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| Meet the inventors of Handspring's Visor
(IDG) -- With a solid mix of brain power and business savvy, Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins are ready to tackle the new wireless century. Handspring -- the company Dubinsky started in 1998 with Jeff Hawkins -- began selling its Visor handheld devices in retail stores in late March. Hawkins and Dubinsky are busy trying to reproduce the huge success of Palm, their first company, which was absorbed by 3Com in 1997. But duplicating one of the most successful new-product launches in consumer electronics history won't be easy. Already some analysts are predicting that the handheld computer, or personal digital assistant, will be swept aside by the coming tide of smart cellular phones.
Hawkins is undaunted. "It's really not about coming up with an encore," he says. "It's all about building the future of Internet access on portable wireless devices." Hawkins and Dubinsky pioneered handheld computing in the face of skepticism in the mid-1990s. What distinguished the Palm was its simple, elegant operating system in a functional, yet oddly stylish, package. The Visor offers all that plus the Springboard, an add-on port that can transform the handheld into a mobile phone, a digital camera, an MP3 player -- just about anything developers can dream up.
Hawkins and Dubinsky have an easy, Nichols-and-May rapport born of joint interviews and late-night strategy meetings. Tall and lanky, Hawkins, who invented the PalmPilot, is the cerebral one, a Cornell engineer who abandoned his pursuit of a Ph.D. in neurobiology but has never lost his fascination with the human brain. Dubinsky, amiable and plainspoken, provides the business savvy. Hawkins recruited her to be Palm's CEO, and she deftly lined up investors back when any mention of handheld computing brought up the Apple Newton -- followed by guffaws. A Yale grad with an MBA from Harvard, Dubinsky cut her teeth at Apple in its early, world-changing days. Like Hawkins, she still speaks of the transformative power of technology -- and the challenge of building a lasting company, as opposed to a built-to-flip dot-com -- without a trace of irony. The two are betting that the next transformation will be to wireless. "If you're going to get a billion people online, you're not going to do it on big boxes on desks," reasons Hawkins. If they're right, the future of Net access may be in their hands -- and ours. RELATED STORIES: Handspring hits retail, unveils new modules RELATED IDG.net STORIES: Handspring Visors go retail RELATED SITES: Handspring | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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