“…online sales have simply been bolted on to existing businesses, but retailers need to start from scratch and use the lull in sales in 2009 to restructure their businesses.” from The Telegraph, talking about the collapse of Woolworths and MFI, and whether this is the end of the high street? Note: it is probably not.

We are pleased to announce the launch of the site for COPE - the Committee on Publication Ethics. COPE are the “the kitemark of medical journals” - working towards high ethical standards and safeguarding the integrity of the scientific record.  In other words, they “help scientific journals to get their houses in order”.

We developed the brand for COPE and designed and built the site from the ground up. COPE wanted the site to be a forum where publishers and editors of peer-reviewed journals could discuss issues related to the integrity of work submitted to or published in their journals. Also required were different levels of membership to the site, each with varying degrees of access and functionality.  To cope with this (excuse the pun) we built the site using the modular content management system Drupal.

The site launched successfully and has received great feedback from COPE members - of which there are 3022 to date. A big thank you to the COPE team and, in particular, to COPE’s Jeremy Theobald and Linda Gough for their hard work and dedication on what has been both a challenging and enjoyable project.

At FoxLand we’ve been talking about the Blackberry Storm a lot recently. We like our iPhones here, but it’s not perfect, and with it now being the no.1 phone in the US, we’re looking for competition and new ideas. We have also recently been working with a client on an iPhone application and other mobile-focussed websites, so we have a great deal of interest in what is happening in this area.

RIM are a strong, respected and much-loved company with fanatical users (much like the other fruit-seller), and they have released a string of highly regarded phones over the years while also breaking out of their corporate niche with phones like the Pearl. Therefore, RIM’s first foray into the touchscreen market, the Blackberry Storm, promised much. The feature that had us particularly intrigued was the unique take on the touchscreen, that included a ‘clickable’ screen. This creates a multitude of ways of interacting with buttons and text, and also has the potential to avoid ‘accidents’ (it is often far too easy to accidently click on items you didn’t mean to on the iPhone). 

Sadly though it looks like RIM have failed in their revolution, and while it is early days and there may be a software fix coming, it looks like they have a major problem on their hands. From reviewers to developers to bloggers, the reviews vary from lukewarm to scathing. The highly regarded and usually pretty mellow David Pogue at the New York Times has put the boot in with his review:

It’s too much work, like using a manual typewriter. (“I couldn’t send two e-mails on this thing,” said one disappointed veteran.)

Incredibly, the Storm even muffs simple navigation tasks. When you open a menu, the commands are too close together; even if your finger seems to be squarely on the proper item, your click often winds up activating something else in the list.

I haven’t found a soul who tried this machine who wasn’t appalled, baffled or both.

So, what to do? As with the iPod before the perception is that companies seem to want to copy Apple without trying to create their own concepts and ideas. RIM are known for their fantastic phones that work brilliantly with email and use real keyboards. They could concentrate on that and push and innovate that whole experience. Many people will always prefer this to the touchscreen, even if it is ‘clickable’. What they shouldn’t do is even look like they’re trying to play ‘catch-up’. For example, earlier today as I walked past the Vodafone shop, they had a giant version of the Storm in the window showing the user experience (see image above). This is exactly the same as Apple who show giant iPhones in theirs and O2’s shop windows. Unfortunately for the giant Storm, the quality of the video looked terrible, the user interface poor - and worst of all, the screen had not been set up correctly - the image was squashed.

Update: See Stephen Fry’s mini take on the Storm (via Twitter)

Update 2: David Pogue follows up his article with some reader responses

Update 3: Jeff Ventura’s article about the issue includes this great quote:

The BlackBerry Storm, in my opinion, is a wonderful illustration of how Apple’s innovation and market appeal can force a smart company like RIM to invest millions of dollars in a product that’s way outside its core competency.  You don’t see Apple trying to create a full-on enterprise/e-mail device, do you?

Steven Heller interviews Sol Sender in the New York Times about the design of the “O” logo for Barack Obama. A striking thing about the campaign was how it concurrently had a strong grip on the identity internally, never letting the wrong colours or typography to be used, but also the way it benefited from how it was constantly reinvented externally by supporters, whether in viral videos, handmade banners, cake designs or any other form imaginable.

Benjamin Netanyahu, the right-wing Israeli politician has been inspired by Barack Obama. Many people may find this inspiration slightly ironic considering the differences in fundamental world views, but learning from his successful campaign techniques makes sense. That said, what Netanyahu really shouldn’t do is copy wholesale the brand design and general look and feel of the whole campaign.

Take a look at this great Twitter-based website that lets people report problems and issues with voting in the US today.

After a couple of years of being heavily addicted to the US presidential campaign, I’m already beginning to feel a little nostalgic for the time spent endlessly flicking through the websites that helped feed my habit. While none of these will be particularly new to many people/addicts, here is a little list of some of my favourite websites I’ve been heavily using:

• Memeorandum has been the main supplier of my needs - a constant river of the most read news and opinion from the makers of Techmeme, from the rabid right all the way through to the paranoid left.
• 538 has been a fantastic new site that parsed the various polls, and made projections of its own. Created by baseball statistic geeks, it has been widely quoted and used everywhere in the media and even had its creator on the Colbert Report.
• Andrew Sullivan, a US-based British conservative who supported John Kerry and now Barack Obama has long been an invigorating thinker on issues of what it means to be of the Right.
• Twitter’s US Election page has been an amusing, if not actually very useful insight into the endless gibberish that spouts from the minds of the Twitterverse.
• The Corner is a great insight into the primarily hardcore neo-conservative mind.
• The Huffington Post has been a great resource of mainly Democratic points-of-view.

There have been endless others, but these have been my main sources. And to think… just another couple of years and I’ll be interminably flicking through these yet again.