Word: gadgeteers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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With Nike Plus, a group of Nike executives has combined the world's top sporting-goods brand with the world's most beloved gadget, all while cleverly capitalizing on the social-networking craze. Getting to the finish line wasn't any easier for them than it was for me. Nike, based in Beaverton, Ore., had to bring together people across divisions to conceive and create the product, test and retest the Nike Plus shoe to meet the exacting standards of both Nike and Apple, and along the way meld the cooler-than-you-are cultures of two very different companies...
Nike's success is all the more remarkable given its earlier technology stumbles. One attempt at a gadget that could measure a runner's speed and distance was a clunky pod that attached to a shoelace. Mark Parker, then Nike's co-president and now its ceo, called the pod "the tumor" and in 2004 clamored for something better. Donaghu's group presented a prototype with a tracking device tucked under the sole. "The thought was to get rid of the tumor by making it disappear," says Michael Tchao, the general manager for Nike Plus...
...stretch of the river running from Burma and Laos to Thailand, clearing away islands, reefs and rapids that once blocked the passage of ships. Since then, sleepy Southeast Asian river ports have morphed into boomtowns, with boats from China disgorging cheap electronics, fruits, vegetables and every kind of plastic gadget imaginable. River traffic runs both ways: in December 2006, the first shipment of refined oil chugged up the Mekong bound for energy-hungry China, opening up a potential alternative shipping route to avoid the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca through which roughly half of its imported oil now passes...
Somewhere in the unwritten amendments to the U.S. Constitution it is stipulated that every gadget reviewer is entitled to his or her personal iPhone quibble. Here's mine: when you're transferring content from your computer to the iPhone, you can't simply drag and drop tracks into the phone, in that richly satisfying way you did with your iPod. Moving music and video around is a matter of instructing iTunes to 'sync' the iPhone with one more playlists. The procedure feels clumsy and imprecise - you can't just spear a specific little chunk of content, like a canape with...
...look at the iPhone as a laundry list of features and bugs is to miss the point (though if you did, the former would commandingly outweigh the latter). The iPhone isn't just the gadget du jour, it's a fresh new platform, an exceptionally powerful mobile computer that's still in its infancy. There's a full version of Apple's desktop operating system in there. The Palm and the Treo, et al., were merely harbingers of the era of true walk-around mobile computing that Jobs has just inaugurated. Hail to the chief...