Here’s some trivia for you. I have the world’s crappiest cell phone. I get a lot of flack for my cell phone. It’s beat to hell, got a cracked screen, dented, scratched, and it’s ridiculously old.
A company once told me someone had offered to build permanent disability calculators for their website in three months for $7,500. One said six months and $20,000. Recently, another suggested it would take them a year and $40,000. My response is usually some variation on “You’ve got to take that deal. You’re wasting your time talking to me.”
It’s no big secret that building a great product takes a lot of work. The important thing to remember is that just because something is easy-to-use, that doesn’t mean its easy-to-make. 1
Difficult-to-make iPhone
Let’s take the iPhone for example. Everyone will concede its an easy phone to use. However, it was released more than two years ago on 6/29/2007. 2 In that time the other players – BlackBerry, LG, Nokia, and Palm have all been trying to catch up. If this easy-to-use phone were easy-to-build everyone would have their own version.
Look, there’s no special magic to building a website like this. Really, anyone can do it. All you have to do is learn the calculations inside-and-out, deconstruct the math involved in the various calculations, learn some client and server side programming languages, learn a content management system, make it all work together, keep current on changes in the law, start all over again each time the law changes, and earn the respect of the workers’ compensation community. Once done, you’ll have your very own workers’ compensation calculator website!
To return to the lesson of the iPhone, building a touch screen phone that can play music and surf the web is totally doable. Doing it right is another matter entirely.
A few weeks ago I launched a Social Security Number verification tool powered by Verify!®. Since its launch its become a very popular tool. One of the coolest things about having these calculators is finding out all of the new ways people think of to use them. These new and unintended uses are almost always far more interesting than the original pedestrian reasons for which a tool was created.
I thought of this one during a deposition last week when a deponent couldn’t recall when they first came to the United States. I just fired up the cell phone web browser, went to the calculator page, and asked the follow up question. [↩]
Unfortunately, one of the coolest features of my calculators is that some of them will give you the answer you’re looking for before you’ve even finished typing the search term. This works with the:
While these are all very cool while you’re sitting at your computer, I found out (much to my dismay) that this system didn’t work at all when using these online calculators from my cell phone! 1 Well, I’ve updated the calculators to make them more compatible with more phones.2
Save yourself from your own workers’ compensation claim and just leave that heavy rating manual at home.
It has to do with cross-browser compatibility and inconsistent support for javascript events. I doubt anyone is interested in this. [↩]
Permanent disability calculators that will fit in any pocket!
I was at the San Jose WCAB on Friday. Since recently discovering that I could run this website’s permanent disability rating calculators from my phone’s web browser, this was the first time I left my rating manual, money chart, and date wheel in the car.1
It was great. That morning I used my phone to:
Find the ADJ number associated with the legacy SJO number on my file
The benefit for me is not so much that I don’t have to carry the rating manuals, dollar value charts, and date wheels. Unlike these tools, my phone is not something I’m going to misplace or loan and never see again.
The best part is that if I want to refer back to the calculation I just performed, I can just e-mail it to myself!
Since launching this website I’ve given a lot of thought to support for cell phones. There just are not many phones that can run these calculators.2 The glaring and notable exception is the iPhone.
Amusingly, one of this website’s users has asked for an “iPhone app” version of this site. Seriously, you’ve got one of the few phones that can use this site and that’s not good enough for you? (Thanks Chris!)
It would be more correct to say there are not many phones that support javascript and AJAX well enough to interact with this website in a meaningful fashion. [↩]
Probably a lot more interesting for me than it is for you… [↩]
Mario Puzo, the famed author of The Godfather, The Sicilian, and The Last Don, also wrote a slightly lesser known book by the name of “Fools Die.” 1 Fools Die was a very cynical look at the gambling, literary, and film industries. Some of the best parts were the casino owners talking about gambling:
Percentages never lie. We built all these hotels on percentages. We stay rich on the percentage. You can lose faith in everything, religion and God, women and love, good and evil, war and peace. You name it. But the percentage will always stand fast.
Throughout the book characters say, “no percentage,” or “bad percentage,” or “I have the percentage.” This phrase refers to a (slight) mathematical advantage or disadvantage which, with the inevitability of a glacier, will guarantee a net win or loss over time.
At this point I could redevelop the calculators to work with more phones. No one is clamoring for cell phone based permanent disability and permanent impairment calculators. Though I have a feeling that day is not far off, right now there is no percentage in that game.
However, do not despair – I’m thinking of offering something of a consolation prize. More on this later.
As the man said, “you can’t always get what you want.” Here’s what I need from a cell phone:
Multiple numbers per contact
Multiple alarms
Scheduling events
Text messaging
Ability to jot down notes
A battery with 4 hours of talk time and a few days of standby time
My current phone can do all that. The battery life is failing, reception is spotty, and its been dropped more times than I was as a baby. Here’s what I want out of a new phone:
Contacts and calendar that can synch with my laptop
Bluetooth support and file access (to transfer files wirelessly)
A web browser that works as well as IE7 or FF2 (Namely: proper HTML rendering, CSS rendering, cookies, and javascript support)
I know the LG Dare can handle #1 and #2, but I’m dubious about its support for #3.
I know the iPhone can handle #3 fairly well, but am dubious about its support for #1 and #2.
So, it looks like the only phone thus far that can use these calculators is… the iPhone. Don’t blame me – blame every other cell phone maker out there. I played with an LG Dare again a few days ago and was disappointed with its web browser this time.
I’m sure its a great phone. But, let’s be real, that’s not good enough any more.
Pros:
Touch screen
Virtual QWERTY keyboard
A screen that rotates when you tilt the camera
MP3 player
Digital camera, video camera
Removable memory chip
500 contact with up to 5 phone numbers each
A web browser that will support AJAX and XMLHttpRequest
Decent support of cascading stylesheets
Cons:
Imperfect support of javascript
No support of cookies/sessions
What does this mean for you? You can go to my site, but you can’t log in. If you can’t log in, you can’t use the calculators. :/
As a side note, just about every Verizon rep I’ve talked to pushes this phone’s 500 person contact list. My question, “How much memory does the phone have?” Their response: “It has 5 phone numbers per contact? Wow. That’s a lot. I didn’t know that.” Riiight – you didn’t know? Why have I heard that exact line from three separate reps? I don’t have 500 contacts. I don’t even know 500 people.
Verdict: It may be a good phone, but you won’t be able to use my calculators from it.
