Out of the blue yesterday (Thursday), Joe Britt, founder and CTO of Danger, e-mailed me to see if I wanted to visit because he saw here on hiptop Nation that I was going to be near his office. During the conference lunch break, Mark and I took a 10-minute taxi ride over to Danger HQ, which is right behind Fry's Electronics.

I paused in front of the building (pic 1) to take a photo of the sign, and right at that instant, my Sidekick II did a hard crash. Bah! Well we went to the lobby where the receptionist paged Joe for us. Joe greeted us warmly and mentioned that the building was previously occupied by Pacific Data Images during the time they produced Shrek 1. That might explain the old scary sign (pic 2) by the parking lot. Joe noticed that my SKII was frozen, apologized profusely and assured me we would stop by engineering for a hard reset, which turned out to be the magic Danger paperclip in the reset hole while pressing the power button. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event where the creator of a consumer product I own was there in person to help me with a problem.

We toured the hardware and software engineering floors, and along the way, had a nice conversation with Joe's wife, who turns out to have gone to design school with John Maeda. We stopped by marketing for some Hiptop 2 t-shirts, and also loaded up on stickers from the bottomless bowl (pic 5).

Joe described the early development of the Sidekick 1 in amazing detail, and we got to see the earliest prototypes. Investors can rest assured that I saw nothing new because Joe is very responsible for the company's intellectual property. Joe did show off the staff version of the Sidekick 2, which has a transparent plastic case.

The office decor was very utilitarian and un-corporate. The space was by and large dimly lit presumably to the liking of the coders. Many of the offices and cubes were super cluttered with random-looking conglomerations of Sidekick parts, desktop computer gear, testing equipment and digital culture paraphernalia. It was good to see that their VC money was being used wisely because everyone didn't have Aeron chairs. The cars in the parking lot were normal makes (pic 3) reflecting the reality that that Danger hasn't gone public yet.

On our way out, we grabbed sodas from the cafeteria, and Joe posed for a photo with me outside. There we were also introduced to "Sidekickme," who helps moderate the Hiptop.com bulletin boards.

The visit was a genuine treat, and my Sidekick 2 has now been touched by the hand of its creator!

- mike lee - palo alto, ca