorrow!). Click to enlarge.

Intro

Installation

How it works

Navigating your way through a website should be a smooth experience. But ensuring that it actually is, can be a rather rough ride…

Today, Project Red Stripe’s first service goes live: the site to gather ideas from the outer world (as opposed to our Big-Brotherish dungeon). But as I am writing this, we’re still busily testing our handful of web pages – and still finding bugs. There are files that have mysteriously disappeared, broken links and (inevitably) typos. And then there is this browser called Internet Explorer, which most netizens use, but which makes life rather difficult for web programmers…

Overall, though, our little application, called Red Stripe robot, held up quite well. I tried breaking it by putting in a very long idea (about 50 pages of text) and tagged it with the term “test” 50 times. The site accepted the submission without protesting, but it showed up 50 times in our database where all the ideas are stored (a bug Stewart, our resident geek, has since fixed; we’ve also limited the length of submissions to 400 words).

It’s the non-technical stuff, though, that has proven the real hassle, particularly since we want the whole world to be able to submit ideas. Are the terms and conditions legally ok? What about the privacy policy? Closer to home, will our colleagues at the mother ship actually send the e-mails out to readers of Economist Group businesses and put our ads up on their websites?

Barring a last-minute catastrophe, recipients of our e-mail and those who see our ads can click through to our new homepage. It directs users to a brief that explains what we’re trying to do and a web form into which they can type their ideas. Once they click that “submit” button, they’ll get an e-mail thanking them for their contribution, which goes directly into our database to be examined later.

Yet there is even more going on behind the scenes. We ask contributors to “tag” (web 2.0-speak for “label”) their ideas with keywords that will then appear as a “tag cloud” next to the form. We also have an administrative online tool to look at each idea, add more tags and write comments.

Once we have 25 serious ideas, we’ll start taking a closer look at the submissions. In the meantime we’ll do some brainstorming to come up with some ideas of our own. So, as we say in our brief, start polishing your crystal ball - and tell us what the future holds for The Economist Group. The deadline is March 25th.

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