Word: allenating
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Like Gates, Allen now devotes much of his time to giving away lots of money. He still has a fortune north of $15 billion and has remained active in the tech world, investing in a series of start-ups, from AOL to early wireless networks. He scored big with such outfits as DreamWorks and Ticketmaster, while some of his other investments have struggled, like Egghead Software and Purple Moon, a failed CD-ROM venture...
...Allen was wondering why laptops couldn't be more portable. And wonder can get funding in a hurry when its owner is Paul Allen. His R&D team, part of his Vulcan research group, started project Sybok, named for Spock's half brother. After a series of prototypes--with names like Dolphin, Eagle, Falcon and Gecko--the team members nailed a version in 2004 that met their goal of shrinking a laptop to one-eighth its size. But it was too hot for laps, so it was scrapped. A faster, slicker processor has since cooled things down. Today, however...
...deciding success factor. The OQO2 differs from the FlipStart in featuring a slide-out keyboard rather than a traditional clamshell top that flips open for laptop-like input. "My mother forced me to take touch typing in high school, and I've always been glad for that," Allen says. He argues that the FlipStart's flat bottom lets users put it down to type comfortably...
...access while standing in line for a movie, he says. "Putting a mobile device like this in a clamshell feels like old-think. It's a holdover of how people viewed the last generation of computing. We're creating the next generation of computing." Did he just call Paul Allen out of touch...
...Allen's not worried. Although the device he's launching is larger than the one he once envisioned, Allen says it packs everything business travelers want in a portable package. "I've always been captivated with problems that really need solving--what should exist and how we could create a solution." His solution works, but the real question is whether there was a problem to solve in the first place...