Challengers

Challengers is a blog about products, services, and technologies that take on the status quo. But right now, it's impossible for me to think about taking on the status quo without my mind turning to a person: Steve Jobs.

He spent 35 years in the PC and personal technology industry, and nearly everything he did, he did in the form of a challenge.

Some examples:

The PC business. Jobs helped to create the personal computer industry in the 1970s, then led the development of the Macintosh, the only consumer platform that took on the Microsoft monopoly. For years, the … Read more

Back in 2004 or thereabouts, I went to Universal Studios Orlando. Once I was inside the park, I whipped out my trusty Nikon point-and-shoot camera to snap a picture--and discovered I'd forgotten to put a memory card inside it.

I did have a backup camera with me, sort of: The one inside my Nokia cameraphone. (That was back when we called them "cameraphones.") I took some pictures, but the best ones were fuzzy and unappealing, and the worst were downright horrific. I can't remember if I even bothered to transfer them out of the phone.

If … Read more

The long-standing rumors that Amazon.com would release a tablet are rumors no more--at an event yesterday in New York City, Amazon founder CEO Jeff Bezos announced the Kindle Fire. 

He told us things we'd been expecting for a while: The Fire is a 7-inch tablet that uses Amazon's own variant of Android, and it's deeply integrated with the company's services for buying books, magazines, movies, music, and apps. And he revealed some stuff that people hadn't been anticipating, such as a surprisingly low price ($199) and the use of a new browser-turbocharging … Read more

Once upon a time--actually, it was less than a decade ago--Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominated the Web browser business so utterly that it appeared that the market didn't have room for a second significant player. 

Then Mozilla's Firefox came along and became that strong second-place browser. And Apple's Safari, with its Webkit rendering engine, proved enormously influential. And Google's Chrome displaced Firefox as the favorite browser of Web nerds.

Today, breakdowns of browser usage vary, but they all show vibrant competition. Research firm Net Applications says that IE retains 51.8% of the market, Firefox … Read more

At first, it must have looked so easy. Within nanoseconds of Steve Jobs' January 2010 unveiling of the iPad, a gaggle of companies decided to get into the tablet business.

Some decided to design their own operating systems; others chose to license software. Even if they were realistic enough to understand that the odds of outselling the iPad were low, I'll bet all these companies thought there'd be enough of a tablet market to make lots of manufacturers happy.

Instead, the first 1.75 years of the iPad era haven't seen a single non-Apple tablet that's … Read more

An awful lot of things have changed about PCs over the past few decades. One that hasn't has been the way we input information into them. We still use the QWERTY keyboard, which was invented by typewriter pioneer Christopher Shoales in 1873 and has been a part of the PC nearly as long as there have been PCs. And we use the mouse, invented by Douglas Engelbart in 1963 and popularized by the first Macintosh in 1984.

Other form of input include interesting technologies that have never become huge hits, such as voice input, and ones which essentially amount … Read more

Since the late 1990s, USB has been the dominant PC connectivity technology for external devices. As anyone who remembers the era of parallel, serial, and PS/2 connectors can tell you, USB is a wonderful thing--whether you're talking about the original 1.1 standard, the now-pervasive 2.0 version, or the still-emerging 3.0 variant.

But what if there was a connectivity standard that was faster than the fastest version of USB? And what if it worked with even more types of devices, including displays? And what if it was even compatible with USB itself, through the use of an adapter?

It's no fantasy--it's Thunderbolt. And I have high hopes for this technology, even though it's not yet clear that it'll be anywhere near as universal as the good old Universal Serial Bus has been for years.

Thunderbolt originated in Intel's labs as a technology called Light Peak. It mashed up PCI Express (the zippy standard used for cards you install inside a PC) with DisplayPort (the new standard for connecting displays), and added compatibility with various other connection technologies. Apple got excited about the idea and began working with Intel to commercialize it. Under the catchier moniker Thunderbolt, it's now available on all new Macs except for Mac Pro desktops, and it's a safe bet that Apple will add it to those machines in their next big upgrade.

With two 10-Gbps channels, Thunderbolt is supercharged by any definition: USB 3.0, which is itself no slowpoke, provides a single 5-Gbps channel. (USB 2.0, still the most pervasive port out there, chugs along at a comparatively pokey 480-Mbps.) … Read more

Out with the old. In with the new. That's been the way of the personal technology industry for as long as there's been a personal technology industry. (I cut my computing teeth on Radio Shack's TRS-80--a personal computer that helped render the original personal computer, MITS' Altair, obsolete in the late 1970s.)

It's also the beat I'll cover here in Challengers. This blog is focused on new things--companies, products, services, and technologies--that aim to go head-to-head with established ones. I'll explore what makes them different and, in theory at least, better. And while I'… Read more