Company’s latest cute gadget takes death-defying first steps
Title: Company’s latest cute gadget takes death-defying first steps , USA Today, OCT 02, 2002
Section: Money, Pg. 03b
PALO ALTO, Calif. — This might be Andy Rubin’s last chance to avoid becoming the Bob Dole of technology.
You might remember Dole. Kept trying to be president. Great senator, likable guy, knew all the right people, did all the right things — but just couldn’t win the Big One. Wound up being known for introducing the term “erectile dysfunction” into polite conversation.
Rubin has a new company called Danger, and if this one doesn’t soar, he too might have to find refuge as a spokesman for a malfunctioning body part.
Danger’s “hiptop” computer landed on store shelves Tuesday. The company has gotten a ton of publicity because it has created the cutest piece of technology in years: a friendly wireless Internet gadget about the size and heft of a thick pork chop.
The thing is, Rubin and his entrepreneurial pals have a long history of creating the cutest pieces of technology in years. They keep starting companies that develop brilliant, forward-thinking, critic-pleasing consumer devices that flop. These guys produce technology the way Orson Welles produced films.
Danger’s founders met at Apple Computer just before that company headed toward its near-death experience. Rubin, Danger’s CEO, moved on to General Magic and WebTV. Joe Britt helped build 3DO and WebTV. While at Apple, Matt Hershenson helped design the PowerBook 150 laptops, which are much-loved but rarely seen — like pandas.
Between them, they haven’t been able to turn a start-up into a highly successful, high-impact company or product. Do you use a General Magic operating system? I didn’t think so. You surf the Web on your TV set? Not many people do. Own a 3DO video game console? 3DO developed the technology of the PlayStation back before Sony had a clue, but nobody at the time knew what to do with a CD-based game machine. I hear they make good trivets.
Rubin obviously has faith in his current effort.
“We want to be the first data device for the mass market,” Rubin tells me as we sit at Danger’s de facto satellite headquarters, Caffe Verona in downtown Palo Alto.
Danger’s real office is a few blocks away. We’re at this airy coffee shop because when Rubin signed the lease for his headquarters, he didn’t know the building used to be a dentist’s office. The dentists had to put a protective lead lining behind the walls to keep X-rays from leaking out. The lead also keeps all radio waves from coming in. So, here’s a wireless communications company operating in a building sealed off from wireless signals. Makes it hard to give demos.
Anyway, in the cafe, Rubin shows me his product. It’s wonderfully designed, with a cool screen that flips around to reveal a tiny thumb keyboard. It can do e-mail and get on the Web. When you call up a Web page, you see everything you’d see on a PC screen except squished vertically. It is also a cellphone.
“This really is the razor blade,” Rubin says of the gadget, messing up the old analogy. Actually, the device is the razor, which the company plans to sell at cost. The razor blade will be the service behind the device.
For instance, Danger is selling its devices to T-Mobile, which will sell them to consumers as the T-Mobile Sidekick for $199 and a package of wireless services. For $39.99 a month, you can get a big basket of minutes on the cellphone and unlimited use of the data service.
Danger will operate the computers that make the wireless data service work, and T-Mobile will pay Danger part of the monthly fees collected from consumers.
Danger’s cute factor is a key piece of genetic code in its heritage. Ten years ago, I visited General Magic when it was full of promise. The company was funded by the likes of AT&T, Philips and Sony. With Motorola, it made the Envoy — a book-size wireless device with an interface that you navigated by moving down a cartoon street and going into an online “store” to shop or a “library” to do research in a “library.” This pre-dated the Internet boom or wireless data services.
“We went overboard making it fun or cute,” Marc Porat, General Magic’s CEO back then, told me in his office. Rubin had worked on the Envoy.
It was all way far ahead of its time. “We’d say, ‘And it does e-mail!’ ” Rubin says now. “And people would say, ‘Uh, what’s e-mail?’ ” Next thing they knew, the Internet, Microsoft Windows and Java blew General Magic out of the water.
Similar story at WebTV. It won kudos for being cute and easy to use. Seemed like the right idea at the right time. But it sold like tea and crumpets at a NASCAR race.
Microsoft scooped up the company in 1997 for $425 million — which certainly isn’t bad, but then again, WorldCom executives allegedly hid more than that on their lunch breaks.
On the Danger device, icons are set up in a wheel. Scroll around it and up pop cartoon images such as a rocket ship or people talking on cellphones. Like a lot of cellphones, it can be set to vibrate when someone calls. Danger’s can be set to vibrate differently, depending on who calls. “So you can feel who it is,” Rubin says.
For the most part, Danger’s hiptop is fun and easy to figure out.
T-Mobile, which is owned by Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, is pulling out the stops for Danger. It’s hired movie goddess Catherine Zeta-Jones as a spokeswoman. It is sponsoring what will be the first-ever outdoor concert on Alcatraz Island off the coast of San Francisco, featuring neurotic head-banger band Creed, which sings cheery, purchase-inducing lyrics such as:
Look at me, look at me
At least look at me when you shoot a bullet through my head
Maybe, after several tries, Rubin and friends have finally figured out how to make cute technology sell. Maybe Danger will take off.
And if not? Rubin will have effected change by pushing the technology at each of his stops. There’s a lot to be said for playing a Dole-like role in the industry. It beats a lot of other CEOs making headlines lately.
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E-mail kmaney@usatoday.com
(c) USA TODAY, 2002
Source: USA Today, OCT 02, 2002
