Word: kamen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...looks can be misleading, as anyone who's ridden a Segway can attest. Just ask Jeff Bezos. On a rainy morning in Seattle recently, Bezos dropped in at a meeting between Kamen, his team and a pair of Amazon execs. The meeting was being held in an Amazon "pick and pack" facility--a warehouse in which employees pick stock from shelves and pack it in boxes for shipment to customers. Kamen had come to sell Amazon some Segways by demonstrating that they would, as Bezos put it, "improve our picking productivity...
Just then, Kamen rides up and hands his Segway over to Bezos. As the Amazon boss races madly around the warehouse, hooting and cackling and flapping his arms, someone yells out, "Yo, Jeff, what were you saying about the consumer market?" Whizzing past, Bezos shouts back, "There's definitely at least a consumer market...
Last Monday the inventor Dean Kamen finally unveiled his famous “Ginger” secret project. As many people correctly guessed last January, Ginger is a new electric scooter officially called Segway and notable primarily for its gyroscope-powered, automatic propulsion system. Step onto a Segway, think about going forward, and the gyroscopes under your feet sense a slight forward tilt in your posture and promptly whisk you onwards...
...really excited when they hear something is “gyroscope-powered.” Some of these people, unlike me, can afford to spend $3,000 on gyroscopes, and they will scoop Segways up faster than authentic Klingon food at a Star Trek convention. The real question for Kamen and his blue chip investors—and for the American pedestrian, who may never feel safe on sidewalks again—is whether the Segway will become a truly mainstream product, taking the world by storm the way people like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs think it will...
...take risks. And that means that a product that does everything right for the early adopters will never sell well to the majority unless the company making it drastically changes the way it markets the device, stressing its 100 percent reliability, its compatibility and its easy functionality. For Kamen, it means that for exactly the reasons he will be able to sell the Segway to the geeks and visionaries he will find it difficult to sell to everyone else, unless he can adapt on the fly. Moore calls this problem The Chasm—that is, the chasm between...