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<< Hexacto’s Lemonade Tycoon Wins First Annual Microsoft Mobile Solutions Challenge | ARCHIVES | Bill Gates and Microsoft's Mobile Computing Manifesto >>
Posted by: Bill Landon on Thu, Mar 20, 2003 Provided by: FreeTranslation.com |
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| Wrist-Top Revolution |
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 Since 1946, the sleek telephone wristwatch worn by comic strip detective Dick Tracy has dangled in the consumer psyche - alongside the personal jet pack and the robot butler - as a Future Product We'd Like to Have. The square-jawed gumshoe's ability to get the inside dope anytime, anywhere on thugs like Flathead, BB Eyes, and the Brow made the gadget itself more famous than any of Tracy's exploits. Over the years, the man became an accessory to the watch, which worked like a modern-day cell phone but was small enough that cartoonist Chester Gould had to ink the words "2-Way Wrist Radio" in a caption box with an arrow pointing to the device. Nearly six decades later, "Dick Tracy watch" is shorthand for an unfulfilled desire, something industry should have long since delivered. We can sequence the human genome, but we can't make a Dick Tracy watch? Fossil, the nation's biggest watchmaker, is on the case. Since its founding in 1985, the Richardson, Texas, company has come to own the American wrist - last year it made four out of every ten fashion watches sold in the US. It also clocked $650 million in sales, partly by expanding into everything from backpacks to sunglasses, and opened its own retail outlets. The company's new ambition is to fuse fashion and information. In May, Fossil introduces a Palm PDA in a watch, complete with infrared data port and a stylus hidden in the band, followed in midsummer by a one-way data-radio model based on Microsoft's Smart Personal Objects Technology protocol, known as SPOT. The making of these watches is a story of unlikely partnerships at the nexus of consumer style and computer tech, manufacturing, and retail science. The results, Fossil executives hope, will open up a virgin segment of the marketplace to technology and change the way we think about our wrists. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/fossil.html |
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