Sleevenotez is roughly four days old. Doug and Andy from Isotoma and I started work in anger last Tuesday, after four days of planning. Since then we have built an app that could be released into the wild without fear of embarrassment. How did this happen? Creativity, focus, agile development practices, a clear understanding of the problem space and the project's goals - the usual stuff. No great surprises, no big revelations. It helps that we're a small team, with complementary skills. It's probably a benefit that we've known each other for over a decade. It's a big plus that Orange pays me to research emerging consumer behaviour, track new technologies and develop insights for driving new product development. But the idea behind Sleevenotes is a simple one - anyone with a large MP3 collection could have thought of it. However, I do believe that the complete vision for Sleevenotez satisfies both a consumer and industry need - and there is also a business model behind it. Still, the maxim that 'a vision without the ability to execute is a hallucination' is true. Luckily we have that ability, so... we executed on it.

It's now Saturday afternoon and - based on my extensive personal experience - we've achieved more in one week than the combined might of France Telecom's R&D facilities, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, could achieve in twelve months. It's not their fault - institutionalised R&D isn't set up to respond to disruptive, agile innovation. More often than not, when a product emerges from inside a Telco's borders it's too little too late. Working with Doug and Andy has, in contrast, been a breath of fresh air.

We've decided to 'do an Amigo' and launch Sleevenotez in its raw, pre-alpha state, based on the tried-and-tested assumption that releasing early and often is best. Our 'bare naked app' will evolve rapidly over the next two months, and hopefully our transparent approach will yield some useful feedback en route.

We're going to figure out how / when to provide access to the demo site shortly. In the meantime, this blog will provide a blow-by-blow account of our progress, from zero to coolio.