Danger, Inc.

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Danger, Inc. was an American company that designed hardware, software, and services for mobile devices. It was founded on December 9, 1999 by Andy Rubin, Joe Britt, and Matt Hershenson in Palo Alto, California. Its most famous product was the T-Mobile Sidekick (Hiptop), an early cloud-connected smartphone and a forerunner of modern app marketplaces.

In 2008, Microsoft bought Danger for about $500 million. The Danger team joined Microsoft and worked on future mobile plans, including a project that became the Kin phone line. Kin launched in 2010 but was a commercial failure and stopped selling after a few weeks. The Danger staff later moved into Microsoft's Windows Phone team, and by late 2009 most had left Microsoft. Andy Rubin left Danger in 2003 to create Android, which Google later acquired; Matias Duarte, Danger’s design director, later joined Google as well.

The acquisition is often criticized for failing to properly integrate the people and technology. In 2009, Danger’s Sidekick servers suffered a major data loss: user data such as contacts, calendars, and photos stored in the cloud were lost when servers failed. Backups existed but were not comprehensive; recovery required restoring from offsite backups, taking more than two months. The incident highlighted the risks of cloud storage.

Danger’s Sidekick helped popularize cloud-based mobile services and influenced later smartphones, even as Microsoft’s Kin and other moves in its mobile strategy were less successful.