Tag Archives: android

reminiscing about seeing the future of mobile with a danger sidekick while sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit.

day 57: eric IV.  the mobile edition.

scott knaster, now at google wrote a nice post about working at danger in the early days where he notes, “The Hiptop (in product form as the TMobile Sidekick) was my first indication that people would soon be getting lost in their phones.”

in fact, the sidekick was the first time i saw the future that would take a long time to become fully realized. i remember the thrill of ssh’ing into a server and instant messaging with friends in january 2004. FROM A PHONE! and a little later, the sense of what the world would soon be like after posting to the blog. FROM A PHONE!

but the real thrill and sense of the future would hold came while sitting in the neonatal intensive care unit with odin and kris, looking at pictures i had taken on the sidekick and socialize with folks following odin’s adventures on flickr. bringing together mobile and social and photography was going to mean lots of people would be getting lost in their phones. but it wouldn’t really become a seamless thing until the cameras on phones could begin to become “good enough”. working in motorola r&d labs in new business development and strategy we all could see the hardware maps and knew it would happen around 2007. the year the iphone was born ( danger was co-founded by andy rubin who went on to start android which it now owns along with motorola mobility ).

in a funny bit of timing, i just realized i wrote this a day after the iphone was first announced in 2007 and i suppose i should say i didn’t have anything to do with the infamous motorola rokr E1.

the future you were promised is almost here – drones, humanoid androids, flying cars and jetpacks!

not content to let amazon prime air get all the attention the UPS is working on delivery by drone where they will shuttling packages from one UPS location to another and still be delivered by a friendly human. and google lets the cat out of the bag that the guy behind android is working on a humanoid robots ( see what they did there ) that would most likely in the short term be used for supply chain automation perhaps by shuttling around packages in flying cars that they may – or may not – be stealthily building. and for short hop delivery the humanoid androids could jump in a personal jetpack. will the humans accept our brave new an automated logistics system?

the paranoid android?

the paranoid android?

it’s been clear that google has been moving to kill the android brand for some time. the writing was on the wall when they rebranded the “android market” to “google play”.

it’s a move that makes a lot of brand sense for el goog and it creates the opportunity for a fun game – Spot The Android in The Wild. it turns up the the funnest and most unlikely places, like the back of this jelly belly bag ( presumably millions were printed at a time when the android brand was not in question ).

and next to a QR code no less! is it true, as anil dash posits, that “All QR codes actually point to MySpace, but nobody’s ever used one so this easter egg is yet to be discovered”.

i’ll never know.