Shooting from the Hip

It's one thing when danger is your middle name, but when your company's called Danger Inc., you've got a lot to live up to, brother. So never mind the fact that the firm delivered a hip-looking, hip-named and hip-equipped mobile voice and data device. It's the rest of the company's business plan that wireless carriers really should be heeding.

As part of an effort to seed a market filled with promise but populated by clunky, expensive devices, the Palo Alto-based company plans to sell its Hiptop unit — which comes with all the requirements of a smart phone, including address book, Internet access, instant messaging, e-mail and voice — for around $200 per unit before any carrier subsidy. That will give Danger a margin of exactly zero on every unit.

Granted, a lot of wireless firms aren't making any money these days. But in Danger's case, at least it's intentional. The company instead plans to generate revenue via back-end services, a model Mark Harlan, senior director of applications, said has proved itself in other industries, including video game consoles. “A mom-and-pop software developer just has to do a deal with Sony, and Sony worries about everything else,” he said. “The other piece that Sony provides is the settlements. In the Danger world, we do the exact same thing.”

Danger has so far raised $48 million in two rounds of funding (good to see investors aren't taking the company's name too literally). While Danger has yet to officially announce any carrier contracts, here's a small hint: During January's Consumer Electronics Show, the company's demonstrations prominently featured VoiceStream's Ping Pong messaging service in its product specs. GSM is also listed as its preferred interface, though Harlan said that could change at a moment's notice.

In the meantime, the Hiptop has become the must-have product of every techno-geek even before it hits the market. The device looks like a BlackBerry pager without the keyboard, but the innovation actually is the keyboard — or, more precisely, how the keyboard is accessed. Using a hinge device, the thumb keyboard is revealed by rotating the unit's screen 180 degrees.

Text rotates right along with the screen, so the user is always reading right side up. Navigating around to various Hiptop applications is accomplished by a thumb scroll, which also lets users pilot through screens of text.

“We knew that the target age for this is 18- to 34-year-olds, so we got a guy that used to design video games to help us out,” said Harlan. “We wanted something that wasn't corporate, all black and dull. We wanted something a little cutting-edge.”

Just a little? You're Danger Inc., man!